Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay | Hacker News Reader

Low unemployment isn’t worth much if the jobs barely pay

brookings.edu

646 pointsweare138653 comments

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living. - Buckminster Fuller

One in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a wage. - Buckminster Fuller

... via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

Although I also perceive the same things I wonder if there is adequate incentive for the one to create something that provides for others

Simply taking their economic output is not incentive

Take a look at all of the open source projects listed here: https://paragonie.com/software

Especially random_compat (145 million installs) and sodium_compat (6.5 million installs + WordPress 5.2).

My revenue for all of this OSS work was precisely $0.00.

When was the last time any of us looked something up in Encyclopedia Brittanica instead of Wikipedia?

The carrot-and-stick incentive model doesn't work for fully self-actualized adults.

I posit that it only works when you use an oversimplified model of human behavior, rather than the messy truth that is humanity.

> My revenue for all

Your revenue may be, but people behind Gstreamer, Linux and other important serious opensource product do it for money (sometimes pretty big money, Linus has $2millions income).

> When was the last time any of us looked something up in Encyclopedia Brittanica instead of Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is looking for money constantly, the have sponsors, donators, without them it would cease to exist.

Also Wikipedia's quality often is pretty abysmal, especially when it's not in English.

> The carrot-and-stick incentive model doesn't work for fully self-actualized adults.

Sure, let's suggest to abolish patent system and see how many fully self-actualized adults will oppose.

As someone who has done quite a bit of patentable work in the past 10 years, I would applaud abolishing patents.

Cryptography patents makes us all less secure, because nobody uses patented cryptography. It's a net-negative in my industry.

You'll mainly get opposition from people who own patents, not inventors.

You're talking about a niche of products with marginal cost = 0 for production, distribution.

Call me when you start building houses for free. ;-)

> The carrot-and-stick incentive model doesn't work for fully self-actualized adults.

But for those who could be fully self actualized but arent yet and have to exchange time for food and shelter?

I had already covered that with the sentence that followed the one you quote-replied to.

To explain: I said it doesn't work with people who are X. Then I posited that it only works in condition Y. Y covers all cases, including non-X, and therefore answers your question (with respect to what I'd posit).

If your mental model of humanity is deeply flawed, you expect carrot-and-stick motivations to work. It doesn't matter if they're self-actualized.

If anyone is still confused, this might be worth a read: https://www.amazon.com/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivate...

Well put. Also most of the commenters here don’t realize that people who have been unemployed for a while can’t just get to a regular job without a low wage job in between that helps to pay for some of the costs of going to school.

Also, wages in the low wage jobs ARE GOING UP, as mentioned throughout the comments

its not even going to school sometimes, often you won't get hired if you've had more then 8-10 months of unemployment without reasonable explanation.

often you won't get hired if you've had more then 8-10 months of unemployment without reasonable explanation.

I do a lot of hiring. You are correct and further - literally any gap at all is viewed as suspicious. And there aren't many reasonable explanations that help the situation.

I also do a lot of hiring, and can say that it's also NOT correct. We'll query it, but it's rarely a problem. Different companies have different process and expectations, so let's steer clear of absolute statements like "this is correct" and "this is not true" as it's unhelpful to folks in the situation. Generally speaking, if you have a gap, make sure to explain in a cover letter. These are important and can make the difference between a rejection from HR and being passed onto a hiring manager.

Edit: spelling

Curious to know how you would distinguish between unemployed, volunteer, and self-employed.

I must disagree, anecdotally.

I walked off one job, and went traveling for six months. Another job I was on the losing end of a political maneuver, and used my severance to take another six month sabbatical.

Each time I returned to the market I received 20%+ compensation over what I had before. The second time I was promoted into management with hiring authority.

Let me know who you turn away for gaps in their resume. Maybe I'll hire them. :-)

I too have found I get a significant salary bump with each job departure. But I have usually had either economic factors or 'sabatical' as a reasonable explanation.

Unrelated, but the cover letter is my least favorite part of job hunting, because I'm often hard pressed to explain why I want to work there beyond "you're hiring, I'm looking, and this job looks suitable for me, and at least mildly interesting".

So... "I gathered savings and wanted to rest for half a year" is suspicious?

Maybe I am misunderstanding here.

This is hopefully a specifically US thing, some companies' HR departments are extremely risk averse and will likely interpret that as you were in prison or rehab for six months.

I once, as an intern, had an HR assistant bring my application for a permanent position back to me because she wanted an explanation for why I was unemployed between June and August of the previous year (a year in which I was enrolled at a university.) I explained that I was in school and most companies don't hire people for only 3 months over the summer so I spent that time learning a programming language. She walked away looking annoyed.

Honestly, would have put 'Student at Blah' during those three months from there on.

Started a business that ultimately failed, consulting, taking a health break, there are plenty. Which field do you hire for? I’ve taken 2 years off before and didn’t have a bit of a problem getting back into my field.

Technological breakthroughs mean that goods become more affordable, not that the inventors must be punished by making them support people who aren't productive.

My mom and i were just discussing my dog's visit to the veterinarian. She said that her father would never have taken a dog to the vet for those symptoms, but my dog got a blood analysis and a stomach X-ray. I spent a lot of money on all this, which paid the vet and their staff and the lab and the equipment manufacturers. Conclusion: increased wealth creates increased opportunity to work.

Medical is a special market due to emotional heartstrings. At a certain point, people will pay anything when death or health are involved.

At a political / social impact / behavioral hacking level, there's probably an argument to make near human grade medical services for domestic pets free, as it would likely assist with the reduction in human population growth (aside from companionship, etc.).

I am consistently amazed how cheap and fast medical services are in developing countries. The equipment costs so much less outside of western regulatory oversight, and to the consumer standard blood test batteries are often ~5-10 minutes and ~free.

> I am consistently amazed how cheap and fast medical services are in developing countries. The equipment costs so much less outside of western regulatory oversight, and to the consumer standard blood test batteries are often ~5-10 minutes and ~free.

This makes me wonder how much other countries indirectly benefit from the regulatory oversight that exists in the west. It's the regulatory oversight, compounded with capitalism, that produces medical equipment. Then the oversight over its usage probably adds to the cost of deploying the equipment.

Does the lack of, or reduced, latter oversight contribute in any major way to the pricing discrepancy for procedures for which that medical equipment is necessary?

We in the east are well aware that we benefit in some ways from the extremely risk averse regulators in the US and Europe and others. It's often explicitly acknowledged with labels like "treatment developed in the US" though it can also be hard to separate the real from the false claims of such.

On the other hand, not only does the east manufacture many of the pharmaceuticals sold in the west, it is a vast market which provides additional revenue with a convenient geographical separation which is difficult to arbitrage (Ibuprofen costs nothing in India compared to the US, but you don't see Indians flying to the US with suitcases of pills for sale).

> Medical is a special market due to emotional heartstrings. At a certain point, people will pay anything when death or health is involved.

This is a common misconception of what healthcare services are. People pay more for unsafer cars every day or decide to travel by plane that carries life&death risks for the pleasures of tourism. Life is a currency we pay with anything, from eating garbage to smoking and drinking and fundamentally, taking risks.

Meh, I trust pilots to handle planes well.

That being said, I don't like commuting by bike because of all the dorks going 50-60mph in a 35mph area. Not worth it. Also makes you think twice before slamming the accelerator when I myself drive. Something like every 10mph faster you go equates to like 50% higher risk of fatality- and when your knees and back are the crumple zones, no thank you!

Risks are an inherent part of life. I've dealt with a popped lung before- likely because of athletic activities- and I wouldn't not do those because I might get hurt. If you don't take risks, are you really alive?

Of course. Thats why the whole line of "a healthcare provider can get your entire life's savings and future earning because otherwise you die" is an idea that doesn't make any sense in theory or in practice.

Also it is a total lie and a very narrow definition of utility. Arguably, we’ve actually under priced some of the most important labor in our society (caregivers, teachers, social workers, etc), and over priced some of the dumbest (sorry, but if Uber disappeared tomorrow, society would be moderately inconvenienced, but little else).

Finally, nothing in evolutionary biology teaches us that human beings ought to work. Studied hunter-gatherer societies are as multi-faceted as agrarian and technologically driven ones, but they all seem to share a 20 hour work week and a strong affinity for story telling and art.

Honestly, if you followed evolutionary biology we all should be working quite a bit less and producing way more art. The idea that people will fall into dissipation without work is supported by very little science, and certainly no biological science.

Human beings need missions, not labor, to be fulfilled. The market economy seems capable of only supporting a very narrow slice of mission oriented work, the rest does seem like drudgery to me.

I think work is pretty important to being human, but working 40-60 hours a week is absurd. 30 seems like a sweet spot to me. If we could remote, do only 30, and reduce pointless meetings than I bet we'd have a lot more time for the things that make us happy like family, side projects, exercise, and Netflix.

Why do you think work in and of itself is important? Being useful to your community is absolutely important, but our definition of that utility is absurdly narrow in this market economy. In fact, sometimes what we value and what is useful are totally orthogonal (again teachers are probably undervalued way too much, because we are poor long term thinkers).

Because nearly everyone wants to feel they're contributing to society in some way. I think we agree here. I'm not saying you need a horrendous office job.

Work is important but labor is not, so to speak.

I think people care less about contributing to society and more about having something meaningful to do.

Many jobs are quite meaningless, and the only reason people work them is because they have bills to pay.

On the other hand, creative people will find something meaningful to do that may or may not ever be a contribution to society.

Work is important because we value a high quality of life. Things like comfort and shelter and medicine and protection from violence and all of the other trappings of civilization never mind luxuries like cars, Internet, cell phones, etc. These things have never existed apart from work. I keep hearing about how awful capitalism is and how absurd and morally wrong it is for humans to need to work, but no one has offered a better solution (certainly nothing that bears up to a layman’s understanding of economics). Substantiate your claims about how “absurd” things are—articulate a system that can appropriately channel resources “where they really should go” (e.g., caregivers) better than capitalism (specifically what imbues your system with more moral authority than a market? If your system depends on a majority of voters feeling the same way as you, what happens when you can’t guarantee that invariant? What happens when you realize that voters and their representatives are even less efficient at allocating resources efficiently than a market? And how does your system guard against corruption better than capitalism?).

change netflix to gaming and you might be onto something

>if Uber disappeared tomorrow, society would be moderately inconvenienced, but little else

If you inconvenience 100 million people by costing them 15 minutes more a day, or a few dollars more for lack of competition, then the cost per person may be low, but the cost altogether will be high.

This is the essential problem I see with the articles, they say so many jobs are useless, but often they're useful but only a small part of what is visible.

Totally, but now play the same scenario in your head if all the social workers or teachers disappeared tomorrow. Uber would be a societal inconvenience, but losing all of our teachers would be a catastrophe.

Wages vary according to marginal utility rather than total utility. The question is not "what if all teachers disappeared", but "what if one particular teacher disappeared".

Wages for public sector workers are legally defined and, at least, in this case, have very little to do with any measure of utility. Our society is horrendous at measuring utility in almost all long term cases.

I'm not complaining that teacher salaries are too high or too low. I'm complaining that: A) you're reinventing the Paradox of Value; and B) you're challenging the norm without proposing an alternative economic model.

"Just pay teachers according to the intrinsic value of their profession." But it's not immediately obvious what this means in practice. Suppose wages were set not by congress and not by the market. According to your moral calculus, what is the correct wage and how is it determined?

Indeed. Oxygen is very valuable too, but it should not be expensive for this reason alone. It's abundant, and therefore cheap, and that's a good thing.

Similarly, hypothetically speaking, perhaps teachers are the most valuable profession to society, but if there's plenty of people willing to become a teacher, and plenty capable, there's no reason to reward these people with vast extra sums of money for the sake of their value.

Such a system would lead to extreme inefficient allocations of resources, an oversupply of teachers.

Yes, if teachers are valuable and you can't find people willing or capable to do the job, then by all means, raise their pay. That's the reason I think many teachers deserve more pay. Not because they're intrinsically valuable.

>Wages for public sector workers are legally defined and, at least, in this case, have very little to do with any measure of utility.

Public sector workers can leave for private wages, and for most comparable jobs, are paid similar wages, perhaps more so when adding benefits of most public sector jobs compared to volatility in private equivalents.

So maybe the wage is not the result of public artificial restriction, but of the value placed on the jobs themselves in the open job market.

Also not US teachers are among the highest paid in the world, certainly the OECD, likely because of Baumol's Cost Disease (which would imply US teachers are intrinsically overpaid, but receive the wages they do because schools must compete with outside even higher paying jobs to attract teachers). So perhaps it's not simply the US or public systems, but this is around the value on such skills worldwide.

So either the entire planet places similar utility on teaching as measured by pay, or the entire planet, public and private, has reached the same wrong conclusion.

In fact, many public sector jobs exist because they are too valuable (or difficult) for the market to pay. In the time before lighthouses were automated, try to calculate the value of the lighthouse keeper who prevented deaths and lost cargo.

I agree. And to be clear I think I think it would be an immediate catastrophe as parents would not be able to work as they would have to take care of their children. Teaching is obviously vastly more important than childcare but teachers on their undervalued salaries provide both of these salaries.

If parents did not have to work or could take their children to work, they could be both caregivers and teachers.

No, it wouldn't really be any sort of calamity. Online-Courses/tuitions/bootcamps/home-schooling will take the place of traditional teachers in no time assuming some overlord disappeared them.

I think a problem with this line of reasoning is that people forget what we used to do before we had certain conveniences. If Uber disappears, people would just read a book for 15mins or plan everything to take the extra time into account.

Another problem with this line of reasoning is that people assume that they can always utilise 15m in a productive way or that not doing anything is not productive. How many times do you need a break everyday? How many times would a 15m break to relax and refocus or meditate actually benefit you rather than trying to force some work?

> I think a problem with this line of reasoning is that people forget what we used to do before we had certain conveniences. If indoor plumbing disappears, people would just read a book for 15mins or plan everything to take the extra time into account.

Of course people would get by, but their lives would be worse and advocating for making people's lives worse is kind of a shitty thing to do.

False equivalence. Indoor plumbing is nothing like an app to call a taxi.

Also see both my points. You don’t know if their lives would get worse. You’ve just assumed that the main goal of everyone is to hyper optimise their lives.

Yes I do know their lives would get worse[1] and yes it is an equivalent. You think when indoor plumbing came around people weren't arguing how it was an unnecessary luxury and making people soft and how that wasted time walking to the outhouse builds character and refocuses the self and how we'd all be better off without it?

[1] Because they have said they do, repeatedly, with their wallets.

What exactly is overpriced about Uber? The drivers aren't making that much and despite Uber's cut they still aren't profitable

Because that core business isn't where all the money is going. The basic concept of software connecting buyers to sellers (riders to available drivers) is a simple software problem, easily solvable by a few guys and servers given time. Uber spends money on expansion, marketing and a constant game of legal stratego against any town/city/country that seems to get in its way. We are overpricing, over-rewarding, those companies who live to rise their stock price. We should be rewarding those companies whose continued existence is of the greatest benefit to society. That probably isn't Uber.

Why do you think caregivers, teachers, and social workers are undervalued? Last time I checked, care facilities, classrooms, and social centers were fully staffed. On what basis can you claim that their pay is too low? Who gets to decide the right salary? You? Why?

A particular job being important in aggregate does not entitle each individual who does that job to a salary higher than people who do some other job that might be less important in aggregate.

Oxygen is very important and it's free. Certain comic books are expensive despite being of very little importance to our survival. The value of a thing is the price of one additional unit of that thing, not some statement about the moral significance of all of that thing in aggregate.

Why do you get to say that working a "full time" job should not have to cover your full time living expenses?

Why are people entitled to a particular set of benefits in exchange for a particular time spent doing some activity? Who gets to decide what benefits should result from that amount of time? You? Why?

> Who gets to decide what benefits should result from that amount of time? You? Why?

Practically speaking, voters do because we live in a democracy.

It is perfectly fine for a society to decide "a full time job should have to pay enough to cover a person's full-time living expenses", to define all those terms reasonably, and presto enforce it as law.

It is also perfectly fine for the free market to decide this. This is society too and captures relative value far more effectively and adaptably than a fixed one-time vote.

The free market considers the monetary tradeoffs in this.

Comparing it to a holistic societal value (quality of life, family time, other non-monetary factors) is a disservice, that I believe negates the (subjective) "effective and adaptable" value measurement of the free market.

Otherwise you're just distilling people's lives and communities down to a dollar value, which in many people's eyes is the dark/down side of capitalism and how we ended up here to begin with.

> just distilling people's lives and communities down to a dollar value

What's wrong with that? Our resources are finite. Our attention is short. We have to prioritize society's investment. How can anyone decide on the relative priority of two things without casting them to some common unit? It's only when we describe people's lives in terms of dollars that we can make intelligent decisions about where to apply society's scarce resources.

This. All professions have relative economic value. The free market - a market without permanent subsidies, monopolies and correct application of import tax (to balance non-free foreign subsidies) is the best and most fair judge of this.

Not some social welfare activist or even some elected representative of the party in power.

(PS: I did not downvote you). People have the same rights. However, relative economic value is definitely different from person to person. Denying this is denying basic reality.

Taking an example from a parent post - caregivers do NOT have high relative economic value. Anyone over 18 can become a caregiver without even passing high school and become a certified home care aide. Enforcing a higher pay through law will is only likely to increase un-employment. The market on the other hand is self-correcting.

The federal government being the lender for loans has only lead to higher cost of loans and un-employed arts graduates who cannot get a job and cannot payback those loans. Without the federal government backing, those loans were un-likely to have been offered in the first place, unless there was current/future demand for arts graduates.

I strongly believe that most aspects of living (for people and communities as you put it) indeed need a dollar value otherwise un-realistic and un-workable economic expectations come into play.

We have seen this play out in the past with failed governments and we will continue to see this in the future.

> we’ve actually under priced some of the most important labor in our society (caregivers, teachers, social workers, etc),

Who is we? Who sets the price?

People obviously don’t see more value in teachers or caregivers, price should not be mandated by law

Prisons are arguably less important to society than education (since it represents the failing of citizens being productive members of society). However, prison expenditures were increasing three times faster than education from 1990 to 2016 [1]. Much of it going to corporately run prisons.

And given the marijuana legalization trend as of late, I really don't believe that people see the value of locking people up we are angry at. People we're afraid of, sure, that's a different story. But a non-violent marijuana offense shouldn't get a 15 year sentence.

Let's be clear, government should control the market, not the other way around.

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/07/the-s...

I’d say it is important to lock up those that hurt society

But I agree that in most countries prisons are true hellholes

In the US laws mandate certain level of care, and government prefer to pay someone else than handle the costs: unions, pensions for those prison staff

> I’d say it is important to lock up those that hurt society.

That's part of how we got here. Prison is just one option. Fines and orders to curtail freedom is another. E.g. Court ordered monetary restitution and loss of one driver's license are examples.

Here's a short version of how we got here:

1. Make more crimes to felonies subject to incarceration.

2. Imprison more people.

3. Remove felon's right to vote to make change to the current system.

4. Build more prisons

5. Privatize the prisons because government needs so much more of them now.

6. The prison lobby now argues for more harsher sentences.

7. GOTO 1.

> Let's be clear, government should control the market, not the other way around.

Missed this one in my earlier comment

Wow

What about farmers, miners, bakers,..., surely they are more important than caregivers and teachers or social workers? This is a silly argument to assign value to a certain profession based on how one feels. And what do hunger-gatherer societies do when they run out of food for whatever reason. Do they just say, no our 20 hour quota was already fulfilled this week, we'll starve now. The a amount of work neccesery to enable our modern lifestyles today is sometimes unimaginable to a person who has everything brought to them.

> Studied hunter-gatherer societies are as multi-faceted as agrarian and technologically driven ones, but they all seem to share a 20 hour work week and a strong affinity for story telling and art.

Yes, and in pretty much every conflict against hard working agricultural societies, they got wiped out.

Evolutionary biology can only tell us the bare minimum about what we need to survive as a species. If you want anything more than that (say for example, a cushy third-world quality of life), evolutionary biology is the wrong field (or rather, not the complete set of fields) to look at.

I've come to find comments like these ones very frustrating as an amateur economist. In the end, this idealization of how productivity should be used ends up being a proposal of political power: productivity should be what I think it should be, so we must collectively act as if it is.

Shouldn't you find the current state of things to be equally frustrating then? It's just another example of the same thing.

We never got to choose how our economic/productive output is valued or disposed of, we just were born into this highly unequal and unfair system and had to play along or die. I'd find that a lot more frustrating than the proposal that, if the technological and resource capacity exists to provide enough for all, it should be shared relatively evenly.

> We never got to choose how our economic/productive output is valued or disposed of,

Bastiat said it long ago: men have the tendency to overvalue their own work and diminish the work of others. There is no better system known to man to solve that issue than the free exchange and refusal of services between them.

When someone says that a farmer that can produce food for a thousand people thanks to productivity gains should mean that people eat for free, does he mean the farmer should not get paid, or does he mean that there should be no farmer? Clearly the idea that because productivity is up there is free labor is a fallacy.

While I wouldn't disagree with anything you have put forward here, I would assert that "free exchange" cannot really happen if there is massive wealth inequality. Private property will necessarily lead to labour exploitation that involves unequal circumstances and thus unequal terms of exchange.

He who does not work, neither shall he eat. - Paul the Apostle

... via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_...

The amazing thing about Bucky is that his insights are more applicable today than when he conceived them ~50+ years ago.

This was also popularly known only a few years back as 'On the phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs'

> It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest.

What does that mean? Supporting all the rest at 1970 first world living standards? And how is that a fact exactly?

The one in ten thousand does not make that breakthrough alone either. They are "standing on the shoulders of giants" of the past and also relying on infrastructure, education, healthcare, social support, etc. that is provided by the broader community. Of course everyone should share directly (not in some "trickle down" way) in the fruits of such success -- they were all a part of nurturing it!

> broader community

And in most cases a broader community of people working jobs! Huh, turns out those jobs ARE useful. (Sorry in advance for sarcasm.)

Tell that to the 3 billion people who are just scraping by with no local government help.

I don't think low unemployment is the unequivocal positive sign that politicians/ think it is ("We're putting millions of Americans back to work!").

Maybe it's not something to be so proud of. If people are having to come out of the woodwork to take jobs that aren't moving the average wage up, maybe they're doing it because they have to, in order to get by.

Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job because he/she can't pay the bills?

That or all the people working multiple of these mcjobs. If one job were enough for every American to at least provide for their basic needs and some reasonable leisures then I might be impressed by low unemployment.

Even the lowest wage bracket of jobs has kept up with price inflation overall.

That doesn’t ring true but I’d be to learn otherwise. What data are you referring to?

Do you have any sources to back up that claim?

I'm sure it varies by region and time period, but for 2000-2019 in california, the cumulative inflation was 49%, while the minimum wage rose 108%.

And in the most recent years, wages are going up across the board at the low pay tier: https://www.wsj.com/articles/rank-and-file-workers-get-bigge...

Continuing to talk about "average" inflation, rather than housing / asset inflation, is borderline disingenuous. Of course the price of consumer products has fallen - that was the primary gain of technological progress and outsourcing it all to China. The price of housing (and healthcare, education) is what has everyone over a barrel, and that's a direct result of the policy to make that average continue to go up in the face of technological progress.

Was this comment meant for me? I think the parent commenter used the word "overall" and not "average". I was simply providing a source and not making any sort of argument from it.

Yes, it is. As opposed to starving or being a freeloader.

Is it still good if that 60+ year old has never been a 'freeloader' and has made the best choices possible to provide for their self/family with the income that the person was able to make prior to retirement? If the 60+ year old has been a net benefit to society, should they not be provided a means of living after retirement age?

Are you discounting social security and Medicaid here? If you have to live on social security alone, you will have a meager existence, but you need not starve. If you want a better retirement, saving along the way is strongly recommended.

If that 60 year old is expecting to live until he is 90 then it is rather funny he or she thinks retirement at 60 is the thing unless that person has enough money to saved to cover half of his or hers lifetime.

Wouldn't it be a third?

If a person is 60 and expects to live until 90 then:

90-60 = 30

30 is 0.5 of 60.

Freeloader... like those women who have been unable to work due to being full-time caretaker for a disabled spouse or child, or cared for their own parents until death, and so didn't have much or any income to save from...

I don't think most politicians are ignorant enough to believe this.

It's part of the marketing used that also seeds self-doubt into many citizens and saves politician's faces:

"How can something so complex (at scale) and studied as unemployment be wrong? I must be the problem finding gainful employment, everyone else is doing great based on these numbers, I guess I need to work even harder to pickup my slack. My representatives even tell me everyone is doing great, look at the GDP and DOW soaring! What am I doing wrong?? Why cant I find a job, I guess I'll have to take whatever I can get." etc.

I guess the question is what age should a person retire? For those of us born after 1960, retirement with full benefits, is age 67. Technically, you can retire at age 62... and draw a percentage. (Bonus, if you can wait till you are 70, you get an even higher multiplier).

Most people don't have savings like they should. There are older folks who are gobbling up jobs tat were historically what younger kids would work. Those benefits are not large sums, so one could imagine someone working into the late 60's to maximize the actual retirement cash flow.

For those who did save... likely don't need to start pulling benefits early.

Over all... wages rise if there is competition for talent. Even if it is on the low end of entry level jobs. If there should be so many low end jobs, without 'normal' benefits... is another really good question.

> I don't think low unemployment is the unequivocal positive sign that politicians/ think it is ("We're putting millions of Americans back to work!").

It's just the kind of marketing that happens to work with the Protestant mentality of the majority of people here. And that's slowly starting to change, with Sanders and other progressive politicians asking about the well-being of Americans as opposed to raw numbers about whether they can work 4 part-time jobs or not.

It’s certainly a good thing if a 60+ year old can go to work because he/she can’t pay the bills or whatever other reasons they choose to add income. And when jobs are plentiful, it’s inevitable that wages go up as well. Employers are competing for employees, and the skilled and useful ones inevitably become better compensated as a result.

... and if the same conditions which create work for said sixty-year-old person to return to are the same conditions that led to them being unable to retire at sixty (perhaps because they never had the opportunity to do anything other than low laying work with no opportunity for growth and existed at the poverty line)?

Unemployment only counts people who are looking for work, but don't have it, so I don't think that framing is accurate.

Someone who is not working by choice is not unemployed.

Is it a good thing that a 60+ year old goes back to work at a low paying job because he/she can't pay the bills?

A 60 year old who is voluntarily retired is not "unemployed". If they later end up taking a job due to financial hardship, that changes the unemployment rate very little; it just adds 1 to the denominator of people in the labor force.

To add to this, only those who are actively seeking work and are not employed, are considered unemployed. A retired person (or a person who has given up looking for work) is not counted as unemployed, but will be counted once employed.

I think they meant if lots of them were doing it, not just one, in which case the denominator would go up, well, a lot. I think this was also an example of a hypothesis:

Why have people doing crap jobs that are better automated just because they can’t afford to live otherwise? The system is broken, in that we need to better support the folks on the fringes so we can just automate away a lot of mindless, repetitive boring work. The remaining jobs can pay well, and we can stop benchmarking the economy of how many people we put to work regardless of the meaningfulness of what they’re doing.

Why waste a human life flipping burgers or banging away in the mines? Make robots do that, and let’s provide a solution to the displaced, like for instance basic income but totally open to alternatives.

> Why waste a human life flipping burgers or banging away in the mines? Make robots do that, and let’s provide a solution to the displaced, like for instance basic income but totally open to alternatives.

Because we don’t have the technology to actually do that? We don’t even have the technology to replace the guy taking drive through orders. (“You want one Big Mech?”).

This discussion is pointless and premature. There are enormous economic incentives to automate away every job that can be done efficiently though automation. It’s just that our technology is actually very primitive, and that shows when trying to apply it to replacing service workers.

We don’t even have the technology to replace the guy taking drive through orders

Yeah we do, touchscreen menus (or ATM style pushbutton menus in places with bad weather).

There are factories that assemble frozen mini burgers for supermarkets. There are pizza vending machines out there. So an entire fast food restaurant could be turned into a vending machine with current technology.

If you think the technology is there, what explains its lack of adoption? I don’t think McDonalds et al. are in the business of leaving easy optimization on the table.

(My own guess is that touch screens are still more expensive and buggy than humans, and machine-made food still trades off novelty to be profitable. But I don’t know.)

McDonald's already uses touchscreens in some locations. I'm guessing the rest comes down to tradition and the availability of cheap labor preventing the motivation to turn existing technology into a packaged franchise of automated restaurants.

McDonalds seems to be rolling them out slowly, but are actually cutting staff while simultaneously increasing their fleet of touchscreens. I see a lot more employees alternating between doing work in the kitchen vs. taking orders at the cashier. This is even during relatively high demand times with long customer wait lines. This is just an anecdote though, the data may disagree.

I'd also be curious to see any user interface studies on these touchscreens. In my limited experiences, they are completely slow and thus an awful experience. They clearly are trying to sell more at every step instead of being useful and efficient for the end user.

We have the ability to replace order taking just not while maintaining a speech interface.

You will ultimately order on your phone or a kiosk

The point is there are a lot of people in this position. I personally know many people 65-75 working/trying to find work because of financial instability.

Edited to add that there's a further problem: it's hard to find work when you're 70, and it's even harder to find 'knowledge work' for most 70-yr-olds. So the 70-yr-olds I know looking for work are working freelance or contingent sorts of things, or working retail/post office/food service -- and some of those jobs are physically difficult. One guy I know was doing a 6-week temporary USPS gig, working 4 am-noon shifts loading things from here to there. He mentioned he'd never been as sore in his life as he was the first few weeks. Many people would not be able to physically do this work at that age, frankly.

The point is there are a lot of people in this position.

Even if there are, that's not going to lower the unemployment rate significantly; it's more likely to raise it. Say there are 100 million people in the labor force, of which 4 million don't have jobs. The unemployment rate is 4% (4/100). Now 10 million previously retired people suddenly realize that they need to go back to work, and they all get hired instantly. The unemployment rate falls to 4/110=3.6%, not a huge change. And in reality all of those people won't get jobs immediately, and while they're looking they're counted as unemployed. If 1 million out of the 10 million former retirees haven't found jobs yet, the unemployment rate rises to 5/110=4.5%.

What is the mechanism to identify and count people who were voluntarily retired but now wish they could find a job but can’t?

If they're actively looking for work, then they're unemployed. If they're not looking for work because they assume there are no opportunities, they're "discouraged workers": https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/discouraged_worker.asp. Discouraged workers aren't counted in the primary unemployment rate, but are counted in U4 and U6, which are also historically low; see https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U4RATE and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE.

Up until the 80's wages and productivity moved in lock step, and since then wages have flatlined due to a various factors (weakening of unions / globalization).

Furthermore, we are reaching the limits of what monetary stimulus is able to achieve in driving the economic wellbeing of everyday Americans; history has shown that fiscal stimulus is better at that. A decade of easy monetary policy and balance sheet expansion has yielded a large divide in inequality and asset inflation. The non-asset owning working class have effectively been left behind, with now a larger wall to climb in order build relative wealth.

I personally don't think unions and collective bargaining are the best solution, as it can in some cases be overbearing on industry---and the burden can be non-uniformly applied across industries. Also, due to globalization, there is effectively a fixed marginal cost for labor: any inefficiencies will be arbitraged abroad. Even if unions and collective bargaining were the solution, there is no inherent law that labor demand and labor supply will always be near parity---especially with increased automation.

I think the best solution to resolve this, both uniformly and with minimal aggregate complexity, would be expand the Federal's reserves responsibilities into the fiscal space.

The Fed currently has two mandates: low unemployment, and stable currency. I propose a third mandate: wage and productivity parity. This would be facilitated by direct fiscal policy in the form of a floating universal basic income. This would enshrine the fed with ability to affect fiscal policy without politics. The stimulus could be progressive, but would be much more uniform---unlike today's pork projects that have a smaller share of winners.

This coupled with universal health, easing the burden of hiring and firing, consolidation of existing entitlement/social programs, could really open up the economic landscape.

> would be expand the Federal's reserves responsibilities into the fiscal space.

This is a very complex solution for a problem we already have the tools to solve. Politicians should just execute proper fiscal policy instead of leaning on the fed for every solution. We already have a decent system for this, which has historically worked, but no one is using it.

Other countries are able to execute proper fiscal policy without complex central banking paradigms or measures.

The real issue is our inability to plan long term fiscal policies at almost every level of our political system.

> Other countries are able to execute proper fiscal policy without complex central banking paradigms or measures.

Which countries?

Historically we've had the opposite problem. Countries tend to move toward austerity at the wrong moment in time, due to political pressures or pressure from debtors. (Though this is much more difficult to navigate when the country's debt is denominated in a foreign currency e.g. Japan with 200%+ debt to gdp which is having a hard time meeting inflation targets vs Argentina).

Even today, the European Central Bank is signaling that it has effectively done all it can do (without permanently harming the banking sector with negative rates), and that it is time to open the doors to fiscal stimulus; but, Germany, which is going through a manufacturing recession, is loath to update their constitution to facilitate fiscal stimulus.

All of Scandinavia, most of Northern Europe, Australia, parts of Asia, Canada.

> This would enshrine the fed with ability to affect fiscal policy without politics.

By what means would you give this third mandate to the Fed? Surely, politicians give this mandate, through the voters. In which case: how can you say it’s “without politics”? Because politicians create the laws that govern central banks, central banks cannot be said to be politically independent.

I guarantee you, if a central bank — any central bank — stopped monetizing its government’s bonds, the currency produced by its member banks would quickly lose its legal tender status and tax privileges.

I don't think politicians actually believe it's a positive. They can't possibly be that naive. They must have basic economic awareness of how $30 p/h FT job in their district has different implications than a couple $15 p/h PT jobs.

They don't discuss the important details because it doesn't drive votes. They also as a challenger during the election want to hold the incumbent to a standard they might not be able to maintain. Politicians, as a breed, are adverse to "live by the sword, did by the sword." As a result we get politician-speak as the normalized standard.

Yes it's a ludicrous notion that working for work's sake is a good thing.

I just watched the documentary "American Factory" (highly recommended), and it's pretty clear to me that doing repetitive manual labor work in a factory is grueling, mind-numbingly boring, dangerous, and not something we should be doing if we can automate it - not to mention low status and low pay. I'd bet that most of the politicians idealizing manufacturing jobs have never worked a manufacturing job before. It's absolutely nothing like any cushy office job. At the end of the movie when they talked about how they were replacing the humans with robots, that should be something to celebrate (but it's not because our society forces people into employment to make a living).

Those workers were making $12/hour at the Chinese owned company despite having made $29/hour in their unionized jobs at GM before it closed. It's not as if the $29/hour jobs were some utopia, but it's a massive difference in pay that affords one a middle class lifestyle. And as a worker, feeling like you have no representation and no say can make any job soul crushing.

Yet politicians talk about "jobs" as some unequivocally good thing as if we're all partners at law firms with corner offices making six figures or whatever they're used to (not that I'd ever want to be a lawyer). They're so clearly out of touch.

$29/hr wasn’t sustainable based on what the consumer would buy the product/service for, hence the inevitable closure.

Unskilled labor isn’t worth a whole lot, and our country has a lot of it.

How do you make everybody an engineer? or... is it not even possible? Are some (most?) people mentally incapable of being engineers with the proper education?

People should be able to pursue whatever work they want so long as it doesn't harm anyone else since we can afford it.

I wouldn't act like you're better than politicians when your "expertise" is based on a documentary. My experience is that factory work is not dangerous[1] and companies try to eliminate any danger if it's brought up because any OSHA/medical costs are very expensive. My experience is also that the work is pretty easy. It can be boring but so are most programming jobs. I don't understand how writing CRUD day after day isn't as boring as working in a factory.

As for whether it is something that should be done or not: why should programming be done? How do most apps benefit the average person. I'm willing to argue that FAANG companies have been detrimental to society.

I've also been well-payed at the factories I work at, but $20/hr in rural Iowa goes way further than in LA or wherever. There were quite a few people who had moved from cities to work where I was at.

The idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are. A lot of people were worried that long-term our jobs would be automated or moved to Mexico.

[1] This may depend on what is being done and more importantly on the age of the company.

I don't know why you're getting so defensive as I'm simply providing an anecdote from a documentary I just watched. I'm happy that your experience at the factory wasn't dangerous. In the documentary some of the workers suffered serious injurious, and many were justifiably greatly concerned with the safety of their working conditions. Working any hard labor job like construction is extremely grueling and involves coming home sore everyday in a way that no office job entails. Meanwhile the worst I've ever had to deal with as a software engineer is avoiding carpel tunnel and eye strain.

Great, if you like working in a factory, then all the power to you. Personally I'd probably be contemplating suicide if I had to work on an assembly line in a work environment similar to how the film portrayed the factory in China, working 12 hour days with only 4 days off per month for crap money.

I never claimed that all programming benefits society.

> the idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are

The fact that you'd write such a dumb baseless insulting comment shows how out of touch you are. Since you didn't provide an argument, I'm not going to waste my time trying to decipher whatever your reasoning was and respond to it. Also it doesn't even really matter if it's a good or bad thing because it's happening, and there's nothing you can do to stop it (unless you're suggesting some kind of ludditism movement of breaking machines for the sake of preserving jobs, which is just flat out stupid).

> The idea that automating these jobs is a good thing demonstrates how out of touch you are.

That's such a ridiculous statement for someone on HN. If we were to believe such a thing, why would you want to advance at all, if not for removing/reducing the work load imposed on people, or, equivalently, improving productivity per working hour?

EDIT: An article in the NYT regarding this topic came to my mind - about automation/robots etc. in Sweden. Can highly recommend it: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/business/the-robots-are-c...

Is the alternative better?

If the retiree didn't get a low-paying job (Uber driver etc.), his neighbors would be forced to care for him through social welfare taxes. With a job, he supports himself. All the resources freed up can be put to more productive use.

It's surprising to me that this comment is so highly upvoted, given how fundamentally it misunderstands unemployment.

What you are implying is that "low unemployment" means people who didn't want to work are being forced to. But that is not what the usually-quoted (and quoted here) unenmployment number means. When people quote "unemployment" they usually mean U3, which is the number of people who are actively looking for a job.

If what you describe were happening, that dire economic conditions were forcing more people to look for work, the "unenmployment rate" would go up, not down.

The unemployment rate is not the labor force participation rate. And even the labor force participation rate is deeply misleading, because it encodes demographic statistics in a way that has complex effects that are hard to account for.

Exactly. In the same vein, is it a good thing that someone in their 20s/30s/40s has to take on 2 or 3 jobs, working 10+ hours per day, just to get by?

> Market failures abound: Education and health care are out of reach for many, child care is often prohibitively expensive (even as child care workers are woefully underpaid), and decent, affordable housing is scarce in many regions.

It’s utterly ridiculous to call these things “market failures.” Every single one of those areas is not a market but is heavily regulated in a way that limits supply. Education mostly a government service, even at the tertiary level. Fully 50% of college students attend a public school.

Even if it’s not a public school they mostly get government guaranteed loans.

If the market were able to solve the problem better, private schools could just provide better service at lower costs (compared to public school cost + state subsidy) and few would still go to public schools right? State subsidies for public schools are not that large anymore (34% of budget for UC Berkeley comes from tuition+fees while 13% comes from state of California).

These are actually IMO all examples of Baumol's Cost Disease as healthcare, child care, and education simply do not scale or require less workers with improved technology (at least so far). The fact that BCD hits so hard is evidence of most of the efficiency gains over the last decade(s) not being shared with the majority of people.

How are private schools supposed to offer better service at a lower cost, when public schools are effectively free?

This is hardly a market. Even if people wish to move their children out of public schools en masse, it's not like governments are going to reduce property taxes accordingly.

Well in the example I provided, state money only amounted to a 28% subsidy (assuming if the state funding were cut, the only way to raise as much money would be to raise tuition+fees). Doesn't seem effectively free to me.

Keep in mind I was replying to a critique of "Education and health care are out of reach for many" which obviously implies higher education

> public schools are effectively free

It's actually even worse than that because you pay for public education even if you don't use it.

So in that regard, if you send your kids to private schools, you're paying for their education twice.

This makes it very difficult to compete, and as a rayiner pointed out, isn't a real market.

I think the best solution to this is vouchers, which is a nice blend of public dollars but competitive schools.

Controversial opinion: I think everyone should have access to good education, and I don't see why a public system is incapable of providing it.

Private systems aren't outcome orientated, they're profit orientated. If a public school and a private school are both given $n to educate a kid, the private option will maximize the proportion they get to keep.

Elite schools are a different story because they have significantly more resources.

The free market is good at some things, but the public wellbeing isn't one of them.

A profit oriented system doesn’t make outcomes irrelevant. A grocery store could maximize their profit margins by selling rotten fruit at the same price as fresh fruit, but of course no one would buy it.

Maximizing your profit margin is one strategy for increasing profits, but growing market share by producing higher quality outcomes is another (arguably more common) strategy.

This is the case because markets have competition, which the public sector lacks. It’s why spending on public education continues to rise despite decreasing quality of outcomes.

This argument falls on deaf ears to be honest, considering Amazon deals with a very similar situation due to rampant fakes and yet it's more profitable for them to simply do nothing.

The problem is that for-profit industries only work when the consumer and business interests are aligned. In education the best way to earn a profit is by offering a low quality degree and spending the least on teaching, facility etc. That's the entire reason why McDegrees exist. Considering schools are also highly tied to physical locations, there's less possible competition than you think.

I think Amazon is a bad example. First, because the Amazon problems are fairly recent on the scale of human reaction, let's see how it will go in 3-5 years. Look at Facebook drop in users after the scandals like Cambridge Analytica, it is real and this is where Amazon is heading to. Sooner or later, the market is fixing problems, even if sometimes it's slow and painful.

This example actually show the fundamental value of separating infrastructure from service.

Amazon's infrastructure (1 day delivery) is good and valuable, but their service (products, etc) are severely lacking. It would be beneficial, in the free market sense, for the government to break up Amazon, split out that infrastructure part make it rentable, and have the rest of Amazon compete with other providers to provide a service on top of this infrastructure.

Same goes for all natural monopolies (e.g. gas pipelines, optic fibre internet, rail, ...).

This exactly. private education has a greater incentive for raising quality than government education does - which is why private schools produces better outcomes.

> I think everyone should have access to good education

How do you define everyone, access and good?

Does access === free where I currently live?

If parents can’t afford to live in an area with good schools should they be forced to get better jobs or moved to LCOL area so their kids get a better education?

or no matter where you live or how you live a third party should make sure your kids get a proper education?

>How do you define everyone, access and good?

Everyone means everyone. Access means that based on where you reside, there is a school within a reasonable distance, or transportation to one. Good is more tricky to define for me because I'm not an educator. The US has metrics and tests for math skills and reading comprehension. I'm sure we can gin up something. Use other developed countries as a benchmark.

>Does access === free where I currently live?

Sure.

> If parents can’t afford to live in an area with good schools should they be forced to get better jobs or moved to LCOL area so their kids get a better education?

The whole point of my comment is that people shouldn't have to make that decision.

> or no matter where you live or how you live a third party should make sure your kids get a proper education?

parents should have to send their kids to a nearby school. The rest should be taken care of.

You're introducing way more complexity into this. Good schools vs bad schools, HCOL vs LCOL. Not every school has to be exceptional, just bring up the average.

I am one that actually agrees with the spirit of what you're saying. Unfortunately, where I have to admit shortcomings with that philosophy is that there's no evidence that the government of the United States can reliably yield good education for students. My own public schooling was a nightmare, and I know many who had an equally bad experience.

Part of this is due to the fact that there isn't (and probably shouldn't be) a singular national system for education. Another part is the fact that quality education is insanely high-priced because a parent has to pay for the public and the private system concurrently. This pressure pushes private tuitions upward and makes the private schools more exclusive because they can't take on kids below certain income thresholds at all.

This is one case where I believe regulation has actually hurt the US citizens a lot. No child left behind was a staggering failure, and most people would be better off making their educational choices for their children based on what makes the most sense for them, not based on a legislated prescription of certain topics (or the intentional avoidance of others, namely human health and biology...)

Let's not forget that george jr. And Biden made college debt slavery a thing. And no child left behind was meant to cripple public education. So you have poor uneducated kids mad at the system voting conservative. And then you have kids that escaped and went to college to only strap them with so much debt, they to become conservative. Saying, well I had to pay, why do they not have to have decades of their lives paying back bad faith loans?

> Another part is the fact that quality education is insanely high-priced because a parent has to pay for the public and the private system concurrently. This pressure pushes private tuitions upward and makes the private schools more exclusive because they can't take on kids below certain income thresholds at all.

How does that hurt public schools? I would assume that would help public schools. Because instead of the top 50% of kids (e.g.) going to private schools, now only the top 10% of kids go to private schools. Thus public schools are filled with smarter kids.

Realistically, it hurts private schools by reducing the number of students they could take on. Public schools, however, are governmentally forced to abide by a certain curriculum, which hurts students dramatically (basic biology and sex education is a big one here).

Because of this, what actually happens is the top half of students that can't go to private schools get an underwhelming education. Compounding on that, local districts can mismanage funds and security to an extent that reduces the likelihood of a student's success in the classroom to near-zero.

Net result - <10% of students get a great education and greater opportunity. 40% come out 'fine' but not particularly ready for entering the workforce or higher education. The rest come out with an education that is measurably substandard, resulting in a significant hardship.

Example numbers, based on your comment.

> Private systems aren't outcome orientated, they're profit orientated

Based on what I've read about the US education system (primary schools), one of the main problems is the "no child left behind" policy, which makes the public system not "outcome oriented" either - kids simply have no incentive to even try (and are disruptive instead), as there's no valuable outcome to achieve - the (fake) "outcome" is the same for everybody (finishing school), regardless of their actual level of education.

It's a hard problem.

I like to think I'm not too ideological about which sectors should be public and which should be private (this is not a moral question as far as I'm concerned). I think some sectors work better privately and others work better publicly. Essentially I think letting the free market do its thing is a good idea if I can be confident that the profit motive broadly aligns with public interest (and using regulation where it doesn't, for instance for pollution). Education is a sector where I have very little faith that the free market profit motive aligns with the public interest.

The problem lies with evaluating the quality of education. Children aren't very capable of evaluating the quality of their own education (and if they are they often aren't taken seriously or they don't have any choice in the matter anyway), and parents are too far removed or often don't know the subject matter very well themselves. The only way (and even that is an inaccurate way) to evaluate schools is by doing statistical analysis on outcomes. The crucial point is: the only data you have is outdated by years, perhaps even a decade or so. Education is a strongly reputation-based sector for a reason: reputation is the only way people have to evaluate your product. I don't believe there's a way around this.

In a for-profit corporation, particularly in a publicly-traded one, there's often pressure to optimize profits on the short term. So if I'm the unscrupulous CEO of a for-profit school, I can always deliver very easily by simply cutting costs even if it dramatically hurts the quality of the education, confident in the knowledge that by the time the effects start getting noticeable I'm long gone. The short term profit motive of a publicly traded corporation works perversely here: there's always the temptation to sell the reputation you built up yesterday to turn a bigger profit today; no one will be any the wiser until it's too late (and they paid a lot of money for sub-par education).

Of course public or non-profit institutions are also vulnerable to bad management, but at least no one has a strong incentive to gut their expenses, as no one stands to gain.

Maybe there's a way to align incentives? E.g. schools are (partially) government-funded, but the funding is a function of the taxes that people who have attended the school pay.

Still there are a few issues that would need to be fixed, off the top of my head: (1) the function should simply be a mean, to make schools focus on desired outcomes (e.g. the minimal (or 5th percentile) education) - otherwise they'd just focus on producing a few outliers, like VCs; (2) there needs to be a "default" funding available (e.g. average of all schools) to enable innovation (starting new schools); (3) there needs to be some funding available for "non-profit" education (e.g. art) but maybe there should be a limit on the number of people that can attend such schools (for free).

The types of education that are most like an efficient market are recognized and necessary certification based training in fields like nursing and agricultural tech/safety (probably other “skilled trades” too), the product of regulation. When you “deregulate” education, you get predatory actors like ITT Tech that try to imitate real trade education.

Childcare (aka mom has a child, goes back to work 6 weeks later, pays $x/week for daycare or a nurse) isn’t a government service and it’s very expensive. Why is it so expensive?

There is a child to caretaker ratio to maintain. And you have to pay for the caretaker wages and benefits, rent, liability insurance, support staff, etc. So those costs are divided among all who are paying for it. It will not scale any better than that.

What’s the solution? Don’t have children?

The government would have to subsidize it as a cost of keeping society functioning.

Would that not just directly lead to it swallowing an amount of federal tax revenue proportional to other services that are subsidized? E.g. healthcare/education? And then proceed to munch on GDP bit by bit?

It might counterbalance a bit. It might create jobs for people. And having affordable childcare means someone might get back into the workforce and contributing taxes.

What does education, healthcare, childcare, and housing have in common? They didn't get cheaper from outsourcing and automation.

Great article, but I find it only takes the "wage" side of the equation and not the "cost" side. I'm not an economic expert but the biggest line items for most people seem to be housing (high and regular), healthcare (high and irregular), education, and childcare.

If we fix these I'm sure the equation changes a lot for many, many, people.

If the market is broken for pricing these main things, then even if everyone suddenly gets an income increase, it probably wouldn't matter much.

It would still make these things more affordable. And, save perhaps childcare, increasing the cost of low waged labor would not have an outsized inflationary effect on them.

Certainly not on housing. The cost of housing/rent is predicated on a shortage of hoarded, largely untaxed land.

Untaxed? Where? Got the car gassed up.

Untaxed as a verb. E.g. California reducing property taxes to absurdly low levels with prop 13, diverting the spoils of the land to the owners instead (in the form of ridiculously high valuations and streams of rental income).

If it's a DeLorean, just head back to 1978 when Proposition 13 passed in California.

Wouldn't be the opposite? Supply-constrained, limited housing. Everyone is suddenly twice as rich competing for the same fixed number of units. Price has to go up.

>Everyone is suddenly twice as rich

Not everyone makes makes minimum wage.

The standard macroeconomic approach is to keep inflation low so that wages will ‘catch up’ to costs. This isn’t working though, low wages seem to be sticky. This implies that there aren’t enough new jobs, and there are plenty of people who will take whatever they can get.

But if costs come down, that is effectively a raise in wages. The cost of many goods has come down (for some of the same reasons wages are down!), but as OP said housing/education/medical have gone up. So if we can target those rising costs, that can be very effective, without raising wages.

Agreed, this is mostly unsupported conjecture, but I think people underestimate how far mitigating healthcare costs would go. Since healthcare costs can be unpredictable (a sudden severe injury, or even just the opacity of health insurance) and costly, they force people to maintain more savings, take less risk, and generally constrain freedom as economic actors.

Do away with, or at least reduce, this bogeyman and I wonder how much economic activity we’d unlock.

I don’t think you’ll fix high housing costs.

There’s a supply and demand problem. Limited supply (real estate), lots of demand, therefore prices go up. Those who can afford it do pay it and are competing with each other to pay for the property they want. Why would New York or Bay area housing ever go down?

Time for more people to admit they can’t afford to live in the best + most popular places and instead move to “less desirable” places, like Iowa.

Actually, housing is easiest to fix, just allow building more densely and provide public transportation.

>>Limited supply (real estate)

This is just artificially limited, because existing home owners don't like to see their property prices fall due to increased supply.

I would like to advance a different opinion. There are many that are proponents of Universal Basic Income (UBI). However, many state that one problem with UBI is that it comes at the expense of personal gratification and economic productivity.

I am of the opinion that low wage jobs are a form of UBI. In this manner, individuals are paid a basic income in exchange for their productivity. However, these jobs are not meant to create wealth. They're meant to provide subsistance. This is much the same goal of UBI.

For those that say that benefits (health, retirement, sick pay, family leave, vacation) are necessary in addition to low wage income which often does not supply many or any of these benefits, I would say that is the case for UBI as well.

For UBI to work, there must be a base of benefits to support the UBI. As such, I see UBI and low wage as fairly synonymous except that UBI is seen as providing income without any productivity required of the individual, and low wage being UBI with required productivity.

In many ways UBI and low wage work come at odds. The more that UBI is offered, the less that individuals would want to do low wage work. Rather than pushing up wages for low wage work, dis-incentivization of low wage will push employers towards automation. As such, low wage is a support of employment generally. The more that employers move towards automation, the more that low wage jobs are eliminated, the more that UBI becomes the only alternative to low wage. As such, low wage jobs do provide a necessary function in the economic system.

This is just food for thought.

The typical low wage job is meant to (using your term) build wealth for the employer.

That is often the case. The function of the low wage job is for the benefit of the employer, not the employee. The function of UBI is neither to build wealth for the individual nor the economy as a whole. Wealth still becomes concentrated with the smaller pool of individuals in control of resources and means of production.

I think employers will move toward automation regardless, so in a way UBI has an advantage there. I also think preventing automation just so humans have something to do isn't reasonable. Let's progress technology, and think of ways to give more dignity to humans at the same time!

Lastly, the benefits point you made does make sense, except a "retirement" benefit shouldn't be needed (it only exists because eventually you can't do work but need money - basically what UBI already is)

Yes, Social Security and Pension benefits are indeed a form of UBI, earned through employment contributions.

Also to add to your points above, in the scenario where all possible low wage jobs are eliminated through automation, this would require a dramatic restructuring of the labor pool and economic environment. This is further evidence of the role low wage plays in current economy.

In the situation where low wage jobs are fully eliminated, all that remains are concentrations of high wage / self-employed pools and a very large amount of automation systems that would require management.

Perhaps one alternative to UBI is the creation of patronage systems that can support human endeavors where no productivity output is required, but human creativity output is desired. Something to think about.

The "goal" of a low wage job is for an employer to make a profit from someone else's labor, and to only allow them to subsist.

UBI promotes subsistence but crucially allows someone enough time to find more substantial opportunities.

And UBI won't necessarily kill low-wage work – in some ways, it makes space for it. I'm an EMT, and I make minimum wage, and I work 48-72 hours a week on the ambulance. UBI would make it so that I don't need another job to support a family, and could live healthily and with dignity on just those 48-72 hours a week.

>>The "goal" of a low wage job is for an employer to make a profit from someone else's labor

That is the goal of all jobs, high, low, middle

Employers are not charity, they do not employ people so they can have a good income.

Employers employ people because they need work done to make money off that work, the second you cost your employer more than they make off your work you are out of a job.

Sometimes that cut off is more direct (i.e if you make widgets your per hour the rate of manufacture can easily be factored into the cost of making the widget) but if you some do something more nebulous like cleaning the floors, or filing papers, that can be harder to calculate but every business does.

That's right, but we don't have a society unless people have incomes so maybe this isn't a good model for funding a civil society?

This is not the case - there's plenty of civil societies that have existed over the millennia that are subsistence economies. They aren't wealthy, but that isn't the point.

Just that earning that little and not being able to just quit and being highly dependend is exactly what a ubi is trying to fix.

My position pays well and I'm an expert. I can choose my job to a certain degree and people are looking for me to keep me.

This is luxury. You are at the grace of your shift manager.

Our society needs a way to ubi to find a new more fulfilling future with tons of automatization. Like in Star trek.

> However, these jobs are not meant to create wealth. They're meant to provide subsistance. This is much the same goal of UBI.

I'm not even a proponent of UBI, but I immediately see a few problems with your argument here:

1) They often don't provide subsistence, hence the necessity for many people to have multiple jobs. While we can adjust UBI accordingly (to some extent, obviously CoL is a thing), it's significantly more difficult to adjust around people working multiple jobs.

2) You're missing a critical component of UBI, which is that people are free to pursue whatever they might like (including nothing at all) without the fear of losing basic necessities. Low wage jobs obviously preclude you from doing that--because you're, well, spending your time working those jobs.

This is hyperbole of course, but we may very well be missing out on a modern-era Emily Dickinson or Darwin because they're spending all their time working minimum wage jobs.

3) Everyone's already moving heavily towards automation. Corporations don't employ people out of the goodness of their hearts. The second it becomes cheaper to automate something, those jobs will disappear. You can already see this to some extent with automated checkout lines, internet vs. retail shopping, etc. Unless you do something drastic ala NJ and Oregon with enforcing low-wage work like gas station attendants, those jobs quickly fade away.

> one problem with UBI is that it comes at the expense of personal gratification and economic productivity

I wholeheartedly disagree with this. UBI allows people to pursue what they are passionate about, work where they truly want to, and help start a new business. The data backs that people will not work less, but be able to have more freedom in what job they do work in. I highly recommend Yang's book about this: https://www.hachettebooks.com/titles/andrew-yang/the-war-on-...

It seems to me that the difference is that with UBI you can use the time that you would otherwise be working to prepare for a new job, look for a new job, or to do work that doesn't pay (e.g. art).

On the other hand, a low wage job takes up the same amount of time as a regular job but doesn't provide many of the benefits (e.g. financial security, sufficient discretionary money to pursue your goals, the ability to purchase a house, etc.).

Unfortunately the existing landscape of flipping burgers and driving for Uber Eats is fairly limited.

UBI allows people to be productive in ways that haven't always been appreciated by society such as raising children, producing a profound portfolio of art, or caring for the disadvantaged.

> However, many state that one problem with UBI is that it comes at the expense of personal gratification and economic productivity.

Personal gratification in the form of extremely boring, demeaning, repetitive work which barely gives you enough money to live in poverty?

> However, these jobs are not meant to create wealth. They're meant to provide subsistance.

Minimum wage jobs are not meant to provide subsistence. They're meant to extract maximum profit from financially vulnerable people.

> Rather than pushing up wages for low wage work, dis-incentivization of low wage will push employers towards automation.

That's already the case regardless of UBI.

> As such, low wage is a support of employment generally.

Not really, I doubt Google's software engineer hiring gets harder or doctors go out of work if less people are willing to work minimum wage at Walmart.

Why does it make sense to force private industry to provide a UBI? A minimum wage job puts a floor on what can be paid and this fundementally distorts the labor market. If a job does not provide enough value to the employer to meet minimum wage it will not exist for very long. This rules out many types of work where the value is hard to capture and pushes all of that work into the domain of either being funded by government or non-profits. This also potentially prevents labor participation by certain categories of handicapped individuals who have the potential to provide value to society and experience satisfaction in their work but can't compete in a marketplace distorted by a minimum wage.

If anything, a UBI enables low-wage work, especially when that work provides satisfaction to the employed. It also can increase economic productivity because the labor market will be able to distribute labor more efficiently.

This brings up the interesting (to discuss) idea that if a UBI is implemented, there should no longer be a minimum wage as the UBI places a floor on income. In many ways the minimum wage doesn't offer benefit in an economy where the self-employed will participate out of their free will in income generation through service such as Uber, DoorDash, Etsy. Often those self-income sources generate less on a per-hour basis than minimum wage, however, since the income earner is free to stop and start at will the presence of a floor of hourly wage has no impact.

It seems like you could pair a gradual introduction of a UBI with a commensurate reduction in the minimum wage and slowly find the sweet spot for our current economy. It seems like this could be a good form of economic stimulus during downturns.

I hear agreement that the economy is good, but also that jobs are paying less for more work and that income inequality is larger than ever. At the same time, the housing market where I live is absolutely exploding. I feel like I'm missing something about the real condition of the economy...

Politics infests everything, so inevitably all economic news is propaganda to be twisted however is deemed appropriate.

When unemployment is high, the house organs lament the poor people out of work. When unemployment is low, the house organs lament that it’s the wrong kind of employment. And always, the problems can be solved with putting my candidate in charge with access to a lot of other people’s money.

Well, maybe it's just that these are actual problems felt by many people and things need to be done about them. The problem is, rarely are things actually done (say, about housing affordability, healthcare accessibility or economic inequality), mostly because doing things endangers interests of privileged groups (property owners, the insurance industry, executives etc.)

> At the same time, the housing market where I live is absolutely exploding

That's because the US housing market is open to the richest people around the world who are looking for a place to store value. US property rights protect value better than property rights in China.

Everyone has an agenda but be especially careful of real estate as an economic barometer. There’s so much speculation going on that the level of distortion can often seem criminal in retrospect. A recent example: Manhattan developers seem to be keeping thousands of new, unsold condos off the market. I don’t think it’s difficult to imagine why. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-06/manhattan...

Re: unsold condos, anyone want to try explaining how withholding stock makes sense? I understand flooding the market would depress prices further, but I don’t understand what market would buy up all this stock. If these units can’t sell in what seems to be a nicely growing market, isn’t it going to be a long time before they sell at all? Like, so long that just sitting on them and paying taxes doesn’t make sense?

The calculation: Prices will skyrocket from lack of supply more quickly than the taxes paid on the units.

Development and renting it out locks you into contracts where you can't flip as quickly (low liquidity). So you don't develop or use the land, just wait for your investment to accrue.

It is extremely simple to see why: flooding the market will lower the prices and reduce the profits, waiting and selling at high price can be more profitable, it's a simple math comparison between the options.

It's worth discussing subgroups. An unemployment rate of 5% is probably fine if it is uniformly distributed; but we know it's not.

Some subgroups, like minorities and young adults, have been plagued by much higher numbers which are a problem. Someone who can't get a foothold in the job market will likely have lifelong challenges.

A rate of 3.5% almost certainly mean improvement for these subgroups.

This is based off of 2016 data and an self admitted overly expansive view of what the proper cohort is.

(eg, they include college age students when they are usually left out because things like increase college enrollment would skew the numbers).

All their distributional data and numbers for what counts as low wage workers comes from a 2012-2016 Census Bureau survey. They then claim without much justification "we think it is unlikely our finding would change significantly if we considered more recent wage data" for the 2017-2019 period.

edits:

strangely enough they exclude graduate and professional student, but still include 18-24 year olds in high school or college. And they exclude self-employed for reasons similar to why you would want to exclude 18-24 year olds. And that 18-24 year old group accounts for only 4% of mid and high wage work, but 24.3% of low wage work, so it is clearly skewing the results.

And the largest category of low-wage workers (a plurality) is classified as "low-wage workers in a family with mid- to high- wage workers". I'm not really sure we care about that as much.

Reading more, they have some very strange inclusion/excisions, such as they exclude professional and grade students because they are seen as having a career path, they include "springboard jobs" because some might not transition out of them. That's just sloppy and lazy.

Sounds like some serious data hacking going on.

When you could house, feed and clothe a family of four (or more!) on a single unskilled labor job, unemployment numbers meant something. Today they mean nothing.

A measure of how many households live above the poverty line would be a step in the right direction, but also frankly the poverty line in America is set too low. People 10% above it are still too poor to live comfortably on their income.

That state never existed. If you were white and in the US you could--it's just we were pushing the bad jobs off on those we didn't notice. Now we can't.

Hate to break it to you but the vast majority of people living in poverty in the united states are and have been white. The majority of government assistance goes to poor whites. Poverty doesn't discriminate. The bad jobs were not pushed off on those we did not notice. The wealth of minorities was rising until we implemented the civil rights act of 1964 which has screwed every minority applicant at a small business. It is riskier to hire and fire than it is to not hire.

The civil rights act prevents minority only businesses ta boot!

The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of 1964.

>The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of 1964.

Well this is certainly an interesting take of the situation.

I should have phrased that differently. While it is still my opinion, in this context I should have phrased it: "The worst thing to happen to minority employment..."

While your comment does not add much to the conversation, I appreciate your skills in ambiguity.

> civil rights act of 1964 which has screwed every minority applicant at a small business....The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of 1964.

That's an...interesting perspective on what most consider to be landmark legislation in American history. So I looked it up, because I didn't know what you were talking about.

"Small businesses with fewer than 25 employees were originally allowed to continue discriminating under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972 changed the law to require all businesses with 15 or more employees to adhere to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964."[1]

I'm still shocked that discrimination is allowed for any business at all. But you weren't entirely correct.

Also, the Act's other benefits have to be weighed against allowing discrimination in small businesses. Small businesses that were racist and discriminatory before the Civil Rights Act could continue to be so after it, but could only grow up to a certain size. That's still an improvement on what existed previously, which was that they could be racist and discriminatory forever and always.

If I was a minority in the 60s I'd consider federally guaranteed right to vote, equal education, stay at any hotel, use any public water fountain or bus, and be considered on an equal basis for federal jobs, private sector jobs in 15/25+ employee firms, loans, assistance programs and the rest to be a massive gain over the status quo. You're entitled to your opinion on the CRA of 1964, but to most people it's going to sound bizarre. Sorry.

> The civil rights act prevents minority only businesses ta boot!

I don't know what "ta boot" means so the meaning of this statement is unclear.

1. https://aapf.org/civil-rights-act

Just because a law makes it illegal to discriminate does not eliminate discrimination. In the United States small businesses account for the most employees. Small business owners do not hire minorities because they risk being sued when they fire them. There is less risk to not hire than there is to hire due to the Civil Rights Act. This results in less minority hires.

If a minority runs a business and only wants to hire minorities they have a greater risk of being sued because it is easier for a person in majority race to prove discrimnation.

> Just because a law makes it illegal to discriminate does not eliminate discrimination.

It increases the cost of doing so, which is really the point. People and businesses respond to incentives.

> small businesses account for the most employees.

That's not been remotely true for the past 26 years (you're welcome to find data before that). Businesses with up to 19 employees (i.e. the ones exempt from the Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972) employed only 20% of employees in 1993. And that share has fallen over time - it was about 17% in 2019.[1]

And even if it were true, all the other benefits of the CRA would still outweigh this one flaw. I think you underestimate the effects of generations of violent voter suppression, and segregation in education, businesses, housing, and other opportunities.

> If a minority runs a business and only wants to hire minorities

A small business (< 15 employees) that only wants to hire minorities would also be exempt from the Equal Opportunity Employment Act wouldn't they? I'm not a lawyer, I still can't believe this is actually legal, and maybe there's some other law elsewhere that makes this illegal. Discrimination is wrong, no matter who does it. But what you're saying wouldn't happen either.

1. https://www.bls.gov/web/cewbd/table_f.txt

> It increases the cost of doing so, which is really the point. People and businesses respond to incentives.

The CRA increased the incentives to discriminate for small businesses as I am trying to illustrate above and below.

> That's not been remotely true for the past 26 years (you're welcome to find data before that). Businesses with up to 19 employees (i.e. the ones exempt from the Equal Opportunity Employment Act of 1972) employed only 20% of employees in 1993. And that share has fallen over time - it was about 17% in 2019.[1]

It is not about the mandates in law. It is about reality and risk. If I want to sue my employer for firing me due to racial reasons, I have to prove in court(or EEOC has to prove) using company statistics(unless explicit evidence exists) that they have a practice of discrimination. This is easier to do against larger employers with more employees. For me to sue a small employer, whether they employ 100(52% of jobs are attributed to 100 employee or less businesses according to Texas Law Now;2012) or 19 employees the statistics are harder to prove because of the small sample size. Employers know this. That establishes a difficulty for minorities to sue small businesses, which allows small businesses to discriminate.

Combine that with the fact that if an applicant does not get hired, it is incredibly difficult to even begin a suit without internal knowledge of the company, ergo it is less risky for employers to not hire minorities to begin with.

> And even if it were true, all the other benefits of the CRA would still outweigh this one flaw. I think you underestimate the effects of generations of violent voter suppression, and segregation in education, businesses, housing, and other opportunities.

I find little comfort in being able to vote, go to school, etc if it results in poor opportunities to be gainfully employed. As I stated before, prior to the CRA wealth(power to influence vote/education/business/etc) of the largest minority group in the US was rising; according to Thomas Sowell.

> The CRA increased the incentives to discriminate for small businesses as I am trying to illustrate above and below.

And as I showed, small businesses make up a minority of employment opportunities. The CRA increased employment opportunities literally everywhere else such as in government jobs. To go from "100% of businesses discriminate" to "50% of businesses discriminate" is an improvement in absolute terms. It didn't take away job opportunities that existed. If a small business was racist before, it would continue to be racist afterward. Do you have proof that small businesses began discriminating more after the CRA than they did before?

> This is easier to do against larger employers with more employees.

Citation needed.

> For me to sue a small employer, whether they employ 100...or 19 employees the statistics are harder to prove because of the small sample size.

Citation needed. In a business that small, everyone knows everyone else. It should be way easier to gather data.

> That establishes a difficulty for minorities to sue small businesses

Whereas before the CRA the option to sue didn't exist at all and all businesses, of every size, could discriminate with impunity.

> I find little comfort in being able to vote, go to school

Fortunately most people disagree with you.

> As I stated before, prior to the CRA wealth...of the largest minority group in the US was rising; according to Thomas Sowell.

That would appear to coincide with the post-WW2 economic boom. I imagine every group in the US got wealthier in that period. I'm not well-versed with all the factors and history after the CRA, but correlation ain't causation.

I was trying to logically explain the reality of the situation. I would have a hard time trying to find sources that are going to admit to discriminating publicly. I cannot imagine that survey exists. I'm done.

> I was trying to logically explain the reality

So was I. My logic is simple to explain:

Pre-CRA - 100% of employers (small businesses, large businesses, medium business, non-profits, governments) could discriminate, and many did.

Post-CRA - < 100% of employers could discriminate

Therefore, the number of jobs available to everyone (minorities and non-minorities alike) went up. It's simple math.

I don't understand what your logic is. Because you've said both:

"Small business owners do not hire minorities because they risk being sued when they fire them."

and

"If I want to sue my employer for firing me due to racial reasons, I have to prove in court that they have a practice of discrimination. This is easier to do against larger employers [than]...a small employer. That establishes a difficulty for minorities to sue small businesses, which allows small businesses to discriminate."

So minorities find it harder to sue small businesses, but, also, small business owners don't hire minorities because they risk being sued. What? And small businesses only worry about lawsuits by fired employees, but not ones by candidates who feel illegal bias was a factor in their rejection. Why?

> I would have a hard time trying to find sources that are going to admit to discriminating publicly

Don't necessarily need that. Economists have all sorts of ingenious ways to tease out this information from other labor and employment data, EEO surveys that many employees and candidates fill out, and other things. If there's any evidence of what you're suggesting, there would be clues in that data.

> I'm done.

Me too, friend. Take care and a (slightly belated) happy new year. :-)

> When you could house, feed and clothe a family of four (or more!) on a single unskilled labor job

Life in those days were in extreme poverty by today's standards.

Yeah, so here's the problem. We now, more than ever, have a key metric for measuring the economy that doesn't really measure the right thing. Just like in every other situation, businesses and startups included, this leads to gamification and optimization for that metric.

"Oh, you want more jobs, great! here you go! We'll cut the hours by 1/2 and employee twice as many people!"

Unemployment goes to 0% but so does quality of life. So the real question remains, what are the metrics we really value as a society and what do we need to do in order to optimize for them?

You’re right that this one metric doesn’t tell the whole story, but no metric does and they aren’t meant to. Of course you need to look at other metrics besides employment to understand how well your society is doing.

Right, but the point is that not only does this metric not tell the whole story, but that it tells the WRONG story.

Unemployment isn't a useful metric anymore.

Perhaps, but your rationale (“it’s not meaningful if jobs pay half of what they used to”) supports my interpretation (“not the whole story”), not your thesis (“WRONG story”). Correct me if I missed something; haven’t had my coffee yet.

What’s the metric to use instead?

# of households in America + average household income?

It sounds silly but happiness should be the metric. If everyone is happy you presume employment is probably good.

happiness, some equivalent, or some series of metrics that equates to it, yeah.

I honestly don't know what it would be (happiness, freedom, life expectancy, etc) but that's the goal.

While true it's important to point out that salaries are rising and most for the lowest income.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-wage-growth-for-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/02/minimum-w...

In these cases I somehow always have the Goodhart's law immediately coming to my mind: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

>In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44% of all workers—earn barely enough to live on.

>The majority of low-wage workers (77%) have less than a college degree,

So there are 53 (1-0.77) = 12.2 million workers with college degrees who are only able to earn "barely enough to live on".

Poor instruction or irrelevant majors in college? Or drug use, criminal convictions, disabling disease or injury after college? Long term career success has a lot to do with parents, friends, spouses, and children as well as a large helping of luck.

I'm thinking mostly poor instruction/irrelevant majors.

Are you assuming that everybody who is able-bodied and has a scale degree should be able to find employment?

Did over 12 million people in this country really get worthless degrees or become incapacitated?

Getting a "good" degree might not matter so much, if so many other people also got those degrees. One could say that degree is therefore no longer so good, but there is not an endless train of "even better" degrees for people to move on towards.

> Long term career success has a lot to do with parents, friends, spouses, and children as well as a large helping of luck.

Long term failure also has a lot to do with parents, friends, spouses, and children as well as a large helping of luck.

I'm guessing also high COL areas.

How true. But even pay is misleading. Ultimately, it's about cost of living / affordability. For example, if hourly rate increases but housing - sensing the market can bear more - soon follows then the pay increase is a wash, or worse.

I see the future as grim anti-utopia:

Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs obsolete. Therefore, we will end up with high unemployment, low pay jobs, and fierce competition for decreasing number of available positions. The owners of businesses will mostly benefit from the automation. It would be a good solution to introduce convenient life long education and universal basic income. Since businesses benefited most from the progress it is reasonable to tax them in order to pay for social policies.

I am afraid, as soon as we tax businesses more they will move to the countries with low taxes, that are less social towards their citizens. The automation actually can make that move fast and not expensive.

In the end, it will be win for companies and loss for the citizens of both countries.

Is such scenario realistic? What can we do to counter it?

> Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs obsolete.

In 1000BC men and women did flour of wheat manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.

In 1000AD men and women did butter of milk manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.

In 1500AD men and women did threads of fur manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.

In 1940s women did manual calculations and typing for military, science departments, newspapers. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.

The whole history of humanity was full of obsolete jobs. Could people in 1000BC ever thing that women would write programs in Python instead of beating wheat? No, they could fancy neither Python nor computer.

People will simply explore other possibilities being free from obsolete jobs, making more services available, more possibilities open.

Two hundred years ago a massage would be totally unavailable for an avg peasant. Today you could have a massage any day because automation let more people do it getting the price down, as well as overall welfare up.

Future is pretty bright exactly because automation, technology would make some jobs obsolete, so more people could navigate spaceships or do other stuff we couldn't even fancy yet.

The problem is that the old jobs didn't require high IQ but the new jobs increasingly do.

In the old days even the dumbest man could carry grain from one place to another or push a plow. Even the dumbest woman could churn butter or milk a cow when told to.

These low-IQ individuals do not have the mental capacity to switch to Python programming - regardless of education.

So the "IQ floor" of the economy is rising. The result is that the high IQ people are fine, but low IQ people end up simply unemployable at any job. It's only in the last 50 years that the IQ floor rose above an undeniably noticeable chunk of the population. 10% of people are under IQ 85, which is too dumb to join the US army (by law). Too dumb to be trusted with powered construction equipment.

Leftists can't conceptualize this problem because of their egalitarian worldview, and rightists either talk about bootstraps or might not even care, seeing it as a sort of justified Darwinism.

> So the "IQ floor" of the economy is rising

I bet this is a wrong implication. Agriculture is way harder than writing php.

> The result is that the high IQ people are fine, but low IQ people end up simply unemployable at any job

Even if this implication were true, there is a whole bunch of new jobs that don't require you to be smart.

You could do sports, train people, be a waiter or a beauty blogger or a web programmer or a politician. I would dare say that the amount of stupid work is growing.

And avg person is not dumb at all, never was. The dumbest few always would find some way of doing some service job, especially when service field is growing. All kind of grooming does not require you to be especially smart, even chimps can do that.

>agriculture is way harder than php

an illiterate man can pull potatoes out of the ground.

No Sorry. Once you understand how a loop and a decision statement works, most of the programming is already demystified. You can make bank on incremental learning and writing applications.

The stakes in agriculture are higher. Who ever thinks manual labor is easy doesn't know what they are talking about. Apart from the tiredness, fatigue part of it. You also get injured, could lose crop to disease, floods etc.

Agriculture is harder than writing code. In fact that's the whole reason why so many of us chose to write code than be a farmer.

You seem to be misunderstanding.

A person who cannot read and write in any language cannot, by definition, write source code.

However, that same person can still receive a verbal command telling them to pull a potato out of the ground. Or move a box from one place to another.

This statement has nothing to do with the detrimental aspects of manual labor. Sitting at a desk as a programmer also has detrimental aspects.

> an illiterate man can pull potatoes

You need to put it there first, and do so avoiding the eruption of soil. Agriculture is very hard and requires much knowledge. Without knowledge you'll destroy both the crop and the land.

The potato puller is not fulfilling the role of agricultural designer. He or she is literally visually identifying a potato and using physics to pull it out of the ground.

It's like the difference between programming (fulfilling tasks), and system architecture, which is something I can't do because I don't have experienxe with huge enterprise stacks.

Yes.

For a visual example, look at John Malkovich's character in the film version of Of Mice and Men. He's mentally retarded. But people tell him - "carry these bags over there". And he does it, and he's useful. There is no job like this now. He's too dumb to be a barista or a gas station attendant or a line cook.

Agree wholeheartedly. As corporations grow into the trillions of dollars range of valuations and work becomes even more complex due to automation, we soon will live in a world where it will be difficult to find a way to purchase the things needed to live.

But x% of us will live really well.

> Leftists can't conceptualize this problem [of perpetual rising unemployment due to technology] because of their egalitarian worldview, and rightists either talk about bootstraps or might not even care, seeing it as a sort of justified Darwinism.

This. So much this. And it would take a Julius Cesar for everyone to see the truth… With physical force. But this hypothetical ruler that saves the day would be an unseen actor, its ideology nonexistent as it corresponds directly with truth as it functions; in contrast to any flawed human character that reasons from humanity, that is, from emotion, prejudice, and mistaken bias. Not seeking glory and fame but instead, letting go of lustful passions, giving what must be given and withholding what must be stored or withheld—achieving balance with the Force. So this implies that the brave Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker was actually Julius Cesar.

How would flooding the economy with “free money” (UBI) not just cause mass inflation? Every experiment I’ve read has been on a small scale. How do economists know what will happen if you give an entire country (both rich and poor) extra money to blow every month?

The term UBI is misleading. Think of it as UBS. Universal Basic Sustenance. If you were given X amount of eatables, a home and healthcare, you could now focus on a lot more.

Sure, you could then say food, home and healthcare wouldn't be much worth(inflated). Then yeah that's the whole point. That's where we want to be.

>What can we do to counter it?

You may want to keep an eye on the global protest trend.

Does a person working part time who can't afford their own place to rent (i.e. Live with their parents) count as "employed"? If so, then the sharing economy surely boosts this metric significantly when not actually significantly improving lives.

People are counted as employed if they did any work at all for pay, even if it was just 1 hour a week.

Aren't all of these metrics that try to capture the bottom end inherently flawed because we don't know what an acceptable "minimum standard" for a long term job is?

For me, anything that doesn't pay enough to own property and eventually retire with some dignity is a "non-job"; which would put a country like the UK at >30% or so.

It's not clear to me that there is a standard basis. Someone might think affording rent on a small room and food is OK. Someone might think raising a family should be possible.

In reference to those low-paying retail jobs: I have done some research on large US retailers like J.C. Penney, Gamestop, Macy's, Sears and Tailored Brands. It's quite scary to see how dire the situation is for these firms. Shrinking revenues, plenty of debt, hardly any profit in sight.

The most shocking to is the number of people they employ (more than 90k in the case of J.C. Penney), many of whom can be sure to be laid off in the next few years.

Walmart, Amazon and Target are doing fine and still pay low wages. I don't understand your point or choice of companies to list.

Amazon retail is not “doing fine”. It’s a low margin business with high fixed costs.

Yes well nobody can afford to buy anything on their subsistence wages...

Unemployment only measures persons in the workforce, not those who never had a job. Thus, the stats are further less rosy.

That is why we also track the labor force participation rate [0].

[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

Unfortunately I don't think that number is saying much either because it does not track well why people are not participating.

I can’t tell from your comment but I’m not sure this is what you expect. This is not people who have never had a job. This is a (now politically motivated) estimate of the number of employable people. Subtle difference.

Participation rate is not politically motivated, but citing it can be. This was widely cited by the right during the Obama administration and now by the left during the Trump administration.

Is the left citing labor participation rate during the Trump administration? This is strange, because the labor participation rate is recovering since Trump elected.

I have never heard of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics being politically motivated. This is a very new accusation. Do you have any reference?

The notion that unemployment (or other economic) statistics are manipulated is neither novel nor confined to the US specifically.

Whether it's generally accurate is another question.

But a Google Scholar search will (along with numerous false hits) turn up multiple discussions:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C39&q=une...

I've chosen Scholar rather than a general Web (or literature) search as the frequency of this accusation online or in the general press is so common as to be a trope, though you can repeat my query in either.

My own read is that unemployment is at best an incomplete metric for reasons expressed in the Brookings article: it fails to consider wages or compensation, and a large number of low-wage, low-skill, low-opportunity jobs really isn't commensurate with a strong labour sector.

There was that article I saw on HN where IIRC a doctor explained that disability diagnosis depends on the kind of work a person can get. If they are a blue collar worker and they can't stand for a whole shift, they get disability. If they can sit in front of a computer for 8 hours and work, they don't get disability, for same medical issue.

People without college degrees get disability and stop seeking employment, making the economy worse off but making the employment statistics look better.

Low unemployment drives productivity gains that keep wages low and that contributes to increased unemployment. See the cycle play out here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=pTTx

Workers with skills that align add productivity see wage gains. Workers and entire businesses on the wrong side of the productivity wave end up dislocated.

I'm sure UBI and other public policy efforts can correct this, right about the time we can control weather, solar cycles and cure cancer. Or, we can just accept there's some things outside our control and plan for the ups and downs.

Low wage labor and UBI are actually two sides of the same coin. The less that low wage labor is available, the more that UBI would become necessary to support the economy. The more that low wage labor is available, the less that UBI becomes seen as a necessity. The more that UBI is offered, the less that individuals would seek low wage labor. The less that individuals seek low wage labor, the tighter the employment market for such service, which motivates employers to seek higher productivity and automation rather than increase wages, which furthers the cycle above.

These things are cumulative, not mutually exclusive. Working minimum wage on top of UBI would put someone in much better position than either one alone. Some people would choose only UBI, but most would want more than that.

In which case, UBI might increase the baseline for what is considered to be "subsistence". If all are entitled to UBI and can simultaneously earn income on top of that, then the base line cost for goods in demand increases so that all that UBI has done is ratcheted up the baseline for what is considered subsistence, i.e., a form of inflation.

Look at the occupations predicted to grow: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/occupations-most-job-growth.h...

Nursing and home aides, fast food, janitors, warehousing and trucking - these are all unproductive and low-skill occupations. It wouldn't look that sorry if the country implemented better industrial policies.

Labor market conditions are not acts of God, nor inevitable. They are shaped by policies, investments, and institutions.

This is a point I keep trying to make about UBI and seemingly utterly failing. It isn't "inevitable" that automation will lead to high rates of chronic unemployment.

I've been quiet of late on HN. I often am around Christmas time, but I also wonder if I'm just fed up with feeling like it's completely pointless.

Due to so-called identity politics, if I give my opinion about various things, it is seen as "political" in a way that it isn't for people who aren't me. There seems to be no amount of provisos or hedging my bet that adequately protects me from ridiculous personal attacks for speaking at all.

I'm skeptical that articles like this one are at all a reasonable picture of what's going on with the economy. I'm skeptical because I'm one of those poor people that makes too little money in the new economy and I'm quite clear this is the happy, shiny version of my life where unicorns fart rainbows.

Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly sick to death of being poor, struggling to make ends meet, etc. I'm sick to death of the classism and gender issues that help keep my financial problems alive.

But the reality is that I'm supposed to be dead. My life isn't supposed to work at all.

I have a genetic disorder and I have been getting myself well for a lot of years when that isn't supposed to be possible at all. It's been possible because of doing low paying gig work and my income is as low as it is in part because I don't work that much.

I hesitate to admit that because I know from long experience that people are quick to latch onto a detail like that and use it to justify making zero effort to address other issues, like classist and sexist BS that is also part of the problem.

Many years ago, I read a study that measured real world things like how many meals per day someone got. The conclusion was that less than one half percent of Americans were poor by the standards of less developed countries like India.

Similarly, I was a military wife for many years and found that it was nigh impossible to compare military compensation packages to civilian ones. A large part of the value of military compensation is in "benefits," not cash pay. It's very much an apples to oranges comparison and it's damn near impossible to articulate.

I'm unconvinced that we have a good means to adequately measure and understand current quality of life as compared to historical norms. I'm dirt poor and I'm currently broadcasting to the globe via a cheap ass smartphone and free membership on a public forum. That same smartphone holds multiple games, serves as my personal library and more.

When I was a military wife, we had multiple bookcases lining the walls of our living room. They held hundreds of books and, later, dozens of boxes from software that came with a paper booklet and a CD or floppy to install it.

I currently live in an SRO. My life could not work at all if I still needed hundreds of books and physical storage for software

It wouldn't work because I don't have the money for more space. It wouldn't work because papers make me sick. It wouldn't work for a long list of reasons.

I don't think we have any idea how to measure how much of our lives have moved from physical goods to virtual ones and how that presents itself to the eyes of the world as seeming poverty because we own so much less physically. To my mind, it's like magic. It's like having a DnD bag of holding for books, software and more.

Life is different these days. We don't have any idea how to incorporate that fact into our metrics for measuring things like poverty.

I desperately want the US to fix its health care issues and housing problems. These are very real problems that very negatively impact the country and weigh especially heavily on the lower classes who have less money.

But I am less convinced that the trend of low paid work, whether from jobs or gig work, is really some kind of evil, malicious, abusive trend where rich people are being intentionally awful to line their pockets at the expense of everyone else. I think it's far more complicated than that and I don't think it gets acknowledged at all. I don't think we are even discussing that angle, in part because no one wants to suggest that poverty isn't really a problem or be accused of implying such by wondering out loud about some of this stuff.

I can afford to occasionally comment on it because I'm already a social outcast that everyone thinks is crazy. I'm not risking that much.

But anyone with any kind of "nice life" and decent reputation either has zero idea how the other half lives or has no real choice but to keep such thoughts private lest they be accused of being up to something nefarious.

A lot of what you're saying rings true to me.

There are basically two 'tracks' of things that people use in life.

Material goods like food, water, entertainment, etc are getting cheaper and cheaper all the time. On long enough time scales this is true compared to wages. For the most part even the worst of jobs is sufficient to pay for that sort of thing.

I can't speak about healthcare as that's a particularly American problem.

But housing - that's literally an issue across the spectrum. It feels like every 'class' of person has basically taken a step down or two if you compare generation to generation. The upper-middle are looking at just about being able to afford starter properties in major cities. The middle class who would 30 years ago be settling down in suburban detached homes with kids are in pokey flats or sharing houses with other professionals.

Below that you have stuff like crappy flat shares, unofficial bunking up, or homelessness - to be honest looking at what graduates are doing I can't even imagine what say, a supermarket worker does if they don't have family.

> But housing - [...] The middle class who would 30 years ago be settling down in suburban detached homes with kids are in pokey flats or sharing houses with other professionals.

Real estate goes through cycles shorter than 30 years and it was not more expensive in 2012 than in 1990.

In the US, we've torn down about a million SROs in recent decades and largely zoned out of existence the creation of new Missing Middle Housing. This trend likely was worse in 2012 than in 1990.

We have a very serious housing supply issue in the US because while our housing supply has increasingly concentrated on the direction of upper class nuclear family, our demographics have gone in the opposite direction and moved away from that. We have a lot more small households (childless couples, single adults) and essentially no housing designed for them. Instead, we now default to expecting young adults to rent a home designed for a family and get roommates to fill the extra bedrooms and divide up the rent.

It's quite the serious problem and it's maddening to continue to see comments that act like there is no housing crisis. I have repeatedly had people tell me that the high cost of housing has nothing to do with homelessness, never mind that I can cite sources that show a very strong correlation.

I agree with the vast majority of what you said. I have always valued your contributions here on HN and elsewhere on your blogs. Thank you for choosing to speak up.

To clarify, are you suggesting that current “low wages” or “wage inequality” are not that important because they fail to account for quality of life (food, shelter, entertainment), which is still achievable, especially by global standards, on a “low” American wage?

I'm trying to say something like: When your caterpillar morphs into a butterfly, harping on how your butterfly is "failing to thrive according to standard, well-established caterpillar metrics used globally for the past thousand years and certified as super duper accurate for caterpillars by many respected institutions." is basically gibberish that says damn near nothing about the state of the butterfly's actual health for which we have zero established metrics, having never seen one before.

Just yesterday on HN, there was an article about someone spending 1 billion dollars to own every pop song ever recorded. Well, I can go to YouTube and listen to any pop song ever recorded (or very close to any), for free.

So: How rich am I? I'm sure not a billion dollars rich, and yet...

As you say, the metrics don't compute very well.

And, yet, you can't eat a YouTube song. So it gets very complicated.

There are many things that are more or less free, but a lot of basic essentials really aren't.

For those as ignorant as I was five minutes ago: "SRO" = "Single Room Occupancy".

Sorry, my bad. No one knows the term anymore because they are practically extinct. I usually include this link in anticipation of that issue:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy

People need to get that first job. That first job leads to skills, experience, knowledge of how to interact with coworkers, and so on. Few people start at minimum wage and then get stuck there. The ranks of the poor are fluid.

This is one reason why I’m against the minimum wage - by making it harder to get that first job, you make it increasingly difficult to get into the employment market.

I would be less opposed to allowing each city and town to set their own minimum wage. But a one-sized fits all approach doesn’t account for local differences. $15 federal minimum wage will drive low-wage work to the black market and the wages paid in cash.

The minimum wage is zero, and always will be.

The article is saying unemployment is very low so your point doesn't stand. The minimum wage isn't hurting employment. What's hurting people are the low wages.

> Few people start at minimum wage and then get stuck there. The ranks of the poor are fluid.

This is false. The US ranks very poorly for economic mobility- in fact, even 3rd world countries like Pakistan rank higher.

Relevant, from the UK side:

"Jobs of the future may not have stable hours, holiday pay, sick pay, or pensions, DWP secretary says"

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dwp-gig-econo...

Low wages for basic labour are I think the biggest driver of inequality in the US. It's not taxes, or education or anything else.

Break your back, barely make it - that's not the American dream.

A lift in Minimum wage would make a big difference, the rest of us would have to pay for it in higher prices, we can afford it though.

Get medical coverage to the remaining few that don't have it and the US would make great gains.

>In a recent analysis, we found that 53 million workers ages 18 to 64—or 44% of all workers—earn barely enough to live on. Their median earnings are $10.22 per hour, and about $18,000 per year.

Right away, they're presenting some large number that's actually double the real number of people below that threshold. If the median is $10.22, that means only half of them make less than that.

They then make a bunch of broad statements about the entire group.

I clicked through to https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/11/21/low-wag..., which linked me to https://www.brookings.edu/research/meet-the-low-wage-workfor..., which says the definition is on page 5 of https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/201911_.... It's actually on page 6 and 7 that we finally get the definition:

> While there is no universal definition of a low-wage worker, we use the often-employed threshold of two-thirds median wages for full-time/full-year workers, with slight modification. When determining median wages, we consider only wages for males. This raises the threshold, since men earn more than women on average, but using the typical male worker as the benchmark limits the extent to which gender inequality in wages effects our definition. While this is a less common approach to take, we are not the first to do so.

...

> The average of the national threshold across our five years of data, in 2016 real dollars, is $16.03, and the adjusted thresholds range from $12.54 in Beckley, W.Va. to $20.02 in San Jose, Calif.

They should probably include some of this info without sending you through 3 different links to track it out, but whatever.

Moving on:

>However, imagine that everyone without a college degree suddenly earned one. The jobs that pay low wages would not disappear. Hospitals would still need nursing assistants, hotels would need housekeepers, day care centers would need child care workers, and so on.

If everyone had a college degree, and assuming in the hypothetical that they had higher human capital (since the hypothetical doesn't really make sense under signalling theories of education), then productivity would be higher in other jobs, which would increase pay for their example jobs due to the Baumol effect.

>Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades, even as costs for basic inputs to a stable life—such as health care, housing, and education—have skyrocketed.

For the stagnation claim, their own source disproves them:

>After adjusting for inflation, wages are only 10 percent higher in 2017 than they were in 1973, with annual real wage growth just below 0.2 percent.

Those numbers are themselves somewhat misleading, there's nuances with measures of inflation, total compensation vs wages, etc, but even their source is sufficient to disprove the claim that "Wages for most workers (except those at the top) have stagnated or declined in recent decades"

The other half is a weird claim. "health care, housing, and education" are part of the inflation index. If your wages are higher after adjusted for inflation, then you can afford more "health care, housing, and education" than before. Yes, they will cost more, but by definition other parts of the inflation index will have gone down, and your total cost to purchase the same basket of goods is now lower as a percentage of your wages.

> then productivity would be higher in other jobs, which would increase pay for their example jobs due to the Baumol effect.

Laughing hard here. You just invented “trickle-down pay raises”!

If everybody has a degree, the degree doesn’t matter anymore, does it? Being a bachelor of economics will not make you a better burger deliverer. Plus the effect only hold due to a few sectors like IT paying disproportionately - overall, productivity increases over the last 70 years have not been reflected in purchasing power or work hours. The gains disappear into the upper deck.

We need to stop this bullshit mentality that people need to ‘educate themselves more’ to earn a decent living. The shit jobs will always exist, and they should pay well just for being shit jobs, which is what happens in northern Europe where minimum wages are more than enough to live comfortably as a bartender. There should be absolutely no shame in working for McDonalds (except about the food itself).

Of course degrees matter. Knowledge creates productivity, which creates wealth.

You’re taking that sentence as an absolute, not in the context of low-wage jobs. And it it is a liberal fantasy, right next to meritocracy. That wealth stays put exactly where it is, at the top of the chain. All studies on labor show productivity gains far outpacing salaries in the past century. A well-paid knowledge worker today can barely meet the lifestyle of his factory worker grandparents.

https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/es/07...

This is the result Google currently features for "productivity effect on wages". The chart shows total compensation tracking productivity very closely, although it only goes back a quarter century.

This is only because America has incredibly bloated healthcare costs - that "compensation" mostly isn't all that valuable.

A $1000 slice of pizza is still only 1 slice of pizza.

This is inflation adjusted, which means it accounts for all that.

This also only goes until 2006, Obamacare didn't even exist yet.

>Being a bachelor of economics will not make you a better burger deliverer.

No one said it did. But if your other option is something that's more productive, then the only way you'll agree to deliver burgers is if you're paid as much as the alternative. This has been known for half a century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

Pay rises in industries without productivity increases to match those in industries with productivity increases because of competition.

Of course, this is in the hypothetical where everyone has a college degree and assuming that the value of a degree is in human capital, which I pointed out explicitly was something I'm assuming.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG

Here's hours worked, shows a clear decline over time.

The other day I got one of those insightful hedge fund newsletters with a deep dive in inflation and unemployment. The dynamics are really complicated but one thing is unequivocal, the moment real wages go up the inflation catches up and those at the bottom suffer the most (due to Cantillon effect, negotiating power and other queuing phenomena). Higher wages as a platform is meaningless.

Perhaps the best measure that matters is the U6 underemployment which cleverly captures the utilisation of education and skill. It looks like this is as good as it gets as of right now in the US.

There are 15+ measures of inflation indeed, varying from 0 to 20%. Inflation is further segmented by demographics, younger people suffer far more inflation than older people (mostly due to housing, education and legacy cheaper medical plan expenses). Poor people also suffer higher inflation than the others.

The rabbit hole is deep and confusing. You can make just about any claim and it will be accurate for some definition of unemployment or inflation. And it's very easy to find contradictions. I'm sure somebody understands all this stuff, but this privilege is probably reserved for the top finance gurus.

>one thing is unequivocal, the moment real wages go up the inflation catches up

Hard disagree. Inflation is affected by wages, but it's not a 1:1 relation and I'm not aware of anyone seriously making that claim. Of course there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages, but not seriously advocated today as far as I know.

>Inflation is further segmented by demographics

This is actually a really interesting point. Elizabeth Warren made exactly this point in her 2004 book The Two Income Trap, with regard to middle class families with kids having higher housing costs due to competition over school districts.

> Hard disagree. Inflation is affected by wages, but it's not a 1:1 relation

I am talking about "real wages" to avoid the gotchas associated with nominal wage and inflation definitions. I think this makes the controversy go away. When you extend the nominal wage growth beyond the productivity gains in real terms, any extra purchasing power from a nominal wage gain will have no real basis and thus instantly triggering inflation as defined for your specific personal definition by demographic and income.

Say if you are really rich, your personal consumer basket that defines your personal purchasing power (and your personal inflation) will be dominated by expensive luxury items and investments while regular food/medical price increases will not impact you at all because they are a small part of the basket. However if your "demographic" (that has similar personal consumer basket) wage increases there is nothing to stop the price increase on such goods. There are small exceptions, but we can ignore them for the most part.

When you break down the demographics into small enough micro-groups you can get rid of the guesswork about what is inflation and how it affects everybody on average. This way you should be able to see how the relationship between wages and inflation is really 1:1. It's indeed not 1:1 when you mix dissimilar baskets and work with averages.

Now you're changing your claim. You're not talking about real wage increases, you're talking about an increase that's bigger than the productivity increase.

Even that doesn't necessarily increase inflation 1:1. Your models are off.

You can't talk about a single demographic because multiple demos buy the same products. The demand curves have multiple customers.

Real wage increase is the same as nominal wage, bigger than productivity increase. Real wages already have productivity and inflation factored in, so any extra nominal increase would be beyond productivity.

> Even that doesn't necessarily increase inflation 1:1. Your models are off.

Assuming you use the example rich demographic I gave, what would be an example scenario that systemically breaks the 1:1 ratio?

> You can't talk about a single demographic because multiple demos buy the same products.

I know what you mean here but you can bypass the dependencies between demos by letting the system play itself out and taking the numbers when you have access to them. You can pick any demographic or a person and you can get their personal basket, calculate inflation, calculate their purchasing power and how it changes every single tick just from their credit card statements. It doesn't matter what other people buy when you can see the actual purchases for each individual. What other demos buy is already taken into account in the numbers you see in the credit card statements so to speak.

>Real wages already have productivity and inflation factored in

What source are you using that adjusts for productivity when reporting real wages? Real is defined as inflation adjusted only.

>Assuming you use the example rich demographic I gave, what would be an example scenario that systemically breaks the 1:1 ratio?

>Say if you are really rich, your personal consumer basket that defines your personal purchasing power (and your personal inflation) will be dominated by expensive luxury items and investments while regular food/medical price increases will not impact you at all because they are a small part of the basket. However if your "demographic" (that has similar personal consumer basket) wage increases there is nothing to stop the price increase on such goods.

You're assuming perfectly inelastic supply, among other things. If there's elasticity, then additional money will result in some additional supply of luxury goods and greater quantity demanded.

Also, investments != purchases. Investments are a decision to defer consumption to the future.

In this global economy, much depends on the quality of education/training our workers are getting compared with other countries. In many cases, there are better educated workers elsewhere. It is not clear to me what the US is doing to stay competitive. Sure, we have top tier universities, but below this level, I think we are getting beat.

If - in America - we stopped bringing in millions of poor and uneducated young working age people every year - legally and illegally - wages would rise. This is common sense and supported by research [0].

[0]: https://cis.org/Report/Wages-Immigration

We could achieve 100% unemployment by putting anyone without a job in work camps. Living with a bunch of friends who are still struggling, everyone is aware that opportunity isn’t easy even in this “ideal” conditions. And frankly the number of employers who will abuse the hell out of you is somewhere around 30-60%.

If we really wanted to put more money in people's pockets and have a more progressive tax code we should, at the very least, start chipping away at taxing incomes. A good start would be to make any cost of necessities (shelter, food, healthcare, transportation) should be tax deductible.

Why not just get rid of the income tax and only have sales tax? We could make exceptions for basic food and shelter.

Agreed. "Job quality" / Wages versus cost of living should also be taken into account.

I'm really glad that we have a presidential candidate (Yang) sophisticated enough to run on UBI. I've never voted before but I finally have hope that the government might make structural adjustments to the changing realities of our world.

Maybe aggregate salary would be a much better measure than unemployment

"Unemployment" is the result of a lack of entrepreneurs, don't drive them out of your neighbourhood.

I would love to see tech pivot away from being an industry that is 100% about tracking & advertising more and more every year and towards something, anything that was an actual real new product or service.

We used to take it for granted that tech was the industry of innovation and progress, but there seems to be very little of that any more. Just a few more ads on the page.

...username checks out...

I'm hoping/wondering if 2020 will be the year there's some sort of real cultural shift in how this is all viewed. We already know about all the research pointing to social media making people generally less happy, but a huge part of the internet/tech economy is just ads and services that... bluntly, don't really add much to the world. And a ton of capital and human effort is going into that.

I had a moment of excitement when Google announced their practical quantum computing breakthrough, then I instantly realized it meant they will just find a way to track me at a quantum level and anticipate my consumer targeting brand preferences 10000x more quickly or something equally as awful.

Not so exciting after all.

> Federal, state, and local governments can take a number of steps to improve workers’ economic security.

Amazed how all these articles gloss over or totally ignore what workers themselves can do to better their situation

> These statistics tell an important story: Millions of hardworking American adults struggle to eke out a living and support their families on very low wages.

>What should be done?

By who?

Fighting against unemployment means you are creating unnecessary jobs. It's creating an army of disposable, obedient, consenting slaves.

Think about fast food and the damage it's doing. All this money, metals and resources and all those people could be paid to deliver better healthcare, educate people, etc while people could just prepare their own food instead.

I can't count the times I was called either a communist, a moocher, a parasite, an euro-something, etc I'm so jaded from this subject. Sometimes I'm scared that the government might try and find new tricks or excuse to not give me welfare, because I'm certain the public opinion would not have any trouble in seeing me homeless.

Misguided economic policies stem from some form of cultural, subjective ideology. I still have to be convinced why it's the government's role to push people to go back to work, instead of just giving them the bare minimum so they can eat and find shelter. The amount of money you need for welfare is ridiculously low compared to the advantage it allows. We're just scared of moochers and people having free time.

And even if I'm wrong, it's not like governments will force people to work or continue to let large-scale homelessness happen. The idea of everyone-for-himself is completely the opposite of our species: we're a social society, and civilization needs to help everyone because it's in the interest of all countries. Until we're able to question the "we need workers for civilization to function" meme, nothing will improve.

I cannot count how many times I rant about this. I can already hear the pedantic, rational people explaining how I'm stealing their taxes.

we have a problem world wide

When US Fed pours money in to unwind mortgage positions over a 30 year period(fall 2008 till fall 2038) barriers arise for job movement in form of high costs of rent or homeownership.

Its not going away and its going to get worse.

I tend to think work gives some sense of purpose to a person’s life. That’s incalculably valuable.

This was why when Argentina swapped out a job guarantee (plan jefes) with a UBI-type program, many of the women who did the job guarantee jobs of caring for the elderly, etc. kept doing the work in spite of the government telling them it wasn't "necessary" any more.

While it's theoretically possible that they might have spontaneously started doing these jobs if a UBI program had been initiated I'm not aware of any example where this has happened.

Yes. Many types of extremely valuable work in our society is not valued by the market and so is not compensated.

Caring for the elderly, caring for children, my elderly neighbour who sometimes picks up trash on the street, etc.

There are all kinds of crucial work our society desperately needs done, but which are often not even conceptualized as work because there's no wage attached to it.

Also, commercialization can create fake economic growth.

For example, suppose in the past one spouse worked a job for a wage/salary and the other spouse cared for some of the couple's ailing parents, provided childcare, and cooked for the couple's children and parents. Now instead, the second spouse also works a wage job, both spouses pay higher taxes some of which go to caring for the old people, and with the extra income they instead purchase prepared food and pay for daycare. The economy grew a lot because formally unpaid labor is now being paid for, but is everyone better off?

Note: I don't think women should be limited to being homemakers, this is just an example.

That's mostly the work that you want to do. The work you must do when being forced by economic factors, especially the extra job one might take in order to make ends meet, gives a sense of dread to a person's life. We can talk about a sense of purpose when people are more-or-less financially stable (at least nothing threatening their first level in Maslow's pyramid) and they get to pick whatever they get to work on. But when you're one step away from homelessness, the sense of purpose and the value derived from that takes the backseat.

If you like your job that's a very useful benefit.

If you don't like your job and you don't think it's actually worthwhile it serves as a reminder that you're wasting your potential, and that can be incredibly detrimental.

You can hate your job and still see that it serves an important purpose.

You can also hate your job and see that it serves no purpose, or worse that you are doing harm (like working collections for predatory lenders or in a factory that churns out bombs that will be dropped on someone).

You can even love your job and see that it serves no purpose!

The low unemployment rate is proof that this techno optimism isn’t true.

Or, perhaps, has society failed to adapt to present technological reality due to entrenched interest in the social status quo? When so many people in the world live happily on so little, it is undeniable that we could provide for all of our basic needs if there were political will. Without education, that would likely result in a population boom, however.

I mean yes, we could all live like people do in Bangladesh and reduce the work force dramatically. I fail to see how this would be desirable.

You present a false (and somewhat offensive) dichotomy.

Here are some more optimistic ideas. If we reconsidered vehicles, everyone could have access to them when desired. If we reconsidered city layouts, everyone could have a home with desired proximity to others without needing to sacrifice either nature or privacy. If we reconsidered education, medical care and communications infrastructure, they would be universally available and effectively free (indeed, in many places these are already the case). If we reconsidered politics, we could encourage global industry toward environmentally sustainable outcomes without irreversible disaster.

These are very optimistic ideas. But good ideas are actionable. Do you have any of those?

Sure. Wikiprojects (admin), cryptocurrency (exchange architect), open source (contributor/maintainer), currently working on kiosk format automated fulfillment of personalized meals directly from fresh ingredients (as an entrepreneur with my own money on the line) to contribute to food safety/security challenges (and hopefully recover costs). What about you?

These ideas are beyond delusional (in today's world).

> everyone could have access to [vehicles] when desired

Uber is trying to do this, but has a lot of problems, from unpredictable pricing, surge pricing, long wait times, shitty drivers, chatty drivers (?), seats with puke all over them, ... self-driving cars could solve some, but not all of these problems.

> everyone could have a home with desired proximity to others

No, the reason real estate in e.g. NYC is so expensive is that everybody wants to live there! The only way to fix this is to fundamentally decentralize our economy and education systems, but that's a whole lot more complicated than "city layouts".

> [education, medical care and communications infrastructure] would be universally available and effectively free

Maybe education and communications, but with medical care almost certainly not... The main issue is that medicine doesn't save people's lives, it just prolongs them, and that can always be done better... So fundamentally, the demand for medicine is unlimited, whereas the supply (doctors) is limited, so whatever system of "free and universally available" system you design, there's going to be tradeoffs. Tradeoffs like, "do I fix my teeth or my eyes" and someone is going to have to make that choice. Personally, I'd prefer that to be me (with my money) rather than my government.

It is true, perfection shall remain elusive. You can't please all of the people all of the time. That said, more equitable systems with far higher qualities in terms of environmental impact, resource consumption and sustainability, as well as fundamental service availability are clearly within reach.

You raise a particularly good point about the overall properties of systems for mass medical care, but people don't live forever. Cancer is one answer. Solutions that reduce or delay post-facto treatment with holistic and pre-emptive approaches (better regulation, better education, better diets/life choices) may be another.

The one war america fought but never bothered winning. The war on Poverty.

I so hate the phrase "war on poverty." It tends to de facto turn poor people into The Enemy in the mind's of far too many people.

That would be another way of lowering the percentage of people living in poverty.

Yes, please, just take us all out and shoot us for our war crimes of failing to be as wildly successful as we would like to be.

(Please don't tell me this needs a sarcasm tag. If you can't tell in this case, then I think it's utterly hopeless.)

Because that is not a war and there is no win, poverty is a moving target and it will always be, unless forced equality is imposed to everybody.

LBJ and the Great Society won the war on poverty in America.

https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1205596833692565504

"The economists find that by the standards of LBJ's time, the U.S. poverty rate has dropped from 19.5 % in 1963 to just 2.3% in 2017!!"

If that's not winning, I don't know what is.

That's the beauty (to some) and problem (to others) with the definition of poverty: we keep moving the goalposts/standards.

But the thing is if the markets really couldn't find any value in the output of nearly everyone, we shouldn't see this high percentage of employment -- not unless one also believes that employers in a decentralised way are implementing their own informal UBI, perhaps out of consensus on political theory or moral values.

One might say a simpler explanation is that employee output is still interesting, and that what's interesting isn't just technological output, and that the bulk of interesting technological work isn't about advancement but delivery to the world.

Most companies operate within a market, but don’t, themselves, operate like a market (internally). Have you really not heard any duck and cover stories from corporate America? It absolutely is easy for incompetent people to remain employed. Talented people tend to job hop to realize their increased utility (not always, but mostly), while incompetence gets promoted at the 50% of companies that cannot compete in the labor market.

Also not to forget a middle manager may want the feeling of power, which they could derive from having more people below them.

Humans aren't rational.

Huh? No it’s not. He is exactly right that we’ve invented a lot of “bullshit jobs” that don’t add anything of value to society and would not change anything if they were gone tomorrow e.g. How many jobs out there just prop up rent seeking?

The whole idea of “bullshit jobs” is ignorant. You’ve got armies of managers and bean counters trying to squeeze nickels out of processes, and yet we are supposed to believe that we’re keeping all of these people employed for no reason?

It’s the same sort of juvenile thinking that causes someone to look at a vast legacy codebase and decide “oh we could easily rewrite that.” The reality is that automation is progressing as fast as technology allows, but technology just doesn’t work that well. In fast food, for example, self-order touch screens are vastly inferior to a trained order taker. There are no machines to roll a burrito. There’s no machines to wipe tables, clean bathrooms, clean the kitchen, or even take drive through orders. We don’t, get, have automated ubers, taxis, freight trucks, etc. Grocery checkout automation is atrocious, which is why higher end chains like Whole Foods don’t have them, even though they’re better able to afford automation.

There’s not a single job I can think of that qualifies as a “bullshit job.”

I’m not talking about service jobs. I wouldn’t consider service workers to be rent seekers at all. I’m actually referring to mostly white collar ones, a lot of administration jobs, finance, government, etc

These jobs may be bullshit in the feelings they induce in people performing them, or the meaning those people give their jobs, but they are probably not bullshit in the utility they have for the organizations that pay for them.

Could be but I am not so sure. There is something I've seen in at least 10 organisations I worked for: middle managers are afraid their budgets will be reduced if they fire someone and never re-hire the position, so they actively go out of their way to think of a very niche and, yes, bullshitty, activity for them to do.

Seen it happen many times and it made me cynical about the whole "there are no bullshit jobs" meme. IMO there are BS jobs, quite a few of them too.

In my job I see that the managers are focused on automation to cut lower status jobs but I never see them questioning whether anyone in the huge hierarchy of managers is necessary. I think this is because if they question other managers, their own job might be called into question as well. Also, managers tend to think that managing is an important job.

It is indeed a vicious cycle.

I do not doubt that there must be some jobs that are bullshit, I might also assume some companies have more than others because those companies are broken in some way, or perhaps so profitable in some specific divisions that they can afford to have plenty of bullshit around and not even notice it. Finally it might be that some jobs are bullshit part of the time and other parts of the time really important.

But I doubt the distribution can be so high as people are always insinuating in these bullshit jobs subthreads.

Given the desire to always cut the useless non-profit parts of a business there will always be some pressure to find and eliminate bullshit, even as there may be some countervailing pressures to create bullshit. I think though that the feedback loops of capitalism are such that if you end up with too much bullshit at a company over time there would have to be a correction, leading either to the elimination of most of the bullshit or the downfall of the company.

If one believes most jobs or a great proportion of them are bullshit then that person should refrain from complaining about MBAs and their cost cutting measures getting rid of jobs - because probably those jobs were the bullshit ones.

(on edit - assuming bullshit jobs are a disease of the employment place I think for the sake of analogy the percentage should be the same as the flu, so 5 to 20 percent in a company, if a company has 20% or more bullshit jobs that company has an epidemic on its hands and needs to do something. If it's 5% ah, that you can live with.)

All of what you said is correct. That being said, the natural process of trying hard to eliminate BS or die is taking way too long. People just like being cozy -- the BS job employees, the managers, the bosses who like the quarterly graphs, everyone.

It's a process that is going at a glacial pace pretty much everywhere, sadly.

Like my recent job as a software tester at state govt. honestly, I swear I got more positive reviews when I didn’t do shit. There was a dearth of meaning since I knew we could all be more trained, systematic and use more auto, less manual. Our testing was not even usually that good. Even mine, though I was among the better; we just checked off the “passed testing” box but didn’t add much value.

> I’m not talking about service jobs.

This thread is about low wage workers.

> I’m actually referring to mostly white collar ones, a lot of administration jobs, finance, government, etc

Why, because you don’t understand what they do? Imagine explaining to those people that Google has “engineers” who just maintain the source repository. I bet they’d think it was a “bullshit job.”

The whole book "bullshit jobs" which is what people are talking about here is talking about useless white collar labor, not service jobs so I'm not sure why you think that that is what's being discussed.

The book "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber defines five types of jobs, two of which are "goons" and "box tickers". Goons include hired people who lobby aggressively on behalf of their employer: lobbyists, corporate lawyers, PR specialists. Box tickers are those who use paperwork and process to appear to be busy, even though the real useful work would continue without their intervention.

It's no secret that the top-5 tech firms hire large numbers of lobbyists and corporate lawyers [1].

And I don't think it is a stretch to say that some well-paid engineering positions include work such as maintaining built-in-house duplicates of open source software, or enforcing arbitrary coding standards, that could be considered "box ticking". Present company excluded, of course.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/us/politics/amazon-apple-...

David Graeber is an anthropologist. He apparently did a PhD thesis on "magic, slavery, and politics." What qualifies him to talk about the economy and the function of various jobs? I mean, hell, he's an anthropology professor declaring other jobs to be "bullshit." (But I won't go so far as to say "anthropology professor" is a bullshit job, because I'm self aware enough to realize that I probably just don't understand what economic function they perform.)

Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else. That's the whole premise of the book. Anthropologists however are trained to listen to what people say about their own lives and understandings of it and that's what I did - a bullshit job is defined as one which the person doing the job believes doesn't have to, or shouldn't, exist.

>>Why, because you don’t understand what they do?

I was a business analyst at my previous job. My core function was to gain a deep understanding of what the various people in an organization did, where the input for their work came from and where the output went, and why.

Here's an example that actually embodies an extremely common scenario:

I worked with a customer whose clients filled out and submitted online forms at the customer's website. They had a clerk who would, once per hour, print all the forms that had been submitted, then take that stack of paper and place it on an unoccupied desk in a room on the other side of the building. She would then walk back to her own desk and twiddle her thumbs for the remainder of the hour.

After a lot of interviews and digging, I found out the reason for this bizarre process: the unoccupied desk on the other side of the building used to be occupied by another clerk, whose job was to sort the forms based on their destination department, then walk to them to those departments. She would then come back to her desk and twiddle her thumbs for the remainder of the hour.

Here's the thing though: she had retired 5 years ago. The stacks of paper that were being piled on her now unoccupied desk were simply shredded regularly by a third clerk about once a week, and it took that clerk four hours to shred everything because she was required to keep an Excel spreadsheet of how many of each form was being shredded. That Excel spreadsheet was then saved to a network drive, where it wasn't accessed by any user, ever.

You might be thinking, "wow, that's pretty crazy, but stuff like that is probably pretty rare." You would be very wrong. I charted out insane processes like this for ten years. Every company has boatloads of them. Bullshit jobs are not only invented, but they are also retained long after they are made redundant and completely unnecessary.

So instead of just eliminating the 2 bullshit jobs, they created another one (yours) to analyze the situation...

A.k.a. management & coordination is a hard problem.

I should have clarified: they hired my company to find out these types of problems. I was assigned to the project. After we gave the final presentation, they eliminated the redundant positions I mentioned (along with a host of others across the enterprise) and saved a boatload of money.

You're describing a different thing. The economy undoubtedly has many jobs that are, in certain specific instances, unnecessary. That's just an uninteresting observation that the economy isn't perfectly efficient. That's different than the concept of "bullshit job," which is more about jobs that are *categorically unnecessary," because, for example, they could be automated away.

I love this anecdote. This is some Office Space stuff.

What were the people receiving the forms from the retired person were doing with them ?

I think each one of us has a different idea what a "bullshit job" is. My favorite definition is this:

> When it comes to garbage collectors, though, it’s different. Any way you look at it, they do a job we can’t do without. And the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without. Were they to suddenly stop working the world wouldn’t get any poorer, uglier, or in any way worse. Take the slick Wall Street traders who line their pockets at the expense of another retirement fund. Take the shrewd lawyers who can draw a corporate lawsuit out until the end of days. Or take the brilliant ad writer who pens the slogan of the year and puts the competition right out of business.

> Instead of creating wealth, these jobs mostly just shift it around.

(the article itself[0] tells about how banks in Ireland went on strike for 6 months, but the strike was shrugged off as there was no impact)

[0]: https://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-...

> In fast food, for example, self-order touch screens are vastly inferior to a trained order taker.

In my experience, once you get used to the interface, it's actually faster to just use the touchscreen to place the order.

> There’s not a single job I can think of that qualifies as a “bullshit job.”

Any job that involves taking a handwritten form which then is processed or oral instructions could be eliminated by providing an interface for the person to input the data directly without having to go through the middle person.

You provided the value of false cover to management.

Yes. It is much, much faster...until you get behind someone who: Never used it before; Has no idea what they want to eat; Wants to check the prices on all the sides; Is waiting for their friends to send them a weChat message with their order also so they don't have to wait; The machine can't print the ticket; The machine crashes after taking payment; The person in front of you has friends show up and they start going back through all of the options.

I love it if it isn't during "rush hour," but some people take a long time to make up their minds when given a plethora of options. And then I seek out a counter person as they will just help the next person if someone hasn't made up their mind yet.

> In my experience, once you get used to the interface, it's actually faster to just use the touchscreen to place the order.

Right, but in general, people don't. Sure, there are some people who will go to the same fast food place every day, and after a week will be able to input their order blindfolded, but that's not the norm.

The people who get used to the interface and end up incredibly efficient are the paid cashiers who input hundreds of orders for 8 hours each day.

> Grocery checkout automation is atrocious, which is why higher end chains like Whole Foods don’t have them, even though they’re better able to afford automation.

No, Costco for example I expect to not have automation because I'm bulk buying and don't want to deal with trying to fit all that on their weight scale for self checkout.

Also, Whole Foods doesn't SKU on all their produce products which makes this a pain for anyone trying to use self checkout.

Stores here in Canada like Loblaws, Metro, IGA, etc are rolling out self checkout. Thank goodness, I don't want to talk to people, asked if I'll donate $1 to something, etc.

Today, I went through Walmart cash checkout because I was buying 7 storage bins for a move. The entire thought process why I didn't go through self checkout:

- Don't have handheld bar scanner

- Someone probably going to stop me because they'll think I've put something inside of bins.

- There's almost no space on the self checkout to actually do large purchases.

People want convenient experiences. I saw older generations +65 starting to use self checkouts at grocery chains.

Spend time watching behavior. Same repeat that happened when McDonald's kiosks rolled out. Now, people get pissed when other people go to use the cash because it pulls someone off the line to deal with someone not using mobile order or the kiosk.

Walmart has security at the door. However you pay will not change if they will ask you for your bill. Things like eye-contact encourage that.

Walmart also has a loss prevention arm.

> The whole idea of “bullshit jobs” is ignorant. You’ve got armies of managers and bean counters trying to squeeze nickels out of processes, and yet we are supposed to believe that we’re keeping all of these people employed for no reason?

Yes, at least in a sense. Coordination failures are a thing. (See e.g. https://equilibriabook.com/toc/ for a readable introduction to the issue.)

Author of this book has never held an actual job, FWIW. He is smart, and a good writer, but I'd take his opinions about how business world works with a huge lump of salt.

> You’ve got armies of managers and bean counters trying to squeeze nickels out of processes

Unfortunately the processes they are squeezing often involve budgets and salaries, like those of factory workers, teachers and nurses. Its a bit hard to sympathise with this kind of 'value' sometimes.

> In fast food, for example, self-order touch screens are vastly inferior to a trained order taker > Grocery checkout automation is atrocious

I don't kniw about elsewhere but in NZ and Japan I'll pick self check out every time it's there. Its a bit sad on the human side of things but it is easier

If you ever have worked at a failed startup than you had a “bullshit” job. Bullshit jobs aren’t all bad, they are necessary hypotheses in the productivity market. The problem with them comes when institutions invert their competency hierarchy (this can happen shockingly fast, just ask an ex-Yahoo employee) and lose their ability to excise the bullshit. Bullshit jobs easily become institutionalized. It is all about managing risk. By the time an organization has a bunch of bullshit jobs the people that could tell management who is who are all long gone.

No it's not. Low unemployment is a result of a system that forces people into employment to make a living (not to mention how skewed the statistics are when they consider part-time workers seeking full-time opportunities as "employed" and exclude disparaged workers).

The efficiency (output per hours of input) of the economy has stagnated because manual labor has become so cheap that automation isn’t worth it.

> The low unemployment rate is proof that this techno optimism isn’t true.

An observation that was already obvious in the 19th century:

"The extraordinary productiveness of modern industry… allows of the unproductive employment of a larger and larger part of the working-class, and the consequent reproduction, on a constantly extending scale, of the ancient domestic slaves under the name of a servant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys, etc. [footnote: Between 1861 and 1870 the number of male servants nearly doubled itself. It increased to 267,671. In the year 1847 there were 2,694 gamekeepers (for the landlords' preserves), in 1869 there were 4,921.]"

Chapter 15 of volume 1 of Marx's Capital. Today the servants are delivery people, Uber drivers, personal chefs and assistants, maid services, etc.

You can't disprove the idea of "make work jobs are not necessary" by citing that a lot of people have jobs

Not at all, a lot of the work being done is probably having a minimal or, even negative, impact upon the overall economy. Labor productivity is low, because the Pareto distribution of productivity across individuals is at historically staggering proportions right now.

I think it proves -- or at least suggests -- the opposite of what you think. If we have low unemployment, but a lot of low-end jobs don't pay a living wage and people have to work multiple jobs at greater than 40 hours per week to make ends meet, that points to the work being so low-value that maybe it just doesn't need to be done, or that we'd be better served automating it.

The logical extreme in the opposite direction -- that our technology gets to the point where everything is automated and no one needs to do any kind of work -- suggests that we should be moving toward some form of universal basic income that provides for everyone's survival needs. People who want more than that can become skilled enough to do worthwhile jobs that provide meaningful income.

Obviously this won't be a panacea, and human nature will cause some people to be exploited while others are enriched, but this idea that life's purpose and meaning is just work work work work work is sad and nonsensical.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027960.

America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada. The difference is the US, you basically need a job, or else you're one broken ankle, complex childbirth, or infected hangnail away from complete financial ruin. People being able to take extra time to find the right job is a good thing for the economy. Better than being driven by an abject fear of not having a job.

I don't think it's terribly strange to view lower unemployment numbers as something to strive for. The idea that I might not need a job (when I haven't accumulated the resources to support myself without one) is totally foreign to me, and not attractive at all.

I grew tremendously as a person working jobs I didn't enjoy. I only work on what I want to now, and I couldn't imagine I'd be very satisfied with my life I didn't navigate to this position through hard work.

Do you think it's possible to work hard at something you enjoy?

It is possible, but it is also quite rare, and usually happens for higly paid, white collar jobs. I'm yet to meet, say, trash pickup guy that enjoys his job.

EDIT: to clarify - it's not that I look down on any jobs. Trash pickup is very much needed profession. What I'm saying is: Let's say person wins a lottery and suddenly has all the money they need for the rest of their lives. I can imagine that many software developers will still continue to program, writers or musicians would continue writing novels or songs, but I'm pretty sure noone would voluntarily continue their trash pickup work.

I know plenty of tradespeople who enjoy their work and find value and some fulfillment in what they do.

Do they love it like I love programming? Maybe; maybe not, but it seems possible.

True but tradespeople !== trash man or inkjet-printer factory worker (similar to example from an above post).

My primary point was that these were not highly-paid, white collar jobs.

It's also possible that people with jobs you are judgy about won't tell you they actually like the work that you look down upon. This is one of the ways prejudice is self reinforcing.

People tend to frame things selectively in response to the audience in question. People in vulnerable positions are usually aware of it and acting to protect themselves.

There are jobs that you don't enjoy but that will help you achieve a better future. Then there are jobs that do nothing but provide a temporary stop gap from financial ruin.

The idea isn't that you don't need a job, the idea is that you are less dependent on finding a job right away so that you can find a good fit between your skills and your goals and your job. This not only will lead to a better life for you, but more overall economic productivity.

If working a job will prevent financial ruin, then it's a good job. No job has to be permanent.

There's no reason people should have to suffer "busy work" while they're looking for some place to be truly productive, just to assuage the grievances of Puritan work ethic folk.

"Any job" doesn't help people find stable work as well as training and a safety net do. SOME jobs provide this, but forcing people into jobs that don't is counterproductive. This is a common misunderstanding people have.

What if the job has terrible safety conditions and a high injury rate. Is it still good? I’m not arguing that it doesn’t provide some value if it staves off financial ruin, but, the world is composed of more than only “good” and “bad”. If it wasn’t things would be so simple that sites like HN would not exist.

> If working a job will prevent financial ruin, then it's a good job. No job has to be permanent.

That seems to be the definition of an acceptable job.

To me a good job is one which you wouldn't mind doing every day for the rest of your life. The occupation needs to actually be desirable in the long run, and a decent paycheck does not fit the bill.

I've been noticing things like this and I wish I could come up with a good name for it. It's about noticing how the scale has slid up quite a bit in just a generation or two. The "American Dream" used to be something a 1200 sq ft house in the burbs with a white picket fence in a clean/safe neighborhood. Just a couple generations ago that was the dream that most Americans worked towards. Now when people talk about the American Dream they talk about Gates, Musk, Kardashians, etc. Of course many people still live in unsafe neighborhoods, but things have gotten so relatively good for so many people that now the scale has slid up and the dream is to become millionaires/billionaires. I think you are presenting a similar thing with your concept of acceptable jobs. During the Great Depression a GREAT job was working for the CCC digging up the bowels of the Earth for $1/day, most of which you sent home to feed your family who was on the brink of death. And there was no "health insurance." If a boulder fell on you and crushed your legs, your family just starved. Another poster parallel to you brought up, "What if your job isn't safe?" Imagine that notion just a few generations ago. Now, just a couple of generations later a job that prevents financial ruin is merely "acceptable." And I agree with you in that depiction. It's amazing how far we've come.

Would you prefer a system which teaches you in let's say a high quality education system?

If yes: imagine a world where more people are willing to do other jobs more social because money becomes less relevant.

note: this is an "old man yelling at clouds" post. I hope readers can consume it in a way that they find valuable to their current perspectives.

I have experiences with many jobs that were not enjoyable. By "not enjoyable", I don't only mean they were dull office jobs. I had a lot of jobs in my early twenties, often through temp agencies but not always: working in warehouses, working as a manual laborer in large institutional buildings (moving furniture etc), two different jobs working on factory assembly lines, working in old office buildings to pull network cable through ceilings and floors, working on receiving docks, etc. Well over ten or fifteen jobs, as they tended to last for a summer, or a few months or weeks. As someone with computer skills and ultimately a pretty promising career ahead of me, I always had the sense in these temp jobs that they were just that, "temporary". However, most everyone I worked with in these roles were not there as temps, they were the people for whom life had worked out such that these kinds of jobs were close to the best they were going to get. There is no amount of "hard work" that someone in these roles can apply to move to a new station in life, there are too many strikes against them: educational, cognitive/developmental, health-wise, criminal backgrounds, etc. that make it extremely unlikely they would ever have much better of a station in life. And like me, all of these people were entirely aware of this element of who they were; they were the "lifers".

One of the worst jobs I had which I could only handle for about two weeks was working in a factory that manufactured rolls of ink ribbon for line printers and typewriters. My job was to be handed a large metal bar called the "spindle" onto which I would pull out 30 or so rolls, stick all the rolls onto the spindle with spacers in between them, then hand them off to this other woman who had whatever minor skill was required to put this spindle into the machine that would roll the ink ribbon onto them. You do this in a dark and smelly factory for 8 hours a day. This job was for me, a valuable experience, as I can look back on it with all the perspective offered by doing that kind of job. But for all the other folks working in that place including the woman who I handed the spindle off towards, that was it for them. They were all at most high school grad or less, they were people for whom there were no opportunities. The job paid minimum wage. They were "lifers". These people are counted as part of "the employed". But they live paycheck to paycheck with minimal benefits or health care, in a dangerous and unhealthy environment, low life expectancy, poor nutrition, all of it. I don't consider low employment numbers to be very interesting when one notes how miserable life is for so many of the "employed".

Your hypothesis does not hold up to the data. The unemployed in Canada experience the same penalty in life satisfaction as the unemployed in the United States:

> On average, the unemployed experience lower life satisfaction than the employed by about 0.3 standard deviations in Canada and the United States, by 0.32 standard deviations in the United Kingdom and by 0.47 standard deviations in Germany.[1]

Your claims relies on the assumption that unemployment in Canada is more tolerable than unemployment in the US. Yet large-scale surveys do not reflect that for the average jobseeker.

Therefore we can conclude that higher unemployment in Canada vis-a-vis the US is almost certainly driven by a lower supply of jobs, rather than as you posit a lower demand for employment. The same also holds true for the major Western European economies surveyed.

[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11f0019m/11f0019m2018408...

Health care is not tied to employment in Canada, for one.

Heath insurance is a benefit offered by some US employers as an alternative form of compensation. Employers get discounted rates because of how many customers they bring to the insurer and they pocket some of those savings while passing the rest on to the employees.

You can get health insurance without having a job. It's expensive, but it's not like it's cheap through employers. Just cheaper.

Health care - at least, treatment for life-threatening emergencies - is a right protected by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act in the US.

Try getting healthcare in the US without health insurance, and try affording health insurance when you don't have good enough work. Yeah... thought so.

You edited your post to add a line about emergency healthcare being a legal obligation of hospitals - we both know that emergency healthcare (i.e. "I am literally dying right this second") is not the total of necessary healthcare for many people. I invite you to try surviving very long as a diabetic when the only treatment option is to go to A&E when you are literally dying.

I understand your point but you’re also attempting to portray that low income folks have no chance at obtaining health insurance. Thankfully Medicare and Medicaid coverage gives health insurance to millions of people. 63 million to be exact were enrolled through some form of Medicaid in October 2019 (Center for Medicare, 2019)[1]. Another 10 million or so people are eligible for Medicare (prior to age 65) due to a disability.

[1] https://www.medicaid.gov/medicaid/program-information/medica...

The problem is there's a gap between having low enough income (and being able to jump through enough hoops) to qualify for Medicaid and having a good enough job to be able to afford adequate health insurance to receive healthcare in anything but an emergency.

> Try getting healthcare in the US without health insurance, and try affording health insurance when you don't have good enough work.

I'm not offering an opinion here. I just think the distinction between health care and insurance is important.

The original post I was responding to implies to some that you need a job to receive treatment. It also conversely implies that having a job means you can get treatment. I've actually talked to people outside the US who think that because of how our discussions are often worded.

> You edited your post to add a line about emergency healthcare being a legal obligation of hospitals

I'm sorry. I often think of things to add to my post right after submitting. I was editing it before I saw your response.

> we both know that emergency healthcare (i.e. "I am literally dying right this second") is not the total of necessary healthcare for many people.

I agree, which is why I specified that the right only extends to life-threatening emergencies.

Emergency care means they stabilize you so you won’t die right away and then kick you out. Many of the things that you will die from will never even qualify for it, e.g. treatment for cancer. You need money, insurance, or real charity to get care for that.

If you're not offering an opinion through the kind of hair-splitting that elides the immediate and generally permanently life-wrecking consequences of not having health insurance, then that hair-splitting serves very little purpose. On the other hand, if your opinion is that the status quo is acceptable, it allows you to rhetorically minimize those consequences because, hey, at least they're not dead, even if the best way out of that debt can seem to be suicide[0].

If you believe that, you've bilged a test of basic humanity. If you don't, perhaps re-think what drives your well-actuallies in the future?

[0] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elderly-couple-found-dead-in-ap...

I gave a reason for my "splitting hairs" and you conveniently ignored it.

Stop projecting opinions that are not mine onto my post. I believe the health care and insurance industries in the US is broken and does not adequately serve a huge portion of citizens with low incomes. I have never suggested the current system is okay.

If your opinion is reliant on misinformation, you should reevaluate it. Otherwise, you should not be concerned with someone like me "splitting hairs".

In the US, the distinction between having health insurance and being able to receive necessary healthcare is not a huge distinction. Fairly sure you know this.

I would consider a distinction between financial ruin and death to be fairly significant. That doesn't mean I think a system that so frequently results in financial ruin is acceptable.

My intention is not to say "you're just broke, you're not dead". Quite the opposite. My intention is to say that health care access is not limited by whether you have a job - it's whether you have money. Plenty of people have money but no job and even more have jobs but no money.

Emergency healthcare prevents some causes of death - generally, those which can be fixed in an ER and allow the person to continue living a mostly normal life after. Take the example of a diabetic person, or a suicidally depressed person, as counter-examples which cannot be fixed in an A&E environment and will lead to death.

You can't get treatment for life-threatening "conditions". You can only get treatment for life-threatening "emergencies". You got a tumor? Good fucking luck. You got a seizure because of your tumor? Come on in and we'll make sure to send you an absurd bill later.

I was trying to find a word that covered "illness" and "injury", but you're right. I've edited my post with the fix.

I know multiple poor people that had their cancers cured without cost to themselves, no "emergency" required. The reality isn't as bleak as you are making it.

The US has the highest cancer survival rate in the world, which would not be possible if poorer populations were not having their cancers proactively treated.

On the one hand, good for them and it would be nice if you elucidated whatever you know about how they pulled this off.

On the other hand, it's basically dismissive of a very real problem here. I read a lot about homelessness. I've seen far too many people indicate they are homeless in part because they have cancer and it's ruining them financially.

America is hardly some utopia where we take wonderful care of all our people, regardless of ability to pay.

General surgeon in the South here. What I've seen is that uninsured individuals will prolong going to the doctor for symptoms because of cost and that sometimes costs them their lives because of the advanced presentation of their disease. On the other hand, once you get diagnosed with cancer in South Carolina, you automatically qualify for Medicaid so that you receive some treatment.

This way, you die with treatment and our system does not seem cruel. Even advanced, expensive chemotherapy is paid for, sometimes exceeding hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Affordable Care Act provides subsidies for health insurance based on income, not assets. If you're diagnosed with cancer and lose your job (because chemo is tough), and have assets, pay the Cobra until next sign up period. Sell all assets and invest to make about $20-$30k a year. Your premiums will be low and you'll have access to quality care. Move near large academic institutions because they do medicaid / bad insurance care. This way you minimally touch assets.

Rich people hate the Affordable Care Act because they don't get subsidies on premiums, which are about $3500 / month for a family now, and they have to pay 4.8% Medicare tax on all income over $250k . So, in essence, someone that makes $1m a year pays $78k/year in health care costs.

Lastly, I take care of a Pizza Hut delivery person who gets his insurance through the Affordable Care Act and only pays $40 / month for it, because of the subsidies.

Thank you.

Just for clarity's sake:

Medicare is a health insurance program for all citizens of U.S. whereas Medicaid is health coverage for low income group and people with disabilities.

Medicare is federal-supported program and Medicaid is a joint program by the state and the federal government. As such the eligibility and coverage for Medicaid vary from state to state.

https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-medicar...

> The US has the highest cancer survival rate in the world

The US isn’t bad in that respect, but according to Wikipedia, this statement isn’t even true for the subset of countries on their list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality...

That only looks at three cancers. The oncology literature tracks survival rates across all cancer incidence, in which the US consistently comes out on top. Only a few other countries, such as Switzerland, are close.

It is attributable almost entirely to more aggressive (and expensive) diagnostics combined with many new cancer therapies being available in the US years before they trickle down to the rest of the world.

> The US has the highest cancer survival rate in the world

No it doesn't.

But even if it was true (and it isn't) you should also specify which type of cancer.

No country gets every type of cancer better than any other.

For example if we consider stomach cancer, South Korea is on top with 57.90% survival rate, USA is 30 points lower at 29.10%

> which would not be possible if poorer populations were not having their cancers proactively treated

It wouldn't also be possible if rich people couldn't get the same treatments other countries have developed by traveling abroad or having them for cheap in Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela.

But to put it in another way: take breast cancer, where USA leads the charts with 88.87% survival rate.

According to the sources "About 1 in 8 U.S. women (about 12%) will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime."

In Italy, where I come from, we measure breast cancer as patients over 100,000 women, not in %.

"Breast cancer is the leading tumor among women in Italy ... The incidence per age group was estimated to exceed 100 new cases every 100,000 women ≥ 40 years of age"

100 over 100,000 is one in a thousands or 0,1%, which is 120 times better than U.S. 12%.

It means that every 120 women that develop breast cancer in USA there is only one Italian woman in the same condition.

That's what really an universal health care system make possible: to not develop the diseases.

You are cherrypicking, and conflating incidence (demographics) with survival rates (medical outcomes). The survival rate across all cancers in the US is around 70%. In the UK (since I work there and have the number handy), it is around 55%, which is a significant improvement for the UK in recent years.

Cancer incidence rates are primarily the product of genetics and environment, which is why it varies across countries. It has little to do with access to healthcare. Stanford hospital has given state-of-the-art treatment for both liver and stomach cancer for free to poor members of my family.

> Cancer incidence rates are primarily the product of genetics and environment

I'm sorry, but that's not how it works.

For example only 1 in 4 breast cancers are attributed globally to risk factors (i.e genetics or environment)? [1]

Since you're bringing it up, I know a things or two about cancer, my father worked in health care, in pulmonary oncology, my mother worked in health care too, in infective diseases, most of my family is tied to Italian public health care, my aunts and uncles worked for it, our family best friends worked there, one of their children and one of my best friends is now a geneticist and is researching rare disease (some types of cancers among the others).

If it was simply about environment and genetics, looking at the numbers, one would assume that in Africa or India they have a very resilient genetic pool and the best environment in the World and in USA they've got some serious problem [2] [3].

Of course that's not the entire story, in those places people don't develop cancer because they die for many other (curable) diseases before cancer gets them.

So what makes survival rates so high in the US?

Well, this Forbes article [4] explains it quite well: overtreating.

But at what price? (not talking about raw monetary value here)

Cancer insurgence is tightly related to aging [5], I've brought up the example of Italy because it's the second oldest population in the World on average after Japan.

And we know that the best cure for cancer is (still) avoiding it.

We have a system here that tries to prevent cancer: women are called in for regular check ups for a number of diseases (including breast cancer), men are checked regularly for prostatic cancer when they are 40 or older and its for free.

Companies, by law, have to send their employees to regular check ups every five years.

I have high blood pressure, I have to attend mandatory check ups every year, because I am more at risk than the others.

It's all paid by the Company.

Would you prefer to develop breast cancer and have a 90% chance of survival or not develop it at all?

Breast cancer is by far the most common type of cancer for women [6] and it has high levels of survival rates in all the western World [7].

What's particularly controversial about the way US counts average survival rates is that they also count breast cancer in situ, which is not a try cancer, but it's used to inflate breast cancer statistics [8]

One statistics is particularly interesting, despite the fact that since the 90s sales of cigarettes per adult per day dropped dramatically and are among the lowest in the west [9] the share of cancer deaths attributed to tobacco is still pretty (alarmingly) high [10].

What's really important in cancer prevention and cure is that globally the chances of going back to an average life expectancy is rising, not only the survival rate after 5 years. In Italy 25% of cancer patients can expect to go back to a normal life, I haven't found the numbers relative to USA.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-cancer-deaths-at...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-...

[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-death-rates?tab=ma...

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/06/13/why-the-us-has...

[5] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-...

[6] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-with-...

[7] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/five-year-survival-rates-...

[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancer_mortality_rates...

[9] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/sales-of-cigarettes-per-a...

[10] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-cancer-deaths-at...

From a profit standpoint, the health industry (providers, not payers) have every incentive to delay care for chronic conditions until they can't get away with not doing it. Once a patient is sick enough, more resources and justification tends to be thrown against the insurers to pressure them to pay up, no matter the cost. One might recall Michael Moore's infamous protests for a dramatic example of this.

Yep. And I don't see it being fixed in the US, because the anti-single-payer crowd erroneously believes that US healthcare exists under a "free market". In truth, the budget per capita for healthcare in the states is actually _higher_ than in Canada. So Americans pay more for a lot less.

It turns out a few turn-your-head-and-coughs in your 30s is a way better deal than waiting for it to become a trip to the ER in your 50s.

Lots of medium sized (and larger) companies self insure and pay an outside company for administration rather than insurance (insurance companies often offer this type of service).

Health insurance is a benefit offered by some employers to some employees. And the data clearly shows that the drop in employment has not resulted in a corresponding rise in health insurance coverage, which just adds further evidence to the argument that our current low unemployment rate really just means that we’ve traded high unemployment for high underemployment.

Thanks. Edited my post to say "some US employers".

I take care of a lot of people who work for Fortune 500 companies that have Medicaid. My taxes, therefore, subsidize these companies' profits. Moreover, when I was in private practice, I accepted sub market fees for my services when I took care of them. This is the reason why I am a hospital employee. I get paid regardless of whether the hospital gets paid.

> Employers get discounted rates because of how many customers

That's hilarious.

I mean, you are correct that employers bundle employees together. But without massive government intervention during and after WWII, the industry would have been wildly different, and the way the trend began was highly historically contingent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942

Econ 101 is insufficient for understanding the world.

I do not want to spread misinformation. If that statement was incorrect, could you let me know how to correct it?

It is mainly that economic factors regarding employment insurance bundling are side effects of having employment-based insurance, not the cause.

It is very useful to look at other countries - we have lots of natural experiments in health care markets. If bundling were determinative of market structure, you'd see the same pattern elsewhere.

You care completely mis-citing / mis-reading that study. It specifically is an attempt to measure the non-material effects of unemployment on persona well-being and happiness.

"Emotionally tolerable" is a very different thing from "financially risky". Indeed, people should be willing to tolerate temporary dissatisfaction to achieve a better long term outcome in ways that they are not willing to tolerate complete financial ruin and the potential loss of major assets that will decrease their long term outcomes.

Financial stress explains upwards of 30% of the cross-sectional variance of life satisfaction.[1] If the hypothesis is that the US unemployed are significantly more financially stressed than the Canadian unemployed, then that would almost assuredly be reflected in differing life satisfaction scores.

[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.536...

Again, you are conflating two different things, financial risk and financial stress.

You are also citing a study that looks at the financial stress levels of employed mental health professionals and then trying to use that to reason about the economic choices made by unemployed people.

This is not how you use data responsibly. You can't just use a 30% correlation in an unrelated dataset to justify conflating two different measures without actually doing statistical analysis to show that that there is reason to believe that that correlation not only exists in a different population, but also isn't washed out by an a other factors.

Your comment seems unnecessarily dismissive and misses the point.

The parent argues that Americans disproportionately boast about their unemployment figures compared to Canadians despite US unemployment carrying an exponentially greater risk of causing financial ruin due to medical expenses.

You dismissed his comment outright by citing that self-reported stress levels of unemployed Canadians and Americans are about the same, although this is at best tangentially related.

> Your hypothesis does not hold up to the data.

Your data is not relevant to the hypothesis. The surveys were conducted in different time-frames (Canada: 2009-2014, USA 2005-2010), which I shouldn't need to tell anyone why that dataset is not useful for rigorous comparison, but I will anyway: one surveys people who were just recently hit by a recession and tracks them throughout the economy's recovery; while the other surveys people who recently experienced massive economic growth (exuberance) and tracks them throughout their economy crashing. Both, Canda's and the USA's, economies were intertwined during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and this should be accounted for -- but it isn't.

Furthermore, the data DOES hold up to the GP's assertion: that as the unemployment rate goes up, the gap in life satisfaction between employed and unemployed approaches zero (chart 2). That is, 20% nationwide unemployment, unemployed and employed Canadians have the same life satisfaction (chart 1).

Lastly, this is social sciences. We cannot conclude anything from the data without experimentation. At best, this data is observational reason to pursue deeper inquiry, at worst it's idealogical fodder to drive other people's agends by lying with statistics. Everyone does it. Statistics don't really mean anything on their own, and lay-people give them too much weight!

Not to mention that people's personal moods do not necessarily reflect the quality of their material position.

I'm guessing your data is comparing satisfaction of employed (nationality) to unemployed (same nationality).

If so, all it says is that unemployment sucks and fails to really compare across borders. I've seen some stuff that indicates American parents are some of the most stressed out and dissatisfied parents on the planet due to our lack of family-friendly policies, including but not limited to our sucky healthcare policies.

Unemployment is defined as the percentage of people employed of those who WANT to work.

It does not count those taking time off.

That would be the UNDERemployment rate.

I thought “underemployment” referred to people working less than full-time (or less than they want) and/or working at a job far below their skill level, e.g. a skilled machinist or college graduate working as a cashier.

But yes, the standard unemployment rate that’s talked about does not account for a lower participation rate, people who could be working or looking for a job but aren’t.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

Clinton found a way to exclude all those pesky minorities. He renamed them from "minority" to "discouraged" workers and dropped them off the books! Pig ...

As far as I understand — without private insurance in Canada, somebody with few resources in Canada is at risk of financial ruin from any of the health conditions you mentioned. For older Canadians, a pre-existing condition may not be covered, which means a serious condition could rack up significant medical bills.

Edit: I should have specifically said that I'm talking about expensive prescription drugs and required ancillary care that is not paid for by the province. Also, each province is different. Ex: cancertaintyforall.ca

This is flatly incorrect.

The Canadian healthcare system doesn’t even have the concept of “pre-existing condition”. That term is deeply flawed and was constructed by the healthcare insurance system in the USA.

The term used in Canada is “medical history”.

I’m at an age where I’m watching my friends in Canada deal with family suffering from long term illnesses and ultimately, death.

They all deal with anguish, grief, heartbreak, and in some cases depression.

But none of them are dealing with medical bills.

Perhaps my error was in saying that the specific conditions that the OP listed would result in financial ruin.

My experience is anecdotal from close relatives in Alberta having severe diseases early in life. Their drugs and "required care" was expensive and not entirely covered by their private insurance. Their private insurance had caps (annual and/or lifetime), and after, their medical history made it difficult or impossible to get private insurance with adequate coverage.

The bills were significant, but maybe each province has programs to cover the difference for those that cannot afford the bills?

In Quebec at least everything is free before 18, after 65, and for those whose financial situation is dire, including vision, drugs etc...

In general in Canada, any care you receive at a hospital or doctor's office is free to you. However, drugs you purchase at your local pharmacy are at your own expense. The provinces all have plans to cover drugs in certain situations (for children, for the elderly, for diabetics, etc.) but they do not provide complete coverage. Employers typically offer prescription drug insurance to employees.

Some people with chronic conditions that fall through the various provincial drug plans are spending fair chunks of money on prescription drugs that may be necessary for them to have a good life.

Thanks for explaining this more eloquently than I was able to. I did a poor job of highlighting that I was mostly referring to to these out-patient drugs.

For example there is a drug you can take before chemo that reduces the side effects, it costs a lot, wasn't covered by the province and isn't free with private insurance. It can make a terrible experience a little more tolerable.

Having a heartbeat is a "pre-existing condition". It's vexing how often Americans will discuss treatments + checkups as though there's some chance that they _won't_ see their health degrade as they age.

> The Canadian healthcare system doesn’t even have the concept of “pre-existing condition”. That term is deeply flawed and was constructed by the healthcare insurance system in the USA.

Neither does the US since the passage of ACA in 2010:

https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/pre-existing-conditions/

This is not true. This is nearly a lie.

Private insurance in Canada barely exists, and primarily covers prescription coverage and paramedial (acupuncture, chiropracty, TCM, etc.) Inpatient prescriptions are covered by provincial health. Doctor's visits are covered by provincial health. Dental may or may not be covered. Hospital stays, urgent care, ER visits, routine checkups, mental health are covered by provincial health. Health hotlines (call a nurse) are literally free. There's no such thing as "pre-existing". There's no such thing as medical billing.

I don't think you should downplay the scope of "not publicly insured" services in Canada, especially after the last couple decades of aggressive privatization of once-insured services.

It varies from province to province in its specifics, but the majority of working-age Canadians have private insurance through their employer. This is expected to cover everything from physiotherapy to psychotherapy to prescription medications.

People without such insurance have a limited patchwork of public programs and usually either have to pay themselves or go without.

Case in point: A friend injured his back, and while the surgery and doctor's consultations were covered, everything else including medication and physiotherapy was not. He ended up spending tens of thousands out of pocket to be able to stand again.

The private health insurance market in Canada is closer to a truly free market and isn't regulated like in the USA, and that means the insurers happily and routinely deny coverage for pre-existing or self-inflicted conditions (as the insurance contract may define them).

Another case in point: A friend of mine is HIV+, and was denied group coverage through his employer. He pays thousands of dollars out of pocket for antivirals every year.

When the public insurer doesn't cover you, it's an absolute wild west of unregulated private insurance coverage and usually boils down to pay or suffer and die.

How are the wait times for all of the above?

> Private insurance in Canada barely exists

Private insurance for prescriptions, dental, vision, etc. is offered by most big employers in Canada.

"As CBC News points out, private health insurance is “a crucial part of the system,” and Canadians spent about $43.2 billion on private coverage in 2005."

https://thinkprogress.org/can-canadians-purchase-private-hea...

If your AGI is below ~$27K you have medicaid. As i understand it, CHIP covers kids higher the he income scale this too.

If you cross that barrier switching between unemployed and employed, there is mounds of paperwork. I wish I could cite a study, but I'm pretty sure people procrastinate / preventative health measures are less prevalent because of this red type.

For a single individual, if you make $18K gross you make too much for Medicaid. In 14 US states, if you make $0 you make too much for Medicaid.

I don't understand this. Are there 14 states where nobody gets Medicaid?

Not exactly. The ACA included an expansion of the Medicaid program, almost entirely funded by the federal government, that provides coverage to anyone making below the amounts other posted quoted. However, the Supreme Court ruled that states could opt out of this "expansion" if they want, and several states did. In those states they still provide pre-ACA Medicaid services - children, pregnant women, and a couple other groups are covered - but don't have general coverage for low-income people.

Only in states that expanded Medicaid, and that number is too high.

> America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada

I don't think that's actually true, I think it's a political talking point that we are all hit over the head with repeatedly. A key progressive talking point is that the issue of so-called "prosperity" is not as simple as "everyone has a job". This is where the issue of people having multiple jobs, minimum wage, benefits, unions, etc. all come into play but that all requires more cognitive overhead, something that is in scarce supply with a nation steeped in distraction.

So we agree that prosperity is not as simple as everyone has a job

Yet the official unemployment rate is really closer to the job seeker rate and largely meaningless when compared between countries, what really matters economically is the employment rate where Canada has been 1+% ahead for most of 2019.

https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/employment-rate, https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate

To be fair, American smugness about this is likely driven by the fact that most Americans lack perspective concerning how other systems work. They just don't get it that a better medical system that doesn't tie medical access to having a job at all brings stress levels down enormously.

You dont need a job to have access to health care in the US. All you need is the ability to pay for the services you use.

For most people, no job means both no medical insurance and also no ability to pay out of pocket. So I'm baffled as to how this is supposed to be a rebuttal.

It's doubly confusing, as you'll find unhealthy people have a much harder time earning the money in order to get well so they can work.

Yes, I live this first-hand. It's quite crazy making stuff.

This is extremely pedantic and misses the point entirely, and I'm sure you know it.

> You dont need a job to have access to health care in the US. All you need is the ability to pay for the services you use.

About 40% of Americans would struggle to come up with $400 for an unexpected expense, and most wouldn't even be able to borrow any money.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/20/heres-why-so-many-americans-...

I travel around the US constantly, and have never heard anything remotely close to comparing unemployment with Canada. Any talk of unemployment is always internally focused, comparing the rate to the past.

Americans overwhelmingly have no idea what the unemployment rate is in Canada, in my opinion. They certainly don't spend much time boasting about the US rate vs the Canadian rate.

It's a staged premise - which was entirely unsupported - to launch into the America Bad talking point. If you don't use a primer to launch into that, it looks particularly biased on a forum. So what you do instead, is you set up something ugly (those boasting Americans!) that can never be backed up, and that provides your on-ramp.

This is a comedy routine here on HN at this point.

Consider that the Americans boasting premise was the whole foundation to the parent comment and the parent made zero effort to back it up (it'd be impossible to support, the US is far too large, insular, and diverse for it to be likely true). The same country that, yes, largely doesn't know where Iran is at on a map, pays deep attention to Canadian economic statistics.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2016/employment-population-rati...

Pre-2000, 65% of adults 18+ were in the workforce; Today that sits at shy of 60%. You'd expect the cycle of liquidity crisis driven by reserveless lending would result in a stable graph over long periods of time, instead over an elongated period of time, it's pointing downard.

The problem with this is you leave a lot of people on the sidelines\wayside, and it takes years of working, of gaining experience, even doing something like janitorial work, to be considered competent.

Walmart has a drug rehab program today they run at many of their stores; they drug test 100 applicants, 99 fail the drug test. They have no other way of finding people to staff basic positions.

The entire concept and point of minimum wage was to ensure people wouldn't fall into this kind of disarray and businesses that complain about minimum wage hikes are parasites that have to literally eat people alive to survive, except today they hire PR Firms to cover it up. This is not the way to run a society. A lot of the reason our government allows this to go on has to do with controversial tech firms like Uber being funded by foreign entiteis with questionable morals such as the Saudi Oil fund, the US Government allowing china to buy 100bn+ in bonds every year, and other such "arrangements". We had 2 presidential candidates last election the Russians government admitted to compromising.

Congress has sold certain segments of people up the river and genuinely doesn't know how to get them out.

If you look at the growth rate in US Census data and private studies of men over 45 never married, no chilren, and look at the trend and how that has been correlated with a declining fertility rate that's starting to rival the USSR's collapse.

We haven't even begun to recover from 2000, and there's one heck of a powder keg forming.

And none of those people who make up that powder keg care about whether or not our health system is superior or inferior to canada's.

> Walmart has a drug rehab program today they run at many of their stores; they drug test 100 applicants, 99 fail the drug test. They have no other way of finding people to staff basic positions.

Sorry for being the "cite please" guy, but where on Earth did you find this? It's not in your link.

I know people who work there out in Chicago. They distribute pamphlets and have it cooked into their health insurance policy. It's mostly a city and urban problem for the company, and done on a community-by-community basis; the stores they do not drug test at are the stores they impliment the program in. All you have to do for yourself is walk into a wal-mart in a bad neighborhood and ask.

Understand this is a company that advertised converting their employee's to all part-time in 2008 to save on health insurance and then lost their proverbial behinds when they had to hire 8x as many hands whom stole 100x as much merchandise. Some stores had 7 figure shrink numbers. They're under indictment under FCPA by the SEC right now.

If you want some REALLY fun numbers, go look at BLS OES Job wage data for number of warehouse supervisors vs number of warehouse workers. More supervisors than workers. Walk into a warehouse sometime and look around, lots of people who can't speak english.

Not hard to find statistics on how these kinds of outfits work.

Historically the unemployment rate has just been one indicator of how the economy is doing. All else being equal[1], economy A with 5% unemployment should be doing better than economy B with 10% unemployment, at least from a job seeker's standpoint.

The danger of being purely quantitatively driven by these historically useful metrics is that there is an absolute focus on keeping the numbers at the right level or moving in the right direction while simultaneously doing things that undercut the value of those metrics. In the previous century, falling unemployment numbers used to indicate that factory workers were returning to work at their old wage and benefits or better that new jobs were being created. However, today it often means that the factory worker who lost their job is now an Uber driver for a fraction of the pay. You used to see stories like 'factory X is bringing back Y thousand good paying jobs as it (re)opens a production line' now the story is 'unemployment is below 4%... shut up and like it'

[1] If all else isn't equal, whether comparing economy A to economy B or a previous version of itself, you are right it isn't a meaningful metric at all.

The infected hangnail case is because it’s illegal for the corner store to sell you $4 in antibiotics without a $200 doctor’s note, fwiw.

This is an issue with the government, not the economy or medical system. They literally make cheap treatment illegal.

PS: For anyone in this situation, search online for FISH MOX or FISH PEN. Amoxicillin and Penicillin respectively. Aquarium stores usually carry them. Saved my life a few times! Sadly, no longer on Amazon.

I think you mean, "you need a well-paid job, with heaps of medical coverage".

As a Canadian, who's been unemployed in Canada...just what??? Being unemployed was one of the most stressful times of my life. I had to hustle for odd jobs to pay bills, and the ≈$700 every two weeks for about 4 months I got from ei wasn't even enough to cover rent. I barely made it through and kept my place. The only reason I didn't end up homeless was finding a job within the last few weeks of my ei. There were days I didn't eat though.

Now what would you do if you had a sudden medical emergency during your time on EI?

In Canada, you'd go to the doctor and then continue you on your way.

In the USA, with the situation you described above, you would now be homeless. And in debt.

So yes, they're both stressful. But one is worse.

>Now what would you do if you had a sudden medical emergency during your time on EI?

I'd be fucked. I have no msp coverage currently and haven't for a couple years. I can't actually go to a doctor right now unless I get hurt at work and wcb covers it.

You guys believe a lot of bullshit fairy tales about things up here honestly.

MSP payments is eliminated. Fairy tales come true. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/health/health-drug-covera...

America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada.

As someone who lives in the US, I’ve never heard anyone even mention Canada’s unemployment rate.

It’s just not on the radar.

>America has a weird sense of superiority about its lower unemployment numbers vs Canada.

I've literally never heard anyone in America discuss Canada's unemployment numbers in any context whatsoever. I think your premise may be off.

Canada is also pretty tiny (smaller than California; much smaller GDP than California) so I'm not sure why we would care.

Usually it's in the political context, as a cautionary tale about why you shouldn't fund healthcare/social programs/etc.

I wouldn't describe politicians trying to score cheap political points as "America" having a weird complex. I can promise you the average American does not have any thoughts whatsoever regarding Canada. It's not even on our radar.

He is saying that people in Canada are less concerned about Canada's unemployment numbers than people in America are concerned about America's unemployment numbers.

If that were the case then the word superiority does not belong in that sentence. No average American has enough thoughts about Canada to have feelings of superiority about our economic statistics.

> America has a weird sense of superiority

Please keep nationalistic flamebait off this site. It leads to nationalistic flamewars, which we seriously don't want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Automation takes a toll, and the market decides the cost of things (e.g. how much an employer is willing to pay an employee for a specific task). One facet of that toll is that employers are much less willing to pay a premium for tasks they believe can be handled by automation.

I see a lot of protestant mentality here in comments valuing any kind of even inhumane labour which does not allow to meet basic needs over not having a job, but also not suffering from hunger thanks to the social support system.

In my opinion, we as a society should aim to work less and less, collectively making use of automation and technological progress. But it will be hard when we label this as being lazy and not valuable member of society.

Another issue is who owns these automation processes. If I used my vast financial resources to develop (i.e. pay people to develop) a new automation process, what rights do you have to my gains? Why should I share it with you?

This mentality and ownership really needs to be rethought.

Imagine if all improvements over the course of history would be kept in secret for gains of owners of capital. Who own rights to the invention of an axe? Probably the first one who put a stone on a piece of wood. Should he has all rights for it forever? I couldn't really agree.

There’s a difference between having the right to the concept of an axe and having the right to my specific axe. I think GP was speaking more towards the latter.

It seems, sadly, that in software we have conflated the two. My specific iPhone is a brick without a government-recognized license for a copy of Apple’s sequence of numbers that instruct it.

You also didn’t make the phone. Apple did and sold it to you under certain arms-length terms, presumably terms that both sides were willing to accept.

That’s quite a bit more acceptable to me than someone deciding that Apple’s phones should be theirs because reasons.

Which is why such property rights are supposed to fade with time. Corporate interests have just pushed that time frame to eternity in recent laws.

You having vast financial resources depends on the rest of society agreeing, otherwise what you have are numbers on a server somewhere and an angry mob around your house.

You're making a lot of assumptions about ownership. "Your" vast financial resources are just measures of debt (money is not personal property) secured by the government. We can always collectively decide that what you did to accrue that owed debt was not worth its valuation and take steps (e.g., taxation) to correct. "Your" automation process is built on publicly-funded research and using publicly-funded resources; the public can decide to recoup its investment, and whatever else it needs to secure its mission of providing for the general welfare.

Feudalism is over, dude. You're connected. You're beholden.

You have to wonder why we don't just tax a little more? Do we have plenty of resources already and we just don't give it to the people struggling who need it? Or do we really not have resources to help the overworked underpaid masses out here in opioid infested flyover country? If we don't have enough resources, why not tax a bit more to get the resources? If we do have the resources, why are we not helping these people out more?

Sometimes it's just baffling how everyone can see an obvious problem and no one moves to try to at least ameliorate it. Not even asking that it be completely solved, just try to make things a little better for those people.

This line of thinking ("we can tax you however we like") is backdrop of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. In the book, the creatives/creators go on strike rather than suffer the taxes. Whatever you believe about the reality of that story, successful tax collection is a negotiation, not a diktat. It's probably best to have everyone believe in taxes, so it's important to have a discussion around it.

The feasability of the circumstances described in AS aren't a triviality, they're the crux of your argument. Tax collection has been unsuccessful even with the fig leaf of "negotiation"; what's better is to have everyone believe in what happens if you don't pay your taxes.

Generally-speaking, I'm betting that the wealthy would rather live in a world where they still have essentially unfettered freedom of movement and resource access with slightly less collective wealth, than one in which they have to hold back their gifts and always have to be looking over their shoulder.

> In my opinion, we as a society should aim to work less and less, collectively making use of automation and technological progress. But it will be hard when we label this as being lazy and not valuable member of society.

If the society had taken this view in 1950 and encouraged "laziness", then we wouldn't[1] have had as much technological progress since then. It would probably have created a great lifestyle for 1950's people. It is indeed a great question to ponder - do we want to optimize social setup for today's population or for future generations to come?

[1] I also think low-wage jobs are sometime essential to move the society forward, Uber being a good example. Taxi-based system was horrible in the US. Uber used a lot of low-paid workers to shake the status quo and the situation has improved remarkably since then. I don't think the solution offered by Uber is perfect and the setup should be improved further, but simple improvements like hailing a cab via an app, credit card payments or driver/passenger ratings were inconceivable with the taxi system (again, in the US). That progress might not have been possible in a system with UBI because no one would have driven for Uber for low wages. Again, presence of UBI would have certainly helped Uber drivers a lot but collective society would have been stuck with a shitty taxi-based system.

Thats total nonsense. Technological progress and capitalism are intertwined, but we didn’t achieve advancements because of the pure necessity to put food on the table or simply “work hard”. Weve advanced enough so we can provide the same basic needs like food and healthcare to everyone, just like everyone can now entertain themselves or travel anywhere in the world.

Exactly. The definition of 'employment' is the crux of the matter. Is a 30-hour week at minimum wage with no retirement or health 'employment'? Were serfs of feudal lords 'employed'? Is someone making valuable contributions without wage or recognition 'employed'? Are those serving the poor voluntarily 'employed'?

The term is mechanical, reductionist, and carelessly 'employed'.

Conservative perspectives often involve some sort of built-in need to proselytize, because they view life as a triumph of ego over intrinsic human weakness. There's an idea that all people need to hear the message of personal responsibility.

Sadly data is weaker than any bias of perspectives, and people find it impossible to think causally without some larger brittle philosophical framework.

Most unfortunately you can change the minds of some, but others you have to wait for them to die. Progress occurs one funeral at a time.

>Conservative perspectives often involve some sort of built-in need to proselytize, because they view life as a triumph of ego over intrinsic human weakness. There's an idea that all people need to hear the message of personal responsibility.

If we're reducing political parties to extreme stereotypes, then perhaps the pressure of the distant right is an appropriate counter to the pressure from the distant left which encourages hedonism and infantilism well into adulthood, shuffling responsibility onto the magical collective to solve problems.

And in this way society isn't totally lost, on average, if it exists somewhere in the middle.

I do not find liberal philosophy more accurate. On almost every issue one can make reasonable evidentiary arguments for either perspective. The problem is people can't even make policy decisions on the basis of controlled statistics and the experimental method (when that's possible).

I just think that conservative thinking lends itself to an evangelical mindset, while liberals tend to view their philosophy as inevitable. Often they are content to wait for people to evolve to their level. Hillary's inaction in the previous campaign is a perfect example of that mindset.

Please don't take HN threads further in generic ideological directions. It leads to generic ideological flamewar, which is tedious and which we don't want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

there is a catch though: automation and technology is not free , but there a high overhead cost that many businesses cannot afford. Also, may low skilled jobs cannot be automated.

> I see a lot of protestant mentality here

Please keep religious flamebait off this site. It leads to religious flamewars, which we seriously don't want here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I didn't mean to start religious discussion, rather used this term as in writings of Mark Weber (value of hard work etc.). This is more about set of principles that shaped Western and American societies, not really being related to religion anymore.

Alas, it's still related enough to religion to easily lead to religious flamewars on the internet. The burden is on the commenter to pack the point in less flammable packaging. "Protestant mentality" is too generic a phrase not to have religious associations for many readers. If you said "Protestant work ethic" that would have been better, and if you had made it clear that you were referencing Weber, there would be no problem. Far fewer internet users are likely to start a flamewar against Weber.

dang, please try to read charitably into the comments you choose to moderate. The concept of Protestant work ethic in the US is centuries old and is effectively divorced from any religious associations it might have had in the 1600's.

It's not centuries old, but comes from Max Weber's surprisingly readable and brilliant book on the topic. But from a moderation perspective we have to look at effects, not intent. If you lead with a comment like that, the odds of somebody getting triggered—for whatever reason—and taking the thread into flamewar go way up. This is not a deep or very interesting point, it's just basic fire prevention.

This is insane. The rise in wages for the bottom half are higher than they have ever been and it is solely because of low unemployment. How in the world do some people become economists and not understand supply and demand?

There are factors at play other than supply and demand

Work, save up, start a business of your own choosing. So many excuses for those unable to achieve this simple formula that our forefathers fought and died for us to have the right to.

I’m skeptical that America’s forefathers envisioned a future where a reasonable degree of financial security is exclusively for business-owners.

At that time, financial security did not exist at all (or almost). There was no social safety net, no food stamps, no tax to redistribute. There was no reason to envision there will ever be different.

> Work, save up, start a business of your own choosing. So many excuses for those unable to achieve this simple formula that our forefathers fought and died for us to have the right to.

That dream is only viable for a very, very small population.

see: Those who have to work multiple jobs to support family, those saddled with crushing loans, those with ailing family while being the sole provider, those who are denied loans because the happen to be born in a zip code a biased algorithm deemed as more risky, etc. etc.

Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is a great move when your privilege and opportunities align well.

It's incredibly delusional and illogical to think that everyone can start and run successfully their own business, and especially so to claim that this was the founding fathers' vision. If that was the case, where would the workers come from? The founding fathers had slaves. Where do I sign up to receive the slaves for my business? Because anyone can build a business on slavery and any society can be successful on the back of slaves.

What about the slaves themselves? What did the founding fathers say about them? Obviously, they cannot start their own business as that would be illegal. What do you suggest for them in your great wisdom? They are not allowed by law to start a business, yet according to you, that's just an "excuse."

What you're advocating also wasn't possible for women until the last few decades. Or Chinese. Or Mexicans. Etc. So why should they work to compete with the established businesses/family wealth that had hundreds of years to grow and slaves to work. All of a sudden, everyone should just compete with them and somehow be on equal footing despite them getting hundreds of years of head start, capital, and free labor?

But yeah, so many excuses for being unable to achieve this almost unachievable formula. Slavery. Oppression. Racism. Violence. Etc. Not to mention the sheer insanity of expecting everyone to be a business owner and therefore none to be a worker. Yup. So simple. Only people deserving of death through destitution couldn't follow such a simple formula.

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

People who lived in socialism know that, there was even 0% unemployment :-)

Since employment is tied to not starving, I'd say its worth a fair amount.

Very tenuously tied to not starving. There are plenty of working-class people who have to avail themselves of community food pantries and at least in my large city the homeless have access to three meals a day.

And honestly, not starving is not a great metric for a wealthy and developed country like the USA. We should demand and strive for more than that terribly low standard.

Not really, since you are counted as "employed" if you work 1 paid hour per pay period.

Similarly, minimum wage isn’t worth much if there’s high unemployment

minimum wage isn’t worth much. period.

These regulations upon regulations, shitty policies and "governing" from socialists are killing the market and gotta stop. It's dumb to interfere with the market and dictate how much your skills are worth. USSR as a reference? We know what financial top-down planning and dictatorship does to countries.

Minimum wage should be abolished.

"The market" is not some all-powerful, benevolent force that will always achieve the best outcome for humanity or society as a whole. Markets are disproportionately controlled by the current holders of wealth (and therefore power), who will naturally tend to seek their own advantage at the expense of others. And so some kinds of regulation are often appropriate to protect the less powerful participants.

free market IS all-powerful. times change, technological progress moves forward, financial powers rise and fall, it's natural, it's evolution, a chaos controlled by the market (and not by the billionaires, it's not Russia). If you interfere, you are making things worse, delaying the inevitable, promoting dependence, killing individuality (or even progress).

The market is not some emergent natural phenomenon. It is a construct to facilitate human interaction. We already heavily circumscribe the “free market” and I don’t understand reactions to market failures that amount to “Well we can’t do anything about that”. Of course we can, it exists for us, not the other way around.

The minimum wage merely sets the welfare level.

I do not agree with that, having a job is always a good thing for mental health. It is always better than staying at home doing nothing.

Having work one finds valuable is.

Having a shitty mind numbing job is hell.

Adam Smith wrote about it (paraphrasing) extreme division of labor will create servile, ignorant humans.

IMO billionaires suffer from it too. Offloading so much real doing and learning while existing in the context of abstract decision maker.

You think Bezos can do much more than validate or demean people around him? Bet he can barely rotate a tire.

On the upside for the first time in history, the oligarchs in America don’t also control armed gangs. The risk of toppling one is manageable: taxes.

Organizing abstract social metadata very particularly is way less useful and makes for way less interesting people, than real muscle memory built from doing a variety of types of work.

"In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations, frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging, and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it."

> Bet he can barely rotate a tire.

According to Wikipedia, Bezos "once rigged an electric alarm to keep his younger siblings out of his room" and "worked at McDonald's as a short-order line cook during the breakfast shift".

I expect he's in the American average range for practical workaday skills.

I don't know whether or not he can specifically "rotate a tire"... but rotating just one tire is pointless anyway, you have to rotate the entire set to even out wear.

There might be someone who can rotate one tire and not four.

I would hazard this peculiar skill is uncommon.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

A lot of people become unhappy with their jobs and develop mental health issues. Some people never recover from having worked in destructive work environments.

If you have to take a bus for an hour to get to your four-hour shift at a stressful minimum wage job, where your manager is abusive and the workplace is unsafe, your mental health may suffer.

Meaningful work, or contributing to the wellbeing of those around you -- that would be a worthwhile goal. Suffering just so your family isn't hungry is a harder sell.

Inevitably, someone will say they should just learn skills from the internet to improve their lot, and perhaps some will. I think most people on HN (especially me) are so insulated from the reality of working poverty that we just look for technical solutions. I wish there were some.

Nobody should be taking a bus for an hour to a minimum wage job. One of the reasons a job is MW is that they are everywhere.

You don’t commute that far for minimum wage.

If you don't have a car, and the bus runs infrequently, I bet many people spend an hour getting somewhere.

Anecdote, not data, but

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/low-pay-long-p...

You could argue the person in the story should get jobs closer to home, but it is probably more common than you think.

Anecdotally, this is not true.

Due to how many North American cities are designed with urban sprawl and separation of living areas (suburbs) and productive areas (industrial/office zoning laws) it should actually be the norm to have a lengthy commute to work.

Hell, I live in a suburb with quite good public transport and it would take me almost 30 minutes to go to the grocery store by bus.

When I was a teenager and had no car, it took me about an hour to get to my minimum wage job by bus due to transfers. Once I could afford a car (because I lived with mum and dad and could save) that commute got cut to 20 minutes.

If you work in one of the US tech hubs, ask your janitorial staff how long their commute is.

You're right, we probably should have said longer, maybe an hour and a half. I definitely know people that commute a long time for low wages. Or did. They're in better places, now.

One of them used to stay really late at night at a Denny's because the buses didn't run when he needed to get to work, so he would spend the night (basically) at a Denny's so he was at work on time.

> to take a bus for an hour to get to your four-hour shift at a stressful minimum wage job, where your manager is abusive and the workplace is unsafe, your mental health may suffer

Your statement sounds like what would be typically written in an attention grabbing first paragraph of a news article in order to draw people in w/o providing any context as far as how common all or even most of those items you listed even exist. It is not realistic in any way at scale common sense says that. You are highlighting almost certainly an outlier not what is typical to make your point.

Let's take a look in particular into 'suffering just so your family isn't hungry'.

- Riding a bus for an hour in itself isn't suffering. - Four hour shift isn't suffering - Stressful minimum wage job? Any job can be stressful having a job pay more does not make it less stressful. - Manager is abusive. Abusive? This sounds like some characterization for impact to make a point. How realistic is it that the vast majority of jobs have people who are 'abusive' managers (as opposed to a percentage of them let's call it 10% arbitrarily).

- Workplace is unsafe? Where? In the US? You think 'all' or 'most' workplaces are unsafe? Or there are perhaps a percentage that are unsafe?

- Your mental health may suffer. Sure ok that one is fine. But maybe you are in the position that you are in the first place because of your mental health.

When I was younger, I worked a job at a car wash. There was only one thing I really did all day long- vacuum cars and wipe them down.

This got repetitive quickly, and the managers got really upset whenever you slacked off in the lulls. Groups of more than three people chatting while we had "downtime" were more or less immediately disbanded. Checking your phone, even to text your family, was a big no-no on company time. There was no such thing as a "smoke break" (I don't smoke, but man a five-minute break occasionally would've been really nice.)

I hated that job. I dealt with a bout of depression because of that job. The turnover there- among people who were talented- was exceptionally high (I lasted about two months before I found a better job) because the job was so menial- and the managers so demeaning- that all joy in working was lost fairly regularly.

It would've been better than staying at home and playing games all day long, but I'm sure that I could've done something more productive, without pay than I did with pay.

> (I lasted about two months before I found a better job) because the job was so menial- and the managers so demeaning- that all joy in working was lost fairly regularly.

That sounds like a good outcome though. If the job weren't so bad you might have stuck with it. You could say that you (and others 'talented') were lucky it sucked so much.

But the job still needed to get done. Just in terms of basic human decency, maybe we shouldn't encourage abuse and exploitation of workers just because "they can just get a better job."

Who is 'encouraging abuse and exploitation'? I am saying that adversity also creates opportunity. Along those lines we all know of people who grew up poor and that was the thing that made them work hard. Also what makes many immigrants want to come here. This doesn't mean 'make things really bad it's motivating'. My point was more if things are comfortable it can keep people around and prevent them from seeking a better life.

>I am saying that adversity also creates opportunity.

But it doesn't. Occasionally it spurs on action, but just as often, it traumatizes.

>This doesn't mean 'make things really bad it's motivating'.

That's just what you said, it's simply the flipside of the following sentence, and it's untrue. If we have limited time and energy on this planet, every moment in the work you describe is wasted.

I see this as a new tactic from the left. Since they can’t complain about unemployment in the record lows since forever, they complain about the jobs themselves.

Straw man. What is 'employment'?

See the trump difference? There is NONE:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

This is not a left or right issue. When Obama was president and unemployment rate was improving under him after the 2008 crash, Trump openly used to claim the same thing. Go google it. We are fighting between left and right while the politicians are laughing all the way to the bank.

Regarding health benefits, can I float a crazy idea?

Let part-time and gig economy workers pick their own insurance plans, and in exchange for every hour in their contract (or hours driven, etc. in the case of gig economy workers), require the employer (yes, we should close the loophole nationwide like California is trying to do) to contribute around 1.5% toward the monthly premium, until the employee/worker has, say, 60% of the premium paid for. This would work well for people juggling 2-3 part-time jobs or gigs and, at least in terms of health benefits, put them on par with FTEs.

Taco Bell has just started experimenting with $100k salaries for their store managers (a raise from about $70k) because low unemployment has tightened the pool of workers available.

We're headed in the right direction. With low unemployment, rising blue collar wages, and strong equity markets it would be absolute foolishness to make a big change in any direction.

Totally disagree. It's 1000000 times better than without a job, a job at least helps mental status and boost some esteem. Also it's 1000000000000 times better than living on welfare or food stamps. for himself/herself and for the society.

Have you been a jobless adult or on food stamps?

Not always. Being in one of these low end jobs tends to beget staying in that low end job longer, making it more difficult to have the time to invest in getting a better job. Numerous studies have shown that giving people a bigger safety net may make them stay unemployed longer, but when they do get a job they end up making much more money and being happier overall.

You are thinking of people who go to college or get some sort of official training. However, the best way to earn more money is to get on the job ladder and start learning skills. Once you have some experience it’s far easier to earn more. Putting people on welfare doesn’t help people learn skills.

For most it is a rungless ladder

Not necessarily. If you go train as, say, a carpenter, then yea sure. But you don't learn many skills from pushing trolleys in a supermarket.

I think it's a stretch to say all jobs help mental status and self esteem.

I think the point of the article is that relying on low unemployment as a main proxy of the health of the economy and how the workforce is doing overall, while pushing economic policies that try to mainly optimize that number, misses some pretty big points.

Eventually you approach (modern) slavery though, and the transition is not black to white, but a continuous one. So your argument, without any qualifications, actually implies that (modern) slavery is not a problem. I hope it is obvious to you why that is a highly unreasonable argument.

No. Slavery isnt voluntary by definition, and that is it's most essential feature.

I don't quite see your point. I agree that both traditional and modern slavery is not voluntary. But if there are no other options, other than taking an extremely low-paying job, then modern slavery is exactly what you get.

None of that contradicts what I originally said. Not having a minimum salary, and removing options for people to get by when they find themselves unemployed, creates a perfect environment for modern slavery. The OP that I replied to above seemed to think this is a good idea - it is obviously not.

Plenty of people sell themselves into slavery to pay off debt. People choosing to do this has been an institution for millennia.

Of course having a low-paying job is A LOT better than not having a job at all. You can ignore other ill-intended comments that are throwing straw-men at you.

Subjective opinion: jobs promote financial independence, mainly independence from the government. When the majority is not handcuffs and forced to give their votes to socialists to secure their welfare benefits (which, ironically, furthers their dependence on corrupted government and tightens handcuffs), democracy and sane vote prevail.

I came from poverty, struggled all my way up, and I'm a strong believer that no matter what, you have to WORK and to earn your life. Those people with good life from born and call others "slave" are not helping anyone, in fact you're trying to make more true slaves by that attitude. Always encourage others to work/study/be-independent as much as you can.

During the time without a job and when I am in poverty, I _NEVER_ sought for food stamp or any government help, I consider it is a shame to me per my own standard, and this is the only way I got out of the poverty.

"...we need to rethink the fundamentals of our economic and social policies"

They suggest fixes in the next paragraph that are not fundamental, have already been implemented, and have directly contributed to the problem:

"Federal, state, and local governments can take a number of steps to improve workers’ economic security. Boosting wages through tax credits, a higher minimum wage, or supporting sectoral bargaining; supporting families with high-quality child care; and giving workers more control over their time via stable scheduling are just a few options."

A fundamental shift occurred in 1776 and has been slowly bastardized since. Read Thomas Sowell, Peter Schiff, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mesis, Ron Paul, etc.

The central planners are the problem.

Would part of that bastardization since 1776 be the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863?

It seems a bit disingenuous to assume that the parent commenter laments the emancipation proclamation just because he/she has a differing view on fiscal policy. This is ad hominem by definition. Not very contributory to the conversation. What parts of his/her points do you disagree with?

Oh this one is easy. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22027504 for the statement:

> The worst thing to happen to minorites in the US was the civil Rights Act of 1964.

If you think I’m quoting out of context, entertain yourself with the rest of the comment. It’s on this very story. No digging necessary.

+1 nice find.

No. What happened in 1776 was a Constitutional Republic whose amendment process led to the 13th amendment. Liberty is a good thing.

I think most would be disturbed by your support of violent revolutionaries that took it upon themselves to seize the rightful property of the sovereign based on their perceived injustices.

I have no idea how you got the idea that I support violent revolutionaries. I simply stated that the 13th amendment(Emancipation Proclamation implied connection) resulted in liberty. That liberty was justified by the constitution created in 1776. Without that constitution, however it came about, emancipation may have never happened. My original comment stated that this was a fundamental shift as opposed to the authors statements.

First when you say liberty your mean negative liberty. The supposed shift is from negative to positive liberty. Second The violent revolutionaries are the Englishman that participated in the American Revolution (1776).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty

I do mean negetive liberty. I have never heard of the different types of liberty. Thank you for pointing that out! I need to point out that I do know the constitution was not written in 1776 even though I stated that previously.

Unemployment is NOT very low. The government publicizes a fake unemployment number which includes a HUGE imaginary subtraction called "discouraged workers", which was originally imagined during the Clinton administration. To get a real idea about EMPLOYMENT, including those pesky minorities that Clinton excluded, see the employment population ratio, ages 25-54:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060

When Obama left office we were STILL in an economy destroyed by Bush, STILL at employment levels BELOW the bottom of the past 2 recessions!

Now that Trump has been in office employment has grown NO DIFFERENTLY THAN UNDER OBAMA, for the past 3 years the Trump difference is INVISIBLE.

That's still roughly tied for lowest ever.

So from the FRED series you link to, the current market is the second best for employment in history. How is that "NOT very low"? It's better than any point in history other than a couple years when the dot com bubble was inflating.

BLS labor statistics are phenomenal. It's some of the most trustworthy data available. Please don't call them "fake" just because you want to use a different time series than someone else.

>53 million people earn low wages, with a median of just $10.22 per hour. That’s nearly half of the 18 to 64 workforce.

10.22 is just a number. It wouldn't be better if they earned $20.44 per hour because costs would double, too.

It's like the SF housing market: people spend what they have. SF residents could live luxurious lives if they wouldn't outbid each other and kept prices low. Likewise, the lower half of the workforce could buy more if they stopped spending it all.

Middle income people are not better with money. They just profit off the poor people who set the base line prices for mass-produced goods.

*edit:

To add to this: Purchasing power parity [1] shows that at least poor people in the US don't get the most for their Dollar. Goods can be sourced cheaper on the world market. In other words: they could drive prices down if they started paying less.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

Doubling the minimum wage does not cause costs to double. This is a very flawed analysis- the minimum wage doesn't affect the entire population (less than half!) so raising that wage only raises the costs of things a small, proportional factor, if at all.

I find we tend to apply microeconomic theorems to macroeconomic activities far too often.

You have overlooked a key part of my argument: Costs are low because the lower half cannot afford to pay more. Vendors have to keep low prices to compete for the hard earned Dollars. Give the lower half more money and things will simply cost more because they are able to spend the money.

This alone will start a demand for higher wages which will end in a situation where everything will cost proportionally more for everybody. The only losers will be those with bonds and cash because inflation will eat away the value.

Additionally, I don't think that you can ignore the supply chains. If you have a maid and you have to pay double, do you stomach the increased cost or are you going to ask for a rise yourself? And don't forget that you have to pay taxes. So you don't ask for her increase but you double it.

Low wages are not for those who operate machines, where the wage doesn't matter because the value is created by the machine. Low wages exist where a huge part of the value is directly created by the person. So double that cost and you increase the prices of those goods.

I don't know how big the low-wage part is relative to the entire economy. If it is minuscule, increasing minimum wage doesn't matter. But as the article says, it's almost 50% of the workforce, so I doubt that costs will only rise a small, proportional factor, if at all.

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