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Comment by jschwartzi | Hacker News Reader

This is basically analogous to "We chronically devalue and underpay our public school teachers. We require them to perform to lowest-common-denominator testing, constant interventions, rigorous, standards-based teaching, work samples, documentation, and other requirements. Why is nobody interested in getting into teaching?"

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Agreed, these sorts of pieces really irritate me because they almost seem to be blaming young people for following basic incentives. Want people to go into an abandoned field? Great, pay them more than jobs they are equally well suited for, give them autonomy, grant them social status, or give them a great lifestyle. No one with other prospects is going to come to a profession if they are paid like shit，treated with no more deference than a fast food worker, saddled with a million regulations from the government, given no autonomy, and / or granted no job security without commensurate upside potential. This is not hard to understand.

The government / employers simply don't want to put their money where their mouth is.

Similar to "unfilled jobs" and "not enough engineers". The market price is just higher than what they would like to pay for those employees.

> saddled with a million regulations from the government

How acute is this, in general? I'm not from the US and I have no clue about it. From the outside it seems that everything is going well, creativity is abundant and freedom is running wild in the streets. Your comment kinda negates that and I'm a little surprised by it.

By and large, it's propaganda.

There is reasonable concern about some kinds of bureaucratic requirements and government-mandated busywork in certain fields, but for the most part, what holds individuals back in our country is the gross inequality in the system, manifesting in a variety of forms.

One of those forms, of course, is regulatory capture, allowing certain industries to maintain high barriers to entry because the people running the governmental agencies tasked with ensuring those industries are being run safely and for the public benefit are mostly former and/or soon-to-be industry executives and lobbyists.

This makes it much easier for the anti-government "look how horrible things are with regulation" rhetoric, when the actual cause is still overwhelming corporate power.

The parent comment is very accurate in regards to teachers within the public school systems in the US. For other industries it is the general rule that the top companies are very creative as they are bending, breaking, or rewriting the laws in some way.

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