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Comment by deadgunslinger | Hacker News Reader

Do you believe permanently raising wages to offset black swan events such as the COVID-19 epidemic is a wise move? What about the next black swan event? Are they going to be paid enough then or they'll need a pay rise again?

Healthcare professionals are paid much more compared to the average UK citizen. Especially doctors, the average pay (100k pounds) is in the 2% of the earners. Emigrant doctors couldn't even dream of finding comparable wages in free market scenarios in their own countries and come to the UK.

I think the best we could do collectively is to pay out generous bonuses to frontline nurses for the duration of the pandemic.

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The COVID-19 epidemic is not a black swan event. It is a foreseeable event with a computable probability of happening. Epidemics are recurring events throughout human history, including in the present day. Sure, the recurrence is low, especially for global pandemics, but you can be almost absolutely sure that within the next 100 years there will be another one.

In fact, even in the black swan book, they are explicitly given as an example of rare but NOT black swan-style events.

Point being, governments and corporations should have epidemic plans. It should never come as a surprise. Sure, a small mom-an-pop place or a start-up can't really prepare, but a corporation the size of Amazon should have an epidemic plan and reserves for that. Not having one would simply be irresponsible, both to shareholders and to employees.

Edit to add: airlines, restaurant, and hotel chains should have been the most aware of this. If they do not have plans for resisting a 2-6 month epidemic when business is shut down, then they are simply gambling on government intervention. There is almost 0% probability of operating one of these companies for 50 years and not having to battle at least a local epidemic in a large country.

Here's how this would go. The UK government did have epidemic plans, including a stockpile of PPE. Here's how the BBC described that stockpile: "Coronavirus: UK failed to stockpile crucial PPE". Of the four items that it complains were missing from the stockpile - gowns, visors, swabs and body bags - two (gowns and swabs) were ones that the government didn't expect to need for the epidemics it was planning for, the visors are expensive and bulky to store but so easy to manufacture hobbyists with 3D printers can literally do it at home, and I'm not even sure what's going on with body bags because there was famously a huge Brexit stockpile of those. Anyway, my overall point is that governments and corporations don't get credit for planning, they get blamed for the ways in which their plans don't predict the future exactly.

Perhaps you missed the C4 doco which showed that stockpiles of PPE of all kinds were run down and what was left was often out of date.

Or the conclusions of the government's own Exercise Cygnus in 2016 which stated clearly that this should never be allowed to happen because the consequences would be beyond horrific.

What do you mean the didn’t have a plan?

Step 1: cause panic Step 2: profit

> Healthcare professionals are paid much more compared to the average UK citizen. Especially doctors, the average pay (100k pounds)

This is just utter nonsense. The average UK salary is around £30,000. Nurses can expect to earn anywhere between £22,000 and £30,000.

Junior doctors (which a new doctor can expect to be for somewhere around 5 years) starts at £23,000 increasing to somewhere between £30,000 to £45,000. GP's earn around £75,000.

Where do you get your numbers from? Judging for how off your data is for GPs[0] I don't want to imagine about the others.

[0]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/29/average-gp-now-e...

From the NHS website, not a newspaper article.

https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/doctors/pay-d...

I asume when we are talking about "underpaid health care workers" we are not talking about doctors, but nurses.

But both deserve bonus crisis.

Not necessarily nurses

underpaid:

orderlies cleaning services kitchen staff

not sure if underpaid:

Midwife Physiotherapist

"Midwife Physiotherapist"

Definitely underpaid in germany.

oh yeah, I forgot to put the round brackets around services too.

orderlies cleaning (services) kitchen staff

that's definitely underpaid as well.

Doctors != majority of health care workers. They are an exception

And most don't make the kind of figure the Poster was saying.

I meant nurses (and other underpaid NHS workers) not necessarily Doctors sorry if I didn't make that clear.

The sentiment was entirely clear.

I think a Black Swan event is an opportunity to shift society out of an inadequate equilibrium. Not just for NHS staff but to reshape the relationship between capital and labor.

Top 2% of income is no great shakes when you look at the full distribution. The 0.1 and 0.01% make several orders of magnitude more.

Everyone should earn more. The best thing you can do for the economy is giving ordinary people more money.

Why? Aside from the fact that if you give everybody more money you're just raising the supply of money in the market so people essentially have the same purchasing power as before, except now their integer in a database is bigger.

This isn't how the economy works. If thst was the case nobody would ever earn more, which of course isn't true.

Wages are only a small part of a products price, and there also is enough evidence that for example raising the minimum wage does actually help people.

For why it works, its simple: non-rich people spend any extra money, rich people don't do anything useful with their extra money. Which is also why trickle-down economics is a scam when its being presented as a way to help poor or average people. It does work of course as a way to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich.

This is exactly how the economy works. If you raise the supply of money, prices are going to rise. Does not matter whether you print it or you just extract it from someone's bank account and redistribute it. That's Econ101. You're equating SOME people getting to earn more, with your original statement that EVERYBODY should be earning more. Well that doesn't work.

Also, rich people don't do anything with their extra money? The exact opposite is true. Most of rich people's wealth is not in cash, it's in investments - while the average folk's extra money is "invested" in products that they can't afford, like the latest iPhone or a fancy house/car. No rich person that didn't just inherit their wealth lets their money sit in a bank except for a small percentage of their wealth, because they know it's a bad deal. How does trickle down economics transfer wealth from the poor to the rich? The poor should have wealth to begin with, in order for it to be transferred.

>Healthcare professionals are paid much more compared to the average UK citizen. Especially doctors, the average pay (100k pounds) is in the 2% of the earners.

Oh please. Have you read "This is going to hurt" by Adam Kay?

Yes. Rise all wages to the point where everyone can at least fully support a family with it. You know, like during the good times when capitalism was still generating prosperity beside the usual death and destruction.

What an overstatement. We live in the most prosperous era of humanity. People have never had it better than today.

It doesn't feel like that at all. More like we're on a sinking luxury cruise ship.

Well, every single point of data we have disagrees with you, but someone is entitled to be pessimistic if they want to.

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