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Comment by mjburgess | Hacker News Reader

The problem is care-jobs are incredibly low productivity.

The reason a worker today is paid more than 100 years ago is, essentially, just that they can produce/transact with more people at once.

A nurse "should" be paid what they were 100 years ago, as the number of transactions hasn't changed. The only reason they aren't is due to competition from productive sectors.

But those productive sectors need to exist! In a world where many people are doing such low-productivity jobs, everyone will be much poorer.

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How can you compare productivity across functions, nevermore industries? Does a nurse produce less than a director of marketing? By what possible metric? Profit comes to mind, but I am hoping no one is inhuman enough to judge the medical care sector by its profits...

Profit is a measure of productivity, other things being equal.

A director of marketing creates a campaign which affects millions of transactions... so it's a function which can dramatically increase economic production.

It's pretty easy to compare productivity across industries. Leave what "should" be aside, when you're planning for the success of nations you cannot rely on Moral Bonuses.

The rate of economic activity (ie., people transacting with one another such that each has more than before) is measurable: it's called growth.

And you cannot grow by replacing highly productive industries with deeply unproductive ones. To pay for things we need the ratio of workers:transactions to increase.

Human history was severely impoverished because this was always a low number. We are wealthy today only because it is a higher one.

> To pay for things we need the ratio of workers:transactions to increase.

Human health is also a component of that inequation. How are you factoring that in with profit?

Also, all of that growth is meaningless unless it somehow makes people healthier and happier. So I would say that having a huge and successful healthcare industry is one of the goals of the rest of the economy (as are food production, entertainment, knowledge production and others).

So, if we have enough wealth but not enough healthcare, food, fun or knowledge, than we can trade some of that wealth for more important things, like healthcare workers, or garbage collection, or agricultural work, or mathematics research, etc. Or child care, though I suppose you view stay-at-home parents as deeply unproductive by this measure.

GDP growth is one of the most strongly correlated metrics with "health, happiness, mathematical research, etc."

Capitalism is the greatest force in history for increases in human wealth, happiness, abundance, etc., ie., for growth

Consider any metric of interest over the last century, and esp. the last 40 years: https://ourworldindata.org/

That only works because the data doesn't take into account any kind of shared wealth. Large swathes of people lived in tribal communities which had different concepts of ownership and property, but were not 'poor' by any common definition from their times. GDP data completely ignored these types of societies, which formed the majority in some areas of the world before colonization. Even then, most of the escapes from poverty have happened in state-run, dictatorial China and in the newly de-colonized India, so it is very hard to imagine how some can claim Capitalism is the important factor here.

Also, capitalism without explicit social goals imposed by a state is disastrous. Just look at the USA, with one of the worse and most expensive Healthcare systems out of the developed world, despite having by far the largest GDP (the only fully capitalist-run Healthcare system in the world!).

All of this is not to mention that capitalism is rapidly destroying our planet, with global warming, deforestation,river polution, oil spills, air pollution and other woes being fought for tooth-and-nail by most large companies.

Yes they were, extremely poor.

Child mortality rates and mortality rates in childbirth have been c. 20% for most of human history, up until c. 1940.

Almost all human beings for almost all recent history have been agricultural works (over 90% in 1800) which is a severe and precarious state.

If you wish to go before settlements into nomadic hunters and gatherers note that this cannot produce "mathematical research, healthcare, etc." -- ie., the desirable things stated.

At this point you're just pining to be a dog. You may prefer a shorter, more brutal, more violent life... but I think, rather, you just need a fantasy of a utopian "before time" to justify you enmity towards the status quo.

> how some can claim Capitalism is the important factor here.

Err... when do you think they started their massive reductions in poverty?

When they stopped blaming various other people an liberalized their markets (in china "The Capitalists" and in India "The British Empire"). Within a few years of introducing captialist reforms these societies dramatically reduced poverty.

according to that logic, lawyers, CEOs, line managers and HR should be paid what they were 100 years ago, as they do not directly produce. They're not, it's effectively through competition with other jobs that their pay is determined.

Intuitively, "pay according to productivity" makes sense, but productivity gains have far outpaced the pay of workers while the money went elsewhere. Let's face the reality that productivity prescribes the total sum that goes around but not how each individual's contribution is credited in a society.

Er... no.

Your productivity is your effect on net increases in economic transactions. A CEO has a massive effect. Jeff Bezos can literally, right now, change the GDP of entire countries just by making a decision.

One minute of his time can raise or lower a country's economic activity.

> while the money went elsewhere

Did it? Productivity increases is still the reason people have rising wages.

That we don't see the 1:1 wage:productivity increases we used to (post-WW2), doesnt mean that productivity isnt still the key metric to be increasing.

As to why that is probably the form automation takes today has a lot to do with it, ie., that innovations in factories used to increase the productivity of working class people; now such increases accumulate to highly skilled workers.

Ironically, I think this makes my point: our economy has become politically unstable because of the relative increase of low-productivity labour. This would get much worse with people transitioning to care work.

> according to that logic, lawyers, CEOs, line managers and HR should be paid what they were 100 years ago

Is that not true? Carnegie and Rockefeller were even relatively richer than the CEOs are today, and I'm sure their lawyers were compensated for as well as today's richest lawyers as well.

yes, for almost all of human history wealth inequality has been (far) worse than it is today.

The only period of relatively more equality was post-WW2. Inequality then, as ever, has only been reduced by mass death -- either in the form of wars, or plagues, famines etc.

The mechanism of wealth acquisition, ie., investment /(preferential attachment), necessarily iterates towards increasing levels of inequality.

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