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> , but on how hard it is to find people to do them when we need them.

This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No.

Here, I suspect the obvious in the anime industry, like in many entertainment sectors including VFX: salary fixing between studios to keep pays low.

> If there were 100 qualified surgeons for every patient needing an operation, and would stampede each other for a chance to work and get paid, we'd pay them $25/hour too.

Given how opaque the healthcare industry is when it comes to cost for non elective surgeries, I doubt costs would go down even if you multiplied the number of surgeons by 1000. Case points: there are loads of restaurants yet the hospital will steal bill a meal 20 times what it would cost in the nearby restaurant.

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> This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No.

Is the fruit worth picking if salaries need to be increased to get workers? In a lot of cases the answer is no.

A lot of work only makes sense at a particular salary. If market salaries are above that, the work just isn't done.

People can pick a lot of fruit per hour. You would need something like 1 cent apples for that to be an issue.

At that point it’s not a question of making money, but minimizing losses.

Yet there are automated apple pickers.

There is no money in agriculture. The only reason why most farms aren't bankrupt is because of subsidies.

In a competitive market long term subsides don’t actually benefit the industry’s profit margins. Suppose we subsidize toilet paper, suddenly prices drop and people might start using toilet paper for random other stuff if it’s cheap. However, the industry would simply expand until things stayed about the same.

Where farm subsides play a role is dampening the boom bust cycle.

There's also a very big national security concern. Each country should be able to grow enough food to support it's people. If it can't, it literally faces the threat of starvation in the event of war or natural disaster.

That's just not true. It's about 15% of net incomes currently, but has hovered around 25% of net (in the US):

https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/us-heads-for-highe....

It can be 1% and still be what keeps the majority of farms from going under.

15% is absolutely "I will go bankrupt if I don't have this" territory.

If you drop that in one year sure, but remove all subsidies globally over even 10 years and the market would adjust.

By having firms go bankrupt.

Far from 1:1, like everything there are diminishing returns from fertilizer use etc. So the efficiency per unit of corn etc would be pushed up as the effective price* declines. The price gets pushed up if insufficient food supply gets produced, but demand in a world of obesity is somewhat elastic.

Net result fewer workers, a shift in which farms are profitable, and a ripple effect up the supply chain, but most bankruptcy would be from farms that do so sooner. Aka they would have been bankrupt in a 10 years and now it happens in 5.

*Effective price being the sales price plus total subsidies.

Yes, very impressive high school economics. In the real world you'd be looking at the tax implications of going under and minimizing them.

This of course is too complex to model is completely ignored. A lot like ignoring the atmosphere when designing air planes.

Modeling such interactions is the entire point of economics. We focus far to much on the math but very complex economic system really can be modeled rather accurately. Farm subsidies have been studied extensively and like all long term subsidies end up being harmful to the overall economy.

I wasn't aware economics had solved the halting problem.

Good on them.

Approximation don’t have issues with the halting problem only exact solution do. Your argument no more meaningful than suggesting useful simulation of fluid flows is impossible as you can’t keep track of all the individual atoms.

The difference is that you can bound any macroscopic quantity in fluid dynamics even if you can't solve the equations, however you can't put a bound on iterative processes. Or have economists figured out busy beaver numbers too?

I guess it was only a matter of time before economists stopped misunderstanding physics and started misunderstanding computer science. I mean there's not much prestige left in physics since the end of the cold war. Are we going to see a Turing prize in economics like the Nobel prize?

Modeling the speed of an object in flight is an iterative process.

But, clearly you’re simply using terms without understanding what they mean.

Food is incredibly cheap. If you can get to a farmers market on a not busy day you'd be really impressed what you can get.

Food distribution is a complete disaster. Lots of middlemen between farmers and consumers inflate prices

This is by design, you don't want your farms to underproduce for even a single season. Subsidizing them is worth it. However, we can always talk about whether the current subsidy structure is good for us. I don't think USA's obsession with corn is healthy.

Fruit picking is a very small part of the cost. Doubling the pay of the pickers wouldn't double the price of the fruit in the stores. Most likely, they'd cost about 10 cents extra or something. Easily worth it.

Whenever the milk price is low, we get farmer's protests that they don't get enough for their milk. Turns out they get 9 cents per liter for which I pay more than a euro. You could double their pay, include it in the price, and I wouldn't care.

You say that and yet they opted to shut down production as opposed to raising wages. That seems to be a better indicator of the underlying reality than your opinion.

I think part of the consideration is that if they pay fruit pickers more now, they fear they may have to pay them more in the future as well. It's also possible they simply refuse to pay fruit pickers more because they strongly believe fruit pickers don't deserve better pay.

There are often a lot more factors at play in these sort of things. Some rational, some maybe not so much.

So they set a whole season's profits on fire to stick it to seasonal workers? That seems so irrational as to require at least a smidgen of evidence to take seriously.

Ever hear about NYC landlords who leave ground level properties vacant for years because they'd rather lock in a high paying tenant. Same principal.

“The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country.”

What is this from? Obviously it was written a long time ago, but what a travesty.

Yeah, except if fruit is left rotting in the fields, then the supply could well be overabundant anyway and the profit margin isn't worth even that small cost for the workers. Absent evidence to the contrary, I will believe that business owners are chiefly rational actors.

Fruit picking is a large part of the farmers' cost. All the extra cost of transportatation, storage, wholesale logistics, retail and markup matters for the retail price, but that's not relevant - the farmer is competing for a tiny share of that retail price, and if that extra ten cents goes out of their share that easily makes it unprofitable.

Your example with milk is a very good illustration - something that raises the farmers costs by a few cents is much more important than what it might seem based on the fact that the difference is small compared t owhat the retail buyer pays.

All the leverage that farmers have can't get them more than 9 cents/liter. That's it, there's no hope for them to earn 18 cents/liter - sure, the wholesalers probably could, but why would they gift money to other businesses without any need to do so? So if your milk production process gets 1 cent/liter more expensive (but your competitors, possibly far away, are still willing to keep the same price), you can't get 10 cents/liter, it simply wrecks your profit margin - if your profit margin was 11% (1 cent/liter profit out of 9 cents/liter revenue), you might as well go out of business since you won't be earning anything.

>A lot of work only makes sense at a particular salary. If market salaries are above that, the work just isn't done.

All sorts of narrow specialized skill jobs (e.g. rebuilding electric motors) have gone this way in the west.

Actually, in developing countries there is a lot of money to be made by optimizing fruit picking and pruning afterwards.

Mango farms are a pretty good example. Old farmers have grown their trees very tall and let the fruit grow as big as possible. It is very difficult for pickers to harvest the fruit. If you train the pickers to prune the trees and ensure a consistent size you can often plant more trees, have each tree bear more but smaller fruit with superior yield.

Because of the decreased height fruit pickers can harvest more fruit per shift and the risk of fruit falling to the ground and only being used in food processinng is minimized. Overall it's a net gain for poor farmers and fruit pickers in Africa and consumers benefit from a greater availability mangos.

These techniques are very common in developed countries though.

Salaries for fruit pickers didn't go up because demand for fruit pickers didn't go up. The farmers knew that they were screwed no matter what they did- if they paid the pickers more and tried to pass the costs on, they wouldn't be able to sell the fruit, and if they paid the pickers more but ate the cost, they wouldn't actually net a profit. So they were going to lose money no matter what, and did it in the least-impact way possible (let the fruit rot).

> So they were going to lose money no matter what, and did it in the least-impact way possible (let the fruit rot).

and at least that option might help fertilize their fields for next season.

I think pay is largely a matter of power. Even bad managers get paid well. CEOs that drive their company to bankruptcy often still get massive bonuses on the way out. There are lots of people who want to do that job, and the people doing it aren't always good at it, yet still get paid a ton.

The worst paid are always the most powerless.

Of course having rare skills that are in high demand also gives you power, but it's one of many kinds of power that can give you more control over your own salary.

> This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No.

Sad that this is one of the plot points of The Grapes Of Wrath and is still happening today.

To a first approximation: the value of the labor is a ceiling on how much you can be paid to do it. The availability of laborers determines the floor of the price of labor.

> Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up. Did farmers increase salaries in order to get more fruit pickers? No.

Probably because raising the wages would cost them more than the loss of the harvest since the price per tonne of fruit was already decided by long term contracts and there were no financial penalties for spoilage / mis-harvests in these contracts.

Ever since food became a global commodity, the conditions in food manufacturing became a ruthless race to the bottom - with the worst offender being meatpacking. The John Oliver segment last weekend was horrifying to watch, even from an European viewpoint (where we also have a history of exploitation and animal cruelty, but nowhere even close to that).

So, why didn't the growers offer better wages to get their fruit picked? Were they ambivalent because of insurance? Or perhaps they thought raising wages was futile? Some other reason?

price elasticity[1] might be an issue. Fruit picking is seasonal work, so even if the wage were attractive you'll have a tough time finding people willing to quit their current job just so they earn slightly more picking fruits.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_supply

> This isn't even the case. Last season in my country fruits were rotting in the fields cause nobody was there to pick them up.

It is the case, but leaves some assumptions on the table. Namely that you understand that price exists to be a deterrent, and when price rises too high you will decide that you don't need something anymore.

The fruits rotted in the fields because they weren't worth picking. There was no need to pay anyone to do a job that wasn't deemed worthwhile to do in the first place.

> The fruits rotted in the fields because they weren't worth picking.

That may be true, but why weren't they worth picking? In agriculture, large buyers often enforce artificially low prices (monopsony). Even if farmers were willing to pay pickers more, there's no point if the buyers refuse to pay a fair price that accounts for increased wages.

> but why weren't they worth picking?

The exact same reason. As the price rises in the grocery store, you and I stop buying those fruits. When we stop buying them, there is no need to produce even more of what is already not being purchased.

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