Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilwilson | Hacker News Reader

But the economist doesn’t mention poor quality and insufficiently paid jobs - which should be eliminated by competitive pressure. Which is the actual problem.

Firms can’t get workers because they don’t actually have a sustainable job to offer. In a functioning capitalist system encouraging those firms to die would be seen as positive.

Firms should have to compete for labour. Not getting labour and the existential risk that poses to firms drives automation and innovation. They are capitalists supposedly. Deploy some capital, or close and get out the way so somebody else will.

Venerating individual businesses stops capitalism working. It’s time to give up believing firms have a right to exist and that they are doing anybody a favour by existing. Let competition do its job of getting rid of the bad and encouraging the good.

View on HN

Talking about economists. Personally I can't wrap my head around why the person that provides the food and the basic services I need so I don't starve, or otherwise die of basic needs doesn't deserve at least as much as an economist who's basically the same as a modern day fortune teller or someone who builds the next gen photo/video sharing app.

Because we get payed based on perceived value on the market and not based on utility, importance and certainly not based on positive impact. All of these things are incredibly hard to measure and I don't think there is a reasonable objective way to evaluate them.

The more people are willing and able to do a job, the less is the perceived marked value, especially if they are not organized in unions to assert their interests.

Now from what I know unions are generally frowned upon in the US for some reason or another (perhaps because of their obsession with capitalist ideology), and reports say that large corporations are actively oppressing the formation of unions.

So what is left is simply trying to avoid work and perhaps hoping that some companies will come around and provide reasonable working conditions and pay or to start businesses themselves, while trying to survive the bullying tactics of said companies.

This has always bothering me: that people think the money you make and the contribution you make to society is the same. Sometimes it is completely detached. There are jobs which pay in a enormous amount of money but which create negative value to society.

It is interesting, that in free-market economics, you get many of the same effects as in nature and evolution. There will always be parasites.

The problem today, are all the people so convinced of the perfection of free-market economics, that they will insist that even the parasites somehow serves a purpose.

That's because the money you make is a defined by your position in a competitive political hierarchy. Your "contribution" is defined entirely by political status.

The more power you have over others, the more money you make. That's the real "free market" definition of value.

There's a reason climate damage and other critically important side-effects of market dysfunction are dismissed as ignorable "externalities". They have little or no immediate political effect and no independent political agency. Therefore in market terms their value is either zero or negative.

The physical reality is that the game board is on fire and unless something changes the entire game will be over soon.

The US, at least, has not been a free market for a long time.

What we have is some form of (heavily financialized) crony statism, where a bunch of well connected monopolies milk consumers shamelessly (health "care", higher education, etc).

> So what is left is simply trying to avoid work and perhaps hoping that some companies will come around and provide reasonable working conditions and pay or to start businesses themselves, while trying to survive the bullying tactics of said companies.

There is no getting around the fact supply and demand = price. If society wants to change the price, society needs to work on moving the supply and demand curves. So what is left is providing people with the information on the market, such as publicizing pay rates (Colorado has made a good start here), and then providing people with the means to get an education so they can provide the type of labor that the market is willing to pay more for.

Another option is unions, although that is more difficult when the global supply of labor is so high and people around the world are willing to work for 10x less. In this case, tariffs are an option, but then you get into politics and there are other consequences to consider.

Honest question. Do you know what an economist is? I'm pretty sure you don't.

Source: I'm an economist.

No idea why you're being downvoted/flagged on this one. The real answer is that the one who provides basic services is far more easily replaced than the economist.

Economics does have a fair amount of fortune telling. I believe the entire field of technical analysis is bunk and really is "fortune telling" but I think that economists have a lot of value to add outside of fortune telling BS.

Capitalist economies don’t pay based on some moral analysis of what people “deserve”, they work on how much utility you provide to people, how much competition there is to provide that utility, and how wealthy the people are to whom you provide that utility.

Personally I am surprised that the idea of pure capitalism is still preached at all. I don’t understand why.

No one is in a capitalist system. Democracies ensure that - politicians will act to ensure the interest of their supporters.

As a result there will always be tariffs, subsidies or tax breaks to support different types of commercial work.

Is it just a rhetorical tool? Some times it reads as if people are actually arguing based on a pure capitalist model and it’s confusing.

Mostly because capitalism can afford to make mistakes. If the government makes a mistake then everyone will have to live with that mistake. If a company makes a mistake, it has the risk of going bankrupt.

Of course pure capitalism is not realistic nor desirable in practice.

> No one is in a capitalist system.

We are all in a capitalist system. Capitalism doesn't mean free markets, it has a much wider definition than that, and doesn't require free markets.

His previous sentence mentions "pure capitalism" which makes the one you quoted make more sense. No one lives in a purely capitalist system, but it is hel up as an ideal. Which is bizarre, as it would be a pretty hellish thing to live under. There's a very good reason why our capitalism is hybridused with democracy and state run services. And attempts since the late 80s/90s to move closer to a purely capitalist system seem to mainly have caused greater inequality and inefficiency.

> His previous sentence mentions "pure capitalism" which makes the one you quoted make more sense.

I read it as, "why talk about pure capitalism when we're not even in capitalism?" I've seen far more conflation of the two by commenters on HN than not, so maybe that's clouding my reading.

The more common name for this is Anarco Capitalism. Or ancap. It’s somewhat of a meme on the internet because of how absurd situations become with no government or central police force.

Just a definition check. By 'purely capitalist system', does that mean a world where all of the means of production are privately owned eg: the non-existence of worker-owned corps, co-ops, or any government-owned production?

> Is it just a rhetorical tool?

It is an ideology that is used to solidify and concentrate power.

"Free trade agreements" that actually lower trade interaction and increase the foothold of multinational corporations in foreign countries to outsource work and avoid taxation.

"Competition" for the workers, while large corporations get massive tax cuts, bailouts and lobby for regulations that benefit them and are a burden for SMBs.

"Market innovation" that is largely superficial and stands of the shoulders of giants, researchers who are paid by the taxpayer.

(I'm being hostile and uncharitable here to get a point across and give some counterweight to the status quo.)

> Democracies ensure that - politicians will act to ensure the interest of their supporters.

Will they? I think they are more like adults promising sweets for breakfast to children if they behave (vote). Not really in their interest if you think about it.

Supporters =/= voters

The supporters are the PACs and special interest lobbying groups exchanging funding for political achievements.

Voters are just the marginalized workers whose favor needs to be curried every so often to keep critical analysis of our sociopolitical economic reality in check.

I think Ha-Joon Chang said it best, that a Free Market isn't actually free because every market has rules that the buyers and sellers have to follow for it to function at all.

> Firms can’t get workers because they don’t actually have a sustainable job to offer. In a functioning capitalist system encouraging those firms to die would be seen as positive.

Unfortunately - similar as with housing - most people currently don't have a meaningful choice between having a job or not or paying through their nose for rent or not, which is something that way too many employers and landlords exploit as a natural consequence of a captive market.

The obvious solution would be a livable minimum wage and government provided housing or at the very least severe rent control and building out of infrastructure in rural areas, but all of that is often simply decried as communist.

Minimum wage doesn't help in a system that is designed to produce fewer jobs than people that want to work. If you have 20 dogs and 19 bones, then one dog is always going to have to go without no matter what happens.

We don't need a minimum wage. We need a minimum job - the ability to sell your labour hours for a given price.

> We don't need a minimum wage. We need a minimum job - the ability to sell your labour hours for a given price.

Alternatively, we could look at what our ancestors dreamed of: utilizing automation to reduce the individual workload for everyone and spread it over more people. A future that is not 5x9-5 is possible. 4 workdays of 6h each with a 30min break at halftime would be a starter.

We would however first need to re-define our culture that derives much of our sense of "self worth" from our employment status, and we would need to think about which jobs we actually want as society... IMO we could cut out a large part of the plague that is advertising, most of the insurance industry (very easy: forcibly fuse all kinds of insurance provider into a single non-profit government entity - added benefit, rates could get massively lower due to less overhead) and likely all of far-distance truck transportation by expanding rail coverage and capacity.

> > We don't need a minimum wage. We need a minimum job - the ability to sell your labour hours for a given price.

> Alternatively, we could look at what our ancestors dreamed of: utilizing automation to reduce the individual workload for everyone and spread it over more people. A future that is not 5x9-5 is possible. 4 workdays of 6h each with a 30min break at halftime would be a starter.

This won't solve the initial problem. The amount of work which gets done defines the amount of activity in the economy, but unemployment is compatible with a range of amounts of activity.

If the goal is to keep about 3% of those who want jobs and could work unemployed, then you will achieve that whether people are working 20 hour weeks or 40 hour weeks. (Actually, the target unemployment is a lot higher than that, because there's plenty of people who want jobs and could work, but who the labor market prefers to redefine as "can't work" or "doesn't want to work". If two people can do the same job, but one person can only do it at half the pace, then we often exclude them from the market.)

> This won't solve the initial problem. The amount of work which gets done defines the amount of activity in the economy, but unemployment is compatible with a range of amounts of activity.

Right now we have a lot of people that are not working at all even if they wanted... in many households, women stay home for childcare, there are people who don't even register for unemployment because of all sorts of (sometimes willful!) bureaucratic impediments.

By reducing the expected per-person workload to 20 hours a week, society would enable all these people to contribute.

How about..a salary based on the ressources you need/want to survive...so that those who work less (indirectly contributing more to society by sharing their job, childcare, volunteering or just being mentally healthy enough to think of the"next big thing" and directly by ecologically diminishing consumption) get paid more ...? Tax the higher earners and subsidise the "work less" ...then suddenly wages and automation go up as businesses have to compete for a diminishing work pool...

I personally have moved out of the 1st world to avoid the work plague, I help my kids grow up and dig a beautiful garden...my conscience cringes at the "work ethic" which I perceive as government propaganda to help milk peoples time and keep them politically silent... the easiest solution to global warming is to work less, we saw it with covid (at least a whispering) but maybe politicians are avoiding doing anything realistic because...power corrupts...

"utilizing automation to reduce the individual workload for everyone and spread it over more people."

Which is a fallacy of composition - unless you believe you can turn a dumpster diver into a brain surgeon just by applying some amount of training.

It's known as the appeal to fungibility and it doesn't stack up.

Jobs are becoming more skilled, not less, which means that we all have to deploy our hours in solidarity with the skilled who we want to work a full week.

Otherwise they will just stop on Tuesday, once they have made enough for themselves, and have the rest of the week off.

> Which is a fallacy of composition - unless you believe you can turn a dumpster diver into a brain surgeon just by applying some amount of training.

So... take the workload of one brain surgeon, and hire two brain surgeons with 20 hours a week each?

Of course society would need to (drastically) expand training capacity, but it would be better off in the end.

That's precisely my point. There aren't enough people who are capable of being brain surgeons. The majority of us cannot become one. We're just not good enough.

That was always the failure of the 'socially necessary labour time' idea. It assumes complete fungibility amongst people, and that isn't the case.

Somewhere around 70% of restaurants fail within 5 years, which seems like a reasonable amount of competitive pressure to eliminate bad restaurant jobs, which obviously hasn't been the case.

The market won't solve this.

It sounds a bit like the're saying benefits are the lever we control to balance between one disaster and another.

On one side there is inflation which ruins the economic recovery (too generous benefits) and on the other side you have mass suffering (too stingy benefits). As the primary driver of the shortage (the fear of COVID) goes down, we also need to scale back benefits while maintaining that delicate balance between too generous and too stingy. And we can't stop decreasing benefits until people begin to accept those less desirable jobs again. Failure to do this would push us over into inflation.

And here I was thinking that undesirable jobs have to pay more to attract employees.

Instead, because the power relationship between companies and employees is imbalanced towards companies, who can afford to not hire a few employees while individual employees can't afford to starve, these employees have to accept suffering for a pittance because hey, there's a slight risk of inflation (while companies have been bailed out to the tune of a few trillion).

> the power relationship between companies and employees is imbalanced towards companies,

This is why low wage workers should unionise.

Most companies practice union busting.

well lets outlaw union busting and actually enforce it -> problem solved

Ah, but that's why companies employ political lobbying.

Moderate inflation doesn't ruin economic recovery.

Italy and Greece both had low or shrinking inflation since 2016 and their economies are down the gutter.

The rest of the EU that has reasonable inflation is doing very well with 2%+ growth well above inflation.

> Failure to do this would push us over into inflation.

Can you explain why you think this would happen?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com