Will the rich world’s worker deficit last?
economist.com
economist.com
I think a lot of those incentives are changing. My take on work is that it's getting more exploitive, more administrative, less fun and less satisfying. Between politics and policies and management, work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs. It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before. And it's my theory anyway that a lot of people have had enough.
A simpler way to say it is that more people would rather exist outside society, in a sense, and do their own thing, than put up with all the BS that comes with working for someone else. Even if the pay is worse. I bet most Uber Eats drivers make less than fast food employees, but I also bet they have less non work corporate BS to deal with, and outside whatever algorithmic unfairness can work as they want. In corporate jobs, the situation is magnified because the requirements of conformity are much greater, but so generally are the options.
Maybe I’m showing my age, but I have to disagree hard with this idea that working conditions are worse in 2021 than they were in the past.
Modern jobs are quite comfortable and flexible relative to what was expected a few decades ago. Companies today bend over backwards to retain employees. I’m not exactly old, but I’m old enough to have experienced a significant shift toward better treatment of workers.
At the upper end (e.g. us engineers earning above-average wages), the level of employee pampering we get at modern tech companies feels unreal, even outside of the stereotypical FAANG offices. The amount of flexibility, respect, and attention showered on us (meaning tech workers) now is miles ahead of working conditions decades ago.
Just ask anyone who worked through past recessions what it’s like to work in a crowded job market with far more workers than jobs and where everyone is trying to outperform each other to avoid the next round of layoffs. It’s nothing like our job market today where you can walk out of one company and into another in a matter of weeks or days.
For the white collar, everything has gotten better.
For the blue and especially pink collar, worse.
I understand your perspective as it's one that I shared, nearly 20 years ago. I was a minimum wage laborer for a few years, and when getting my first desk job, I couldn't believe how easy it was, and yet how so many complained. And it's only gotten more surreal since. When your back hurts from shoveling all day, it's really hard to sympathize with someone in an office who complains they didn't get a perfect review. The one thing it did teach me is that people just like to grieve, whether it's from black lung or a small monitor.
It definitely gave me humility, and perspective. Service workers are treated as disposable trash, to this day, by both their employer and customers. I'm beyond excited they're quitting.
Just the transition to modern romex with push in receptacles saves tons of time and effort in the part of the job you spend 90% of the time doing.
It's still manual labor but it's much less strenuous than it used to be and it's also much more efficient.
I guess I was thinking of the lower tier blue collar laborers, where I had worked (landscaping, auto parts, etc) and especially 'pink collar', which I did not know existed until I googled it.
If you will excuse me,
<cheap quip>
it is also case that the transition from toilet breaks to peeing in used soda bottles is adding crucial minutes of productivity to the Amazon warehouse worker's day.
</cheap quip>
I think the different experiences are two sides of the same coin: an increasing proportion of the working class are seeing a relentless pressure to optimise productivity in a way reminiscent of Taylor's Scientific Management. Where the setup needs the worker to be listened too, such as your light manufacturing example, this results in cumulative improvement. Otherwise, the tendency is to allow the workplace to become nakedly exploitative.
Not an innovation in the field per-se but nevertheless an innovation that improves the daily routine of many people working in the field is the mobile phone and especially the very cheap data and voice subscriptions (compared to 10-15 years ago, say).
Just yesterday I had to call a locksmith at my apartment so that he would fix something at the bathroom door. During his entire intervention (45 minutes - one hour) he was also on his phone (via headphones) talking with one of his other coworkers and at some point with (what seemed to be) a close relative. That reminded me seeing the same scene with a public cleaning worker from our city talking with someone close on a phone (friend or relative) while raking the autumn leaves in front of my building.
Again, it's not something that improves their "productivity" or anything like that but imo it reduces some of the alienation of being cut off from your friends and close relatives for at least 8 or 9 hours a day because of work.
2. In a decent union, like local 6, it's not bad work. It's much better working conditions, and pays much more than the other trades.
3. If you are working non-union--it's a bitch. Terrible working conditions, low pay, supply your own tools, exploitive owners.
4. Yes--Romex, Scothlocks, and MC Cable, revolutionized the industry. It revolutionized it for the contractor.
5. Meaning they (the contractor) just except to you to work quicker.
6. In the old days, with knob/tube wiring, and soldering, the profession was more of an art. Today--it's about speed.
7. Today, a union electrician is expected to wire a new residential home in one day. (Believe me that's backbreaking work.)
8. While working as a electrician today it is much safer today, but the work is just as hard for non-union electricians. Non-union electricians work very hard. (In the past the death rate was so high for electricians, only Irish immigrants were doing the work.)
9. If any aimless youth reads this, and likes construction, get you C-10 license, or get into a union. Become a electrician, or elevator mechanic. Only use a non-union job as experience for your C-10 license.
(Come from a family of electricians, and 1 year working at Packbell park as an apprentice. I found another career, but do miss the regular income/benefits.)
Then I had periods where I’d crushed the before time, and could get away with walking the street shooting photography for 4 hours, as long as I didn’t have meetings. My attainment wasn’t that different in either case, I just got put on easier stuff, because I’d made it.
The shitty part is how easily the wrong manager can throw you back into that first place and effectively squeeze you, if you’re not an unequivocal top performer. In the past, I don’t get the sense that companies were as ruthlessly efficient and eager to cut out people who were good enough, but not excellent. It seems like it was easier to hang around, whereas now you have to grind and be the best for a nontrivial period of time to earn the right to relax a bit.
It is not a good position to be in if you wanted to treat an employee like shit. There is far less leverage.
Or having to bring your wife to job interviews...
Or having to wear a suit and tie :-P
or ...
or ...
It really does seem better then I remember it 'last century' :-D
Though - to give Perot his due, when his employees got trapped in Iran...EDS planned and executed a military style raid on a foreign country to get them back. You don't see that kind of loyalty from employers any more.
Some modern jobs.
On the other end of the spectrum you have Amazon drivers pissing in bottles--something that a steel mill laborer would never have had to do.
Are you really suggesting that laboring at a steel mill decades ago was a more comfortable job than being an Amazon worker? That's incredibly out of touch.
Even modern steel mills, with all of our technology and safety regulations, are difficult jobs. That's why they pay more than being an Amazon warehouse employees or drivers.
Older steel mill jobs were absolutely hellish. The struggles at modern Amazon jobs have been greatly exaggerated or cherry-picked in the news. There's no comparison between the two.
This might be true but the comparison is profoundly misleading.
We should instead contrast the improvement in quality of working life with the improvement of other jobs and society in general.
Humanity (and US especially) has amassed an incredible amount of wealth, knowledge and technology in the last decades.
Switching from employment to "gigs" is as huge step backward and the quality of life is dropping for many people.
It's sometimes a bit too easy to look at the past through sepia-colored lenses, and assume that the present must be worse. As an antidote to that tendency, it's worth reading this description of the actual reality of working in one of Andrew Carnegie's steel mills at the turn of the 20th century:
> Indeed, flames, noise, and danger ruled the Carnegie mills. "Protective gear" consisted only of two layers of wool long-johns; horrible injuries were common. Wives and children came to dread the sound of factory whistles that meant an accident had occurred.
> "They wipe a man out here every little while," a worker said in 1893. "Sometimes a chain breaks, and a ladle tips over, and the iron explodes.... Sometimes the slag falls on the workmen.... Of course, if everything is working all smooth and a man watches out, why, all right! But you take it after they've been on duty twelve hours without sleep, and running like hell, everybody tired and loggy, and it's a different story."
(Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carnegi...)
I've worked blue collar jobs and I've worked white collar jobs, and I'd take Bezos over Carnegie any day. And the very fact that sounds like such faint praise highlights how far we've come.
Also, aside from risk in objective terms, which was surely a consequence of technology and level of material wealth available to some degree -- how seriously did the society and culture generally take the issue?
The real issue isn't whether people have to pee in a bottle sometimes--it's the nature of the business--but how prevalent it is. That is, do the drivers on routes with available facilities have the time to make use of them? But that's a far more nuanced question that doesn't make for good sound bites.
Anecdotally, at the very start of the pandemic I had read a similar complaint from someone whose relative worked in delivery - with offices (and retail) on the lockdown there were fewer potential pit stops along the route.
Multiple comments have pointed out how this is wrong, but I have one more to add to the list.
Look up Henry Ford's Sociological Department. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class, but in order to qualify for his $5 per day wage you had to subject yourself to random inspections by the company's Sociological Department. This meant your employer would routinely check up on all aspects of your personal life. Your pay was docked if you weren't married, your home was too dirty, you didn't save enough of your wages, you didn't speak English well enough, your kids weren't regularly attending school, and if you got drunk after work. Nothing employers do today comes close to that.
Employers can demand you give them urine, blood or hair samples to prove that you haven't smoked a joint sometime within the last 30 days. They can give you psychological assessments, and personal value assessments, and deny you employment based on the results. Sometimes they assess the level of your conformity, by assessing how well you'll fit into their culture.
They can deny employment based on your credit score, or via private background checking companies that don't have to give them accurate information about you. They can use your biometrics to track you, and they can hand those biometrics to private companies like Clearview AI[1] to track you outside of work. While you're at work, they can point several cameras at you, recording everything you do and say from multiple angles, and storing it indefinitely. Some companies will spy on you with monitoring apps on your phones and computers, a risk that goes up exponentially if you need certain apps to do your job, or if you're using company equipment. If they don't like what you're doing, they'll fire you.
Given, you need to have leverage on the working market of course. But if you have, not using it would not be to your benefit.
And as I said further down this thread:
Things aren't universally better and they aren't getting better quick enough for most of our liking, but let's not ignore that improvements have been made.
Especially back then, but even now, it is thought that married men are, on average, are more likely to be the settled type. Dependable and boring. It was not a belief idiosyncratic to Ford. I think the idea is the man has children and a wife to feed to keep him in place and coming in to work, and also to keep him so busy and tired he stays out of trouble.
Whether this weird psychological theorizing is true of course, I don't know. (Married men do die in car crashes less, today.) See all that psychometry stuff some employers do. Seems no more reliable.
Today's employers do similar things in subtler ways. After all, it's been 100+ years, things have changed. Lots of things have changed including the average quality of life, and the Sociological Department has kept up and changed with the times too.
You pointed some of this out yourself. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class. I bet upwards of 90% of corporate workers today would agree with a statement that Ford was such a champion. This convincing by way of constant Ford-praising literate is a first step in itself.
Sociological Departmentalism now manifests itself in subtler ways, like superiors throwing out casual questions about your personal lives, "team dinners" where people bring their spouses, and the ever so lightly dropped "see you early in the office tomorrow!" at the end (never "you must be tired – don't come to the office tomorrow, take some time off!").
I would invite you to consider the possibility that the intents of such practices have not changed since Ford's time, the methods have.
Things aren't universally better and they aren't getting better quick enough for most of our liking, but let's not ignore that improvements have been made.
To take your examples concretely – sure, you won't see your pay docked, but you may find that the teammate who does bring their spouse along and participates in the bullshit rituals gets consistent pay rises that you don't.
Or at least, this used to happen routinely prior to the pandemic making it impractical to conduct such affairs unnecessarily blending work and life. Yet another reason why a lot of management is itching to "get back to the office".
I’m not suggesting that corporate enforcement of behavior is the best way to go. But we should obviously do it for things that are proven to work before we do it for things that are untested.
They say this about a lot of things, but it’s hard to imagine a worse “target metric” than marriage.
I’d argue we lean too heavily in the direction of thinking everyone should figure life out by themselves with no external pressure. This hurts young people, who lack experience and the benefit of hindsight, and less intellectually gifted people, who may lack judgment and impulse control.
People these days indeed actively give destructive advice. Thinking of abandoning your stable long term relationship? “Follow your heart!”
And now we have ideological inspections.
What? In 2020, 50-78% of Americans earned just enough to pay their bills each month. Worldwide, a poll found that 85% of people are disengaged at work. I guarantee you that most people work -- even work long hours -- because they have no real choice.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown...
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/212045/world-broken...
We're in a weird and fortunate spot because we work as in a well capitalized industry as highly specialized skilled artisans. So often we get autonomy, leverage, and a good paycheck. This is not the experience for workers in general.
I would add that it's misleading to generalize the experience of american tech workers to tech workers at large. Anywhere else, you're most likely just as underpaid and overworked as the rest.
You can buy actual homes for $10-20k in the US, youtube has told me, with enough land to grow enough food to sustain yourself. It's certainly not impossible to survive on a very small amount of money (until you die of a horribly expensive health problem).
That might not be the path most of us choose, but it's still there.
One of the reasons food is cheap in the west is the automation, but the machines used for that automation are big and expensive, and only make sense if you’re feeding a lot of people rather than your immediate family. That leaves you with inefficient farming, hard work even though the $€£ cost is low.
A cheap home and a part-time job to buy necessities, letting you take advantage of economies of scale and specialisation? That can work, but it’s rare to find a cheap home with access to the labour market — where the jobs exist, you compete against those willing to work longer hours as a customer in housing market, and where you rely on remote work you risk being outsourced to someone willing to do ten times the hours for a tenth the hourly rate in the labour market.
It is questionable what the signal of that statement is. I know people earning top tier salaries who can "just pay their bills". Truth is that their bills cover their mortgages on which savings they plan to retire -- If one count in adding money to you savings account, the I reckon 100% person of all people earn just enough to cover their bills.
My take is that a highly productive globalized industrial society necessitates high abstraction of work and supply chains.
Buying a chair on an e-commerce site has many layers, each with its own sublayers (shipping <- fulfillment <- e-commerce site <- payments <- warehousing <- distribution <- manufacturing <- supply chain <- design <- product research <- market research — I'm skipping a bunch). Each layer and sublayer has its own bureaucracy to keep things running and to interface with other layers.
A pair of pants will be touched by fashion consumer researchers, fashion designers, textile designers, product managers, supply chain managers, marketing managers, analysts, social media managers, advertisers, merchandisers, software engineers, accountants, data scientists (clothing companies are turning to ML to assess fashion trends and demand), and many, many more. All to make it possible for you discover and buy a cheap pair of pants and have it delivered in 2 days.
Because of its efficiencies, the high abstraction economy outcompeted and replaced the old low abstraction economy. The driving force is the fact that it's easy for people to indirectly 'vote' for a high abstraction economy by overwhelmingly preferring to buy cheaper and more stuff; but it's very difficult for people to 'vote' for a low abstraction economy, even if people will occasionally buy something handmade.
I think that this force will endlessly drive the economy to become ever more abstract. Consumers want cheaper, better stuff. The economy will become more abstract, evolving ever narrower niche roles in order to serve consumer wants.
People will find themselves in those ever narrowing roles in order to afford the good life. And there is no low abstraction economy to flee to for the simple life because it has been outcompeted and replaced.
We could have a way out of this if we restructured our economy so that decision making power didn't solely rest with owners of capital, and taxed companies ina more strongly progessive manner to prevent winner-takes-all situations. That would enable companies to make decisions that were not solely for financial reasons and allow for more diversity in business models and practices.
It's not some abstract evil ideal that drives the market. It's people doing purchases.
Now, good markets need good (perfect to be precise) information. If people knew this is where we would end up (say most production moved to Asia), would they have made different choices (say to preserve manufacturing in US EU with better worker conditions)?
I would argue our economic system is just fine. But we fail in political, educational and ethical issues. Especially ethical, people know about horrible conditions in sweatshops, still there are massive queues to shop at low cost brands. I feel clothing as the most egregious, because there are decent alternative choices.
Right, but the fact that our economic outcomes are decided by consumers is an artifact of our economic system, not some necessary truth. There are a lot if upsides to such a system, but as discussed in this thread there are also downsides.
> I would argue our economic system is just fine. But we fail in political, educational and ethical issues
I disagree here. Our economic system makes sweatshop clothes cheaper (we could for example regulate or raise tariffs against them). That means that making thw ethical choice becomes a sacrifice of sorts, and not only that but it puts people who don't make that choice at a comparative advantage (they have more money left over), which effectively makes their influence over the rest of the economy greater.
We should be doing better in terms of political and ethical education, but we should also be ssetting up economic incentives to do the ethical thing not the opposite.
What if people just don't care?
I actually expect we'll have two broad classes of society which value more or less abstraction. A few enclaves like Singapore surrounded by a lot of Amish country.
I hadn't realized until this thread that this is actually everywhere. Our supply chains are nothing more than nested Matryoshka dolls of tightly bound interfaces. The cartel formed by these platforms are the most profitable way to be in business. Everyone is seeking to become a platform that others expend energy building on top of.
Now that these interfaces are tightly bound, Metcalfe's law and it's associated n^2 communication costs mean that one participant can't make a change unless someone down the line changes. And they can't change unless someone else changes. It's the exact same problem as refactoring a big ball of mud.
Sure we have, serfdom. Serfs were not only expected to provide labour to their “employers”, but to fight for them, believe what they believe, and pledge their fealty.
Like serfs, and unlike the period from the industrial revolution to the postwar years, it’s becoming less common for people to change careers, an occupation being more than a job and becoming an identity. Sure we might change employers frequently, but it is not often (and is in fact a spectacle) when someone makes a drastic change of occupation.
Maybe it’s the cultural distance between the 90s and today. Or maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood for it.
I do think it covered some interesting ground and gave me a better understanding of the 90s in tech.
Occupation being an identity is a very long tradition though (going all the way to surnames). If anything, social media allowed ordinary people to express themselves outside of - and in disconnection from - their professional environment. Maybe this is part of why people are disassociating from their employers to some extent.
I think it’s as natural as there being leaders of packs. Some people have specific qualities making them better than another person in a specific endeavor. That other person might be better in another area. Unless a hermit, it makes sense there was specialization and we don’t do much pursue jacks-of-all-trades.
>"social media allowed ordinary people to express themselves outside of..."
In a limited fashion, yes, but speak of something your employer disagrees with and one may regret that take as unrelated to doing your job it may be.
That was never expected. It was never going to be expected. Fighting was much too prestigious for serfs to be doing it.
> believe what they believe
This changed over time. Mostly serfs were too unimportant for their non-Christian beliefs to matter. But it was always a formal expectation, and as the centuries went by it did develop into an actual expectation.
> and pledge their fealty.
Indeed. This is the difference between a W2 worker and a contractor; it escapes me why so much public rhetoric focuses on W2 status as if getting it were a victory for the employee.
I think the industrial world would love to disagree. Working at a factory my grandma would have carefully regulated break times, food times, etc. All controlled by a central clock for everyone on shift.
It makes sense when you consider factory line workers as part of the machine, but it's also kinda bullshit from a human perspective.
And that was after the big wins of the labor movement in the early 1900's. Imagine how bad it was in the late 1800's.
The new innovation our generation introduced is that because everyone is supposed to be following their dream and passion, you not only have to be a good worker, you also have to love it. If you don't, you are expected to perform the part of someone who does.
Charlie Chaplin satirized this in his 1936 film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)
I see this quite a bit on HN (the other day someone was saying to no fanfair that he doesn't work because he doesn't like the corporate setting) and other parts of the internet, enough so to assume it must be true, but this notion really confuses me, as it's certainly never been a choice for myself.
Genuinely interested, maybe I'm missing a trick in life, how would you pay for rent, food, electricity, ect... I do genuinely think when I read things like this or see things casually mentioned in the news that there's some alternative route in life nobodies ever told me about
As a person who spend most of my life studying on just a little income my expenses are only slowly increasing. Much slower than my earnings.
My guess is if one got a permanent job early on it might be hard to imaging how to live frugally.
So yeh, might just be a waiting game.
If you look at median net worth of individuals. You'll see that over 50% of people have enough money to live for years without working. Hence, the "most people" phrase. https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-ame....
There are plenty of people who feel like they have to live in a high cost of living city. And plenty of people who feel like they have to drive a new car and live in a 4 bedroom house and take their family to Disney World. But those are all choices people make in how they want to live.
Maybe most people do have 350k in savings though, but yeh, sadly I do not
Maybe you’ve already heard of tha blog, maybe not. In a nutshell: rethink your life and your expenses so you’re able to save 50+% of your income. Put it into low cost ETFs (which particular one depends on what’s available where you live), and after a while (13 years at 50%, much less at more saving), you’ll have the option to not work anymore and still cover all your life expenses etc.
Not selling anything, not looking to start a debate, just mentioning it because parent might be interested or curious.
If you are able to spend 300k a year, you will be working until end of your days anyways.
I don't even think I'm badly paid, but 300k a year is silly money
Cheers!
That journey i took 10yrs ago took me all over the world eventually, and reinforced my pre-trip skeptism of what success in life was. To me, climbing the corporate ladder simply meant trading my time for more money and more stress.
So while others looked at me and skoffed at the 80$k i spent travelling the world for 2 years in a search for meaning... I now look at a post-covid world and take solace that i did it. I did it, just before the world changed, forever. I saw the world, the coral reefs, the rivers, the rainforests, before climate change, people destroyed them. No matter how much money you eventually get, or how many peers you impress, you cannot get that experience that I had.
And thats really what you are doing by chasing the startup dream. Your trading your life for status and money amoung your peers.
I came to the realisation that what drives me in life not my peers. it was love.... as i travelled around the world and saw poor families with not much nestled into natural environments that provided for them i saw satisfaction. They had a balance. They were poor, but balanced. They took joy in the love that they could give eachother and sharing that time with eachother reinforced that.
So fast forward 10 yrs since that trip. What did i learn? Money cannot by love. No matter how popular you are with your peers, without love, you go home from that recognisition into an abyss of loneliness. You are rish, respected, but alone.
Eventually I came back to life and attempted one last startup venture before figuring that its time i start working Remotely and start living everyday the way i wanted. I love to code, and finding a company that is stimulating and open to this relationship means i will give them the best everyday, day or night.
I thank covid for giving others that shake they all needed. Remote working is much more accessible now. Covid hasnt changed my life at all. I literly have not felt a single day in lockdown, even while the majority of people around me snarl in fear (i also gave up TV, so havnt even seen a covid-news-cast yet). I sit here watching my peers panic buy, while i never go a day without something i desire. I gave away more toilet paper then i bought.
To all those who have those doubt. Dont ignore them. The risks are worth the rewards. You will be calmer inside.
Though if you really want to travel or raise a happy family, you're also going to need some of the latter. And for most, that means being part of the rat race to some extent, once beyond your early twenties.
This made me melancholic. I never thought the changes that we saw last two years would be so drastic. I hope we didn’t run out of time as a species yet.
You also have less incentive to be in the race if you do not have kids/spouse, which fewer people have.
> Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality, or as one says sometimes, our "personality package", for something. Now, this is not so true for the manual workers. The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile. But what you might call the "symbolpushers" , that is to say, all the people who deal with figures, with paper, with men, who manipulate - to use a better, or nicer, word - manipulate men and signs and words, all those today have not only to sell their service but in the bargain they're to sell their personality, more or less. There are exceptions.
-- Erich Fromm, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu-7UDT0Xe4&t=94s
I wonder if part of it is exposure to alternatives. Once upon a time, your awareness of an alternate life was a movie, or newspaper article, or a friend showing you their travel photos. Now, if you are ever on social media, you face a bombardment of peers or randoms having long lunches during work hours, travelling around, in the sun, at the beach, etc - or maybe it's just my feed. Hard to feel like you have your work mix right if your daily vibe doesn't compare to the aggregated freedom.
I opted for smaller monetary rewards for working in a smaller company with extensive freedom. Stress is mostly positive when projects get released. I have paid vacations and sick days, industry is secure that I can probably work until I get my pension if I wanted to. You also get much more invested in the company and other employees.
I still recommend doing a corp run for a year or two to get to know this world. It also help to negotiate your rates. But I don't see how you would not get a dislike about how things are done. It also seem to attract a certain kind of person.
I could never do it justice here, but you might find it valuable knowing how and when people have very legitimately been making the same point (roughly) that you’re saying here for generations.
You need to spend your time doing something. If you aren't spending a good chunk of it making money, you may be spending too much of it blowing through money out of boredom.
I hypothesize that this is a significant part of why 2/3 of lottery winners are bankrupt within 5 years: They quit their job and start spending like there's no tomorrow. And then, oops, the money shockingly doesn't go very far when all you do every minute of every day is spend money like a drunken sailor.
In reality, they trade poor people problems for rich people problems and don't have rich people coping skills. They run out of money before developing them or they resist developing them because they are hesitant to be that cynical and jaded and they run out of money trying to prove to themselves that life does not boil down to "I've got dozens of friends and the fun never ends, that is as long as I'm buying."
Exactly. It might be hard to find peace and a sense of meaning in life without having some sort of responsibility, even if one thinks ultimate freedom is the lack of responsibility.
In some ways, I imagine being rich (without that being the almost coincidental side effect of a strong passion) and especially winning the lottery is for many going to be like throwing money into a bottomless pit.
Though that doesn't necessarily mean I would mind giving it a try...
The "society" created around the routines of most corporate jobs is artificial, inauthentic, and provides material comforts. Having death staring you down during a pandemic for this long is a good motivator for letting go of baggage, including said jobs, especially if material comforts were the main reason to stay in it.
As a result I took my savings and move back to India. Now I've a small farm here, since the market is soo inefficient in India specially for farm produce and labor abundant I am able to work only 1 hour a day and enjoy rest of my day on things I like.
In US and Europe proportion of smart people with access to resources is vastly more compared to India where either smart people lack resources or the ones with resources aren't smart enough.
wealth, or just money?
From my experience of seeing grumpy Deliveroo and Uber Eats drivers mouth off at poor fast food and restaurant employees when the food isn't ready yet, and the general way they drive on the streets, I don't agree with that sentiment at all.
I work as much as I do because I don't know what's going to happen next. Someone in my family could get sick. The economy could go into the crapper. I could live longer than normal (my parents are 90).
Probably the worst corporate BS I could imagine would be commuting an hour or more, and I'm lucky that my commute is less than 1/2 hour by bike.
I want a trip on one of these orbital space ships. Is there a space ship shortage?
We really need to empower all kinds of front-line workers to enforce reasonable boundaries with both customers and management.
So, not only there is no space ship shortage :) there is actually much bigger worker shortage, as I keep a billion positions open (I want slaves, of all kinds, especially with Wall Street experience) and can't fill them (I don't bother to try).
It’s a free rider problem of profitable corporations on labor of society.
It's not whining, it's a strategy, when interviewing costs relatively little. Even startups spend weeks of interviewing for a single candidate, because prevailing opinion is that it's more costly to hire a subpar employee than to do those interview rounds, even in a jurisdiction where laws allow firing with relative ease.
This also further divides people because of the consistent use of the "Welfare Queen" [1] stereotype by conservatives to vilify people on welfare.
0 - https://reason.com/2021/06/01/the-bipartisan-war-on-work/
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_queen#In_political_dis...
I know that sounds harsh but that's the reality that workers live with every day. Can't pay the prevailing rent? You have to sleep in the streets. Can't pay for medical insurance? You get to die from a treatable disease. Why should there be more consideration for businesses than there is for human beings?
As some businesses go out of business due to wages, that will put downward pressure on wages and keep things affordable for the remaining businesses.
They may be able to pay an increased wage when the rest of the economy catches. So it may be optimal for the economy as a whole to support businesses temporarily.
Why would companies raise wages now when they can wait a few months to see if the situation changes?
People seem upset by this, but if you have a free market economy, you should anticipate that actors will work in their own best interest.
Changing regulations around compensation will be much more effective versus hoping that a company will act on a specific moral principle.
I don’t think it’s obvious that large numbers of people are choosing to stay home and earn $0/hour instead of getting a job working $10/hour because they really wanted $15/hour. The worker shortage is a real phenomenon of more jobs existing than people in the workforce.
On the other hand, raising wages would produce inflationary pressure on everything from housing prices to food prices, which would force more people to get jobs just to survive. Not exactly what you meant, I know.
Of course it does. My wife doesn't work because there's nothing that particularly motivates her to work rather than doing her hobbies. If you offered her more money, it might motivate her to re-enter the work force.
And if you can get 100k without a degree people who would be in college will be in the work force instead.
That’s the theory at least.
But if don't pay labor, no one is going to buy your product at the end of the day. If you pay more for labour, that's more money to spend on product and services.
There's an optimum somewhere between the two.
Presenting only one side is a polical statement.
I don't really see how any of this is a bad thing. This has to happen from time to time for the economy to remain efficient. This is the phase in the cycle where the capital owners take their lumps and workers make big career making moves.
If you zoom in a little closer you can see lots of little victories happening all the time in the boarder economy. Lots of workers moving into better positions for more pay and leaving behind employers who can only find more expensive and less able replacements, if any at all. My personal observation is workers in service industry jobs seem more casual than a year and a half ago, less hurried, perhaps less fearful of losing a job than can be replaced in a few hours.
If I create a job that pays $100,000 per hour for making me a coffee whenever I ask, I assure you that plenty of people will come off the sidelines and apply for that job.
Others have correctly pointed out that the supply curve is not flat. But even if it were, well, economics is about the allocation of scarce resources that have alternate uses (Thomas Sowell's definition). If people are scarce, and they go where they produce the most value, and places where they would produce less value don't get filled, is that a problem? Isn't that exactly what you would want to happen?
There's something called the backward bending supply curve of labor. At some point, people work fewer hours because they make enough money that more money won't affect their quality of life. Various closures, and, interestingly, labor shortages, have given people fewer ways to spend their money, lowering the inflection point of the curve.
[1]: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_totaldeaths
No, 80% of them were 65 and older.
For people who are 65 this year, full retirement age (as defined by Social Security) is 66 years, 4 months.
And lots of people aren't able, financially, to retire ar “full" retirement age.
30% of deaths are from 85+, 27% for ages 75-84, 21% for ages 65-74
Source: same site as you https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographics
Do you have an example of this?
A shortage occurs when buyers want to pay more, and need to pay more for the market to clear, but cannot do so for some reason (the law, for example). A decent indicator of there being a shortage is if the recipient of a product or service is determined by a non-price based mechanism, such as a lottery or a needs-based determination, as the usual 'highest bidder wins' method is not possible.
If there is real competitiveness, a company that suffers shortages of an input (workers in this case), would see an increase in price and a fall in profits. Did your friend mentioned profits in the conversation?
Because I'm seeing a lot of this discussions where not even profits is mentioned. Including the article we are discussing by the way, where the word 'profits' doesn't appear.
It's also possible that certain businesses and products we've grown accustomed to, at the prices we are used to, are simply not viable anymore as the market changes.
The market giveth and the market taketh away. A lot of business owners complaining about a "labor shortage" love being pro free market when it works in their favor, but whine when it turns around on them.
For those with low skills, this can mean unemployment, even permanent one.
I think that a lot of the "worker shortage" is in fact companies being unwilling to understand that they are being outcompeted in the market, someone is able to make that 100 dollar product less costly and thus can attract more workers, or alternatively workers/resources cost less abroad.
Don't be so quick to think this. Society can't just poof into existence more qualified skilled workers. It takes years to train nurses and a decade or more to do so with M.Ds/O.Ds.
Right now, traveling nurses are being offered pretty insane salaries, up to and including low five figures a week. It hasn't helped bring more people in, or fixed the burnout. People are just traveling to work for the highest bidder. I suspect most are planning to leave the game after they've saved up enough money.
That said, in theory the US could raise wages enough to attract skilled professionals in from other countries. Except that the US also has extremely restrictive immigration laws and a housing shortage making it extremely difficult to pay people enough to live where they're needed.
> “jobs”
Employment, and employees, are not fungible - why do people (and more importantly: the news-media and the people elected to direct the economy) continue to speak of it as though it is?
And keep in mind, if you get paid minimum wage, your employer is telling you they'd pay you less if they could.
This is the crux, because what's happening is that housing is highly inflationary (especially in desirable locations) and wages are failing to match inflation, so entry level workers are being pushed further out to the boonies. Why would they commute all the way into the city centers if they don't actually pay better?
An interesting side effect of all the rampant real estate speculation and bidding wars is that cities are becoming dramatically more expensive to live in than the exurbs. I feel like eventually this will result in a much higher cost of living across the board as employers need to account for this difference in their pay scales. The entry level / service industry jobs in these places with insane housing prices will need to pay much better to attract workers, thus making these already expensive-to-live places even more expensive.
Perhaps it will eventually create some kind of equilibrium where new towns can provide some of the same quality of life benefits at a fraction of the cost since their real estate isn't so astronomical.
roommates are a critical social developmental step in your life.
They teach you how to negotiate boundaries without a direct authority figure.
They teach you how to live in a common space with somebody else.
roommates teach you that you must be responsible for your actions which affect the other people who live with you.
roommates teach you the importance of financial responsibility because when the rent is due you both need to pay up.
You may be lazy You may not want to do the dishes, but you know if you take that messy ass plate and you just throw it in the sink it will become a mountain of dirty ass shit and you owe it to somebody else to do your part.
If both of you hold up your end of the bargain and perform 3 seconds of work to place that dish in the dishwasher it avoids this tragedy of the commons.
roommates teach you that self-discipline is critical for a tolerable society.
E.g. Forget to pay your share of the rent when you live with a roommate? Room-mate yells at you. When you live alone you get an eviction notice.
Self-discipline is about the self after all. If you need another person there to be disciplined, then you are clearly not self-disciplined.
(That said, nothing wrong with roommates, it often makes financial sense and some people like having them, i just dont see the connection to responsibility)
But when housing costs are such that you have people in their late 20's and early 30's still living with roommates it seems like a societal problem.
This was the first potential explanation TFA examined. It said that this effect was "negligible":
> It is commonly believed that school closures have made it impossible for parents, particularly mothers, to take a job. The evidence for this is mixed, though. Analysis by Jason Furman, Melissa Kearney and Wilson Powell III concludes that extra joblessness among mothers of young children accounts for a “negligible” share of America’s employment deficit. Despite talk of a “shecession” early in the pandemic, in most rich countries the worker deficit for men remains larger.
The demand-side of the labor market simply isn't willing to pay what the supply-side expects, and is childishly throwing a tantrum that for once they have to compromise to market forces.
The so called "worker deficit" only exists below ~15-20/h. Above that there's no issue whatsoever.
It's a seller's market. Suck it up.
What are the market forces that led to this, when there wasn't a worker shortage just a little over a year ago?
Even without Covid this would have happened as low-income workers in many areas were either rapidly approaching being unequivocally priced out of living anywhere remotely near their work, or already were.
Covid just forced the issue sooner and faster, rather than letting it fester.
Why would anyone continue working for subsistence wages that can't even pay rent where they live and work? Their only sensible options are demanding more pay or leaving.
In major cities, with current rents, it simply isn't feasible to pay janitors, garbage collectors, fast-food workers, restaurant employees, etc as little as they've been paid, for the very simple reason that they can't afford to live there on those wages.
Unless we're willing to give up sanitation, garbage collection, fast food, and cheap restaurants in those cities, there is no reasonable solution except increasing wages. (There are of course unreasonable solutions such as exploiting immigrants, wage theft, and prison labor).
I think a component of this is hazard pay. The pandemic has made a lot of these low pay jobs more dangerous. If everything else is the same, but the job is now more dangerous, fewer people will take the employment.
1) People getting government assistance so they are able to survive without their current employer enabling them to quit
2) People re evaluating the risk reward ratio of their jobs, perhaps due to COVID bringing risks into view that previously were not focused on, and also comparing themselves to all the people they see working remotely getting paid more for not taking risks
3) People have time to research other work options since they were able to quit (or lost their job)
4) Demographic changes becoming more apparent as fewer children mean more and more of the working population ages out every year, and if not replaced by immigrants, then there are objectively fewer people competing to sell their labor
https://youtu.be/NBHHFnUqo5o?t=119
(You can wind back to the start to see the underlying cause of unemployment as well)
Maybe they should fix some of the issues preventing people from returning to work (childcare, pandemic restrictions) before complaining...
There is certainly a worker deficit. Our society has moved up the stack and isn't bringing in enough cheap immigrant labor anymore to work the jobs even poor americans won't accept anymore.
Businesses who were on a shoestring fail and yuppies continue to move in. The regional+national inflation has simply left large chunks of business in the dust without very cheap (immigrant) labor. This causes the makeshift infrastructure to weaken and the communities start to come apart.
The article claimed this was negligible.
> How can anyone say there's a worker deficit when we're so far below pre-pandemic employment?
There are be talent and location mismatches that make both of these true.
And stats concerning women in the workforce definitely paint a different picture.
> There are be talent and location mismatches that make both of these true.
So employers need to pay more and offer remote work or pay relocation expenses.
There's also a dearth of $1000 new automobiles on the market but no one's suggesting forcing automakers to offer them. Why do we expect labour to bend to the will of companies? They need to offer competitive compensation.
The Economist is pushing the dishonest narrative that there's an employee shortage, when actually there's a glut of greedy "we don't want to pay higher wages" employers.
The Economist is, therefore, enabling these greedy employers.
You'll get some that adhere to those principles, and others that don't.
If society deems minimum wage too low, government is the one responsible for regulating it to reflect those morals.
Rather than see the employers as greedy, just accept that they'll most likely do whatever they can within the confines of the law to help themselves, and then change the law to shape the incentive.
Anything else is just wishful thinking. Well intentioned, but not realistic to achieve the purported goal.
>The Economist is, therefore, enabling employers to do whatever they can within the confines of the law to help themselves.
Saying 'greedy' just saves 13 words. But I'm being flippant with what I consider to be an important topic. Let me be be positive, this:
Depending on independent actors in a free market system to act on specific moral principles rather than in their own best interest is not going to work in practice.
Feels like a variation of a "tragedy of the commons[0]" / "race to the bottom[1]" situation, which is where this:
government is the one responsible for regulating it
is exposed as the causal failure - in large part because, I think, the same people that influence the angle The Economist is taking are those who 'donate' to various members of government. The more I'm talking through this, the more I see the problem as voter apathy. If a member of government only gets feedback from industry lobbyists, that's all they'll be able to base their decisions on.
Write your local members! Use your voice! Vote! (I'm saying this to myself as much as anyone else). Only politics can solve politics.
The minimum wage is pushed up by large corporations to squeeze out small corporations.
If "society" deems minimum wage too low, they stop accepting jobs at that wage. That's what's happening right now in my area. There are no employers offering the legal minimum wage and even fast food places are offering hiring bonuses. The law is largely irrelevant and only affects a very narrow window of workers/jobs at the edge.
You'd still have many elderly consumers, but nobody to serve them.
Of course we can get into immigration and a long tangential discussion. My only point being, there can be structural shortages that wages aren't able to fix.
Another more realistic example would be a shortage of labor with a specific skillset. Wages can potentially fix this in the longer run by enticing people to pick up these skills (we see this in tech).
Does this take the difference in automatic stabilizers into account? There was probably quite a lot of extra cash injected from the stronger social net in the EU.
Eg https://www.nber.org/papers/w16275 says "In the case of an unemployment shock 47 percent of the shock are absorbed in the EU, compared to 34 per cent in the US."
Two natural assumptions are that there is less demand for economic activity and that people are depressed / have less mental bandwidth for work.
Without being able to do most of the fun stuff in life thanks to our authoritarian governments, I burnt out at my job, quit and dedicated solely to running my side business.
I make way less money than before but it's not something I could mentally handle anymore.
ETA: I base most of my thinking on this on Bruce Schneier's points, so I'm just going to link his blog here. https://www.schneier.com/tag/air-travel/page/8/ And a quote from an Atlantic interview: “Only two things have made flying safer: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.” This assumes, of course, that al-Qaeda will target airplanes for hijacking, or target aviation at all. “We defend against what the terrorists did last week,” Schneier said. He believes that the country would be just as safe as it is today if airport security were rolled back to pre-9/11 levels. “Spend the rest of your money on intelligence, investigations, and emergency response.”
A reinforced cockpit door is not going to help you when you sneak on individual components for plastic explosives and assemble them in the lavatory.
There's security and then there's paranoid irrationality, which is what we have at present.
"The working-age employment rate (the share of 16- to 64-year-olds in a job) was at an all-time high in over half of rich countries."
Yes, because about half the population - women - who previously weren't counted as part of the "work force" are now counted.
However, looking at males alone, they have been dropping out of the workforce at an alarming rate: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191725/us-male-civilian-....
The Pandemic seems to be an acceleration of the latter trend, and perhaps a partial reversal of the former, with more women deciding to exit the workforce either temporarily or permanently.
We've only had "knowledge workers" in the current high tech industrial sense for a couple of hundred years and our understanding of the value of one person's labour is still firmly based in the trades. It's still a relatively new idea that a single person working in the right way (eg. designing automated equipment) could produce hundreds or thousands of times as much as a person trying to directly produce the same thing. We've barely started to process the idea that a single person working in the right breakthrough technology could be almost infinitely productive.
However, the end state of software/SaaS is likely low margins, as regulations will be put into place to foster competition.
SaaS has high margins due to the low marginal cost to produce additional units, which is close to free, in many cases. But it's also 0 marginal cost for any competitior.
So in theory, in a perfectly competitive market, margins should be low, as two companies can produce roughly similar software. The problem comes in when you consider network effect and other factors that lead to a sort of natural Monopoly for a software company.
Likely these factors will begin to get regulated over the coming years. For example, you could require that all SaaS companies provide an API that's sufficient to allow you to switch to a competitor at a click of a button.
Circling back to your comment. My point is that pay in software is unlikely to remain abnormally high in the decades to come. Eventually supply of labor will increase, and business margins will decrease... Which effectively caps how much you can pay employees.
Somewhat related; China has realized that fostering competition rather than allowing monopolies to form is likely to produce better long term outcomes for society... which is why they are enacting all of these new regulations. The logic makes sense, but it remains to be seen in the long run.
I believe the US will follow, but it's a story that will take decades to play out fully.
Since a market is about supply and demand finding each other at a price point, and supply may well grow if the price is raised, can we not rephrase this as:
"When will the underpayment of workers in the rich world end?"
That's the short term view. The long term view: are those societies having enough children?
Eventually everyone will make six figures and a loaf of bread will be $16 but housing will be rationally priced again with starter homes at $500k.
Beyond everything else, this is just mathematically absurd.
Gee, I wonder what the problem could be?
Rezone for more density.
Allow building with less red tape.
Government incentives to build.
It can be very easy if there's the political will. Look at what China did when they built all those empty cities... which are now pretty much filled.
If we built 30 million new housing units in the next few years, I guarantee you the cost of housing would decline significantly. If it's profitable to build, builders will do it.
Unfortunately the US government has been more keen on supporting housing prices rather than lowering them.
Discourage owning empty homes with taxation.
Make evictions more difficult, even for squatting.
Require mixed use and prohibit office-only / mall-only areas and McMansions.
It's telling how The Economist views lost taxes and lost "talent" as the worst effects of unemployment, rather than homelessness or hunger for example.
And apparently people using their talents for personal enjoyment is outside of The Economist's models. No surprise there.