What Is Business Waiting For? Start hiring today. | Hacker News Reader

What Is Business Waiting For? Start hiring today.

nytimes.com

7 pointsjoshwa7 comments

Uncertainty leads to more conservative investment and a greater demand for savings to absorb exogenous shocks. There is a great deal of regulatory uncertainty about obamacare amongst other things.

Honestly, the fact it might be Defunded is the issue to me. I can't afford to offer healthcare in the old regime.

If businesses aren't hiring, it's because they don't see the benefits of a new hire exceeding the costs of a new hire. Begging businesses to please please ignore the costs in the spirit of amity and, ahem, not proving the numerous policies the NYT has agitated for that have the effect of raising the cost of an employee a bad idea (a full listing of which would take quite a while!), isn't going to work. Any business foolish enough to do so will simply find itself outcompeted. It turns out employers are not in fact a font of endless money that can be without cost harnessed for the purposes of social engineering by the government. Cost/benefit analyses can never be ignored.

Did you read all the way to the end of TFA?

Yes. It solves the wrong problem. The problem is that the cost of an employee exceeds the benefits. Everybody agreeing to take on employees whose costs exceed their benefits is just a mutual suicide pact. You can't get around that fact. If the benefits exceeded the costs, they would already be hiring, and there would be no problem to solve. If the costs exceed the benefits, then slapping yet more costs into the equation, even if everybody agrees to shoulder them, doesn't solve the problem!

And the idea that you can get entire industries to agree to mutual suicide is just idiocy. In the startup world, we call that a "boil the ocean" plan. Businesses would have massive incentives to defect.

This is all just blithering economic idiocy from top to bottom. (Of course, in NYTland, people never respond to economic incentives, and a business is prima facie acting immorally if their income exceeds their expenditures. Also, cost/benefit analysis is a radical and controversial political idea that must be downvoted, rather than a simple, direct consequence of basic economic reality.)

The interesting part of this article is the "contingent commitment facility"... kind of like Kickstarter for new jobs. Or maybe more like the opposite of mutually-assured destruction?

As far as I know, the NY Times itself has been laying off staff for the last few years, not hiring new people.

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