Comment by zaptheimpaler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zaptheimpaler | Hacker News Reader

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So a huge pandemic has been raging through the world for almost 2 years now, massively reconfiguring the world in so many ways. lockdowns, deaths, fear, government subsidies, cheap money, GME and unions, several global mindshift changes e.g of how crucial low wage jobs are or how short life is. But the bean counters are confused about why “labor supply” is low. hmmmm

Or maybe they aren’t confused, they're worried.

> More broadly, the participation rate has generally underperformed in economies with large increases in household liquidity. The most notable case in point is Chile, where the participation rate declined by 5pp as fiscal support and pension withdrawals flooded households with liquidity.

“if people have money they might not work at jobs”. jobs that have systematically trained them over decades to expect a paycheck but nothing else, not loyalty or satisfaction or upward mobility or any semblance of agency. wow. fucking clueless.

When media speaks about a good or bad 'economy' it means is capital being returned at near record rates, not can most people afford a subsistence existence without soul crushing levels of anxiety from fear of accidentally becoming destitute

> not can most people afford a subsistence existence without soul crushing levels of anxiety from fear of accidentally becoming destitute

This is the human condition - through all the ages, most people would feel this way, and will continue to do so in the future. Until the day free energy and star trek level replicators exist, all wealth and all goods and services that people consume will need to be created by people. It's just the relative amounts that differ between the ages, but unfortunately, people don't compare themselves to people 100 years ago, they compare themselves to the jones.

I remain perpetually bemused at how the same people who wax lyrical about the efficiency of the free market in determining prices of goods and commercial services via supply and demand will then turn around and bemoan the lack of willing workers at their autocratically decreed pay scales.

Surely the market shall provide, and if it doesn't provide at your offered price, the answer is wonderfully clear? Pay. More.

As wealth concentrated to a few thousand people, fiscal policy shifted from full employment to as close to zero inflation as possible. One of the ways to do that has been to devalue labor. Another has been the manipulation of asset pricing through increasingly cheaper debt.

Even progressives are stuck in a Stockholm syndrome like thought process for this stuff. People pitch stupidity like UBI over paying an honest days wage for an honest days work.

The 0.1% can comfortably endure a 50% reduction in net worth from a pullback in risk assets.

The US govt and Joe Everyman cannot.

Do the truly wealthy care about inflation? Their wealth is tied up mostly or entirely in assets, and inflation may even benefit them as their labour costs go down in real terms.

Inflation and taxes are all the generational investors care about, and most have trusts that are tax free in perpetuity!

Who exactly is complaining here? Amazon and Target have no problems with raising their wages to meet demand. A small business owner isn't going to tell you it's more profitable to have shittier service than hire more workers with higher wages, so they'll just say "labor shortage".

They are starting to pay more. A Walmart near me in rural Midwest is offering $18.50 an hour for someone to stock shelves. That’s the supply & demand of the free market at work, efficiently determining the price of labor.

If the government pays people to stay home, do you have a free market?

If the government pays people to not grow crops, do you have a free market? If the government props up certain industries with $BB in subsidies, do you have a free market? If the government approves mega-mergers that remove the ability for new companies to compete, do you have a free market? If the government bails out megabanks and investment firms after they crash the world economy, do you have a free market?

Of course not. The US hasn't had a free market economic system, or anything closely resembling that, in 60+ years. The US is at best a mixed economic system.

The megabanks didn't crash the world economy, they assisted as role players. The Fed's artificially low interest rates - an attempt to try to dodge a harsher recession after 9/11 and the dotcom implosion - primed a massive real-estate bubble that inevitably had to collapse. Just as the Fed has once again primed the massive asset bubbles in the US (both stocks and housing) by holding rates artificially low for far too long to try to spur fake economic growth.

prior to world war 2, the US wasnt a free market either. with massive government involvement to solve the great depression.

The government paid businesses too via PPP. They were called loans, and then some part of them were forgiven [1]. Is that a free market?

[1] https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/covid-19-relief-o...

Not original poster, but I presume that the answer would be "of course not".

The government paid workers via PPP, not businesses

The US federal government hasn't been paying people to stay home for a while and some of the more US conservative states stopped the extra payments before the feds did but those states are having trouble filling jobs too.

Of course you do. The government has set the absolute price of labour relative to activity. Business then has a relative cost to obtain that labour.

In fact the market has been levelled. Before workers needed to work to eat whereas business only needed to hire if there was a chance of a profit.

Now both sides have a “no deal I’ll wait” option.

> Now both sides have a “no deal I’ll wait” option.

No, only the workers do. The companies will go out of business without workers, but the "workers" (should we even call them that if they choose not to work?) will live off of our tax dollars through our safety net programs without jobs.

Good. The invisible hand if the market will cull the companies too weak to provide living wages.

When you can live off of the money you get for doing nothing, companies have to pay a lot more than a living wage to get you to work for them.

Does the money people are 'living off' not get spent with companies in your world? Doesn't that mean the company owner gets an income, the bankers get an income and the workers in that company get an income. The company owner and bankers only get an income to the extent that there is a productive use of workers above 1-1 - delivering sufficient surplus of real goods and services to feed and house the rest of us.

Isn't that what we want?

Always remember that money doesn't stop at its first use.

didnt the govt assistance for covid already end? also i wasnt aware it was actually enough to live on...

It wasn’t enough for anyone to live on. At best, it helped a few of my relatives when they couldn’t work for one paycheck due to illness.

Supposedly it moved large swaths of kids out of poverty. If that’s the labor companies we’re counting on using…

Ha! My spouse got $1000 per week, which I can assure you is more than enough for even both of us to live on.

Those elusive two weeks of minimum wage pay were enough for all workers to live off for all time!

If people are not born into wealthy or well networked families in an environment where they can acquire the skills and connections that allow them to choose between multiple hundred thousand dollar desk jobs that can be worked from home versus working as a janitor in hospitals, do you have a free market?

Yes. Including a free marriage market. And in a free marriage market an assortative mating strategy, which is generally used by human beings, will result in the children of successful people being considerably more likely to have heritable traits that contribute to success.

I can't see why not.

I think the notion that government is only supposed to subsidize and help and tax break and bail and help businesses, and not people, will need more thought out support to stand a chance of being taken seriously, than a snarky half sentence :)

It is actually a freer market, because it counterbalances the government paying banks to keep the financial treadmill going.

I'd love a sane economy where the government isn't distorting the market with trillion dollar stimuli and artificially low interest rates. But we haven't had that for many decades! Spending on social programs isn't some brazen giveaway, rather its mitigation for the ill effects of extreme giveaways to the financial industry that "both" parties solidly agree on.

Businesses especially the large one get free guarantees, bailouts, low interest rates, preferential treatments, etc. It isn't free for many decades.

The people I was talking about clearly have no problem with the government paying corporations to stay home, and they still call it a free market.

Then you're right about them being inconsistent.

no, because free markets are an illusion (information asymetry).

also the ppl payed to stay at home are mostly not working-class.

> no, because free markets are an illusion (information asymetry).

That's not relevant.

> also the ppl payed to stay at home are mostly not working-class.

Citation?

> That's not relevant.

it serves to disprove your misleading implication that free markets were destroyed by the goverment paying ppl to stay at home.

> Citation?

look around

> If the government pays people to stay home, do you have a free market?

83% of the value of all the 2020-21 Paycheck Protection Program loans were forgiven as of December 19th, 2021 [1]. That's a total value of $653,038,613,899. That's nearly as large as the 2008 bailouts. Even that doesn't tell the whole story because 94% of the 2020 loans alone were forgiven, and 2021 is on track to meet it.

[1]: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/2021-12/2021.12.19_W...

Is the labor shortages as bad elsewhere in the world? Plenty of places with great social safety nets, not just now but all the time. Treating the vast majority of people as wage slaves seems particularly American.

> Treating the vast majority of people as wage slaves seems particularly American.

The vast majority of people (75%?). Fascinating claim. I bet you can't support it.

Americans earn higher wages at the median than: Canadians, Germans, Swedes, French, British, Spanish, Italians, Russians, Japanese, Chinese, South Koreans, and so on.

Americans are also richer at the median than either the Germans or the Swedes (which should be impossible if you buy in to the propaganda). And that's despite the massive demographic shift at the median in the US over the past 40 years (comparing demographics to demographics, Americans are far richer than either of those two nations).

So, why are Germany's workers so poor? Why are Sweden's workers so poor? Why have incomes stagnated so horribly over 20 years across most of Europe (as with their economic growth which has been mostly net flat since ~2007)? Treating people as wage slaves must be a particularly European thing.

Americans work longer hours per week and get less holidays. A typical European 37 hour work week and 3 additional weeks vacation adds up to about two months more work by US workers than Europeans. So it's not really that they're paid more in the USA, it's that US workers get less vacation and longer hours.

Nah, US workers are generally paid more even accounting for the 2-3 weeks vacation that skilled laborers get.

Americans also live shorter lifespans while going bankrupt for things like medical debt while enjoying less vacations and well, living than Europeans.

I don't need to check any official sources to be pretty sure the number of able-bodied working age Americans who died from Covid is (statistically, not in humanitarian terms) negligible.

Once word: socialism, for the rich and poor alike, promoted by the US government and the Fed.

It's the same in the EU, the only difference is it's worse and it started before Covid-19.

Funny but completely expected thing about it is gubmint stats refer to some of those non-working as "discouraged" whereas many are in fact encouraged to be unemployed. It's hard to be discouraged if you're hungry.

The impacts of these deaths are going to be far reaching though. For example, I had a friend in his 30s who died from Covid during the first wave. His last tweet was about how his manager at T-Mobile was a dick for making him come into work during a global pandemic.

Even though he is but one death in a sea of almost a million, he alone serves as a cautionary tale to dozens and dozens of surviving friends, family, and acquaintances. His friends and family have a much different view now of the nature of work in the US. For many of them, this has fundamentally changed their relationship with work, and yeah, some of them quit their jobs and won’t be coming back. Big business are left scratching their heads wondering why. Here’s a hint: check the Twitter feed.

There are hundreds of thousands of such cautionary tales out there now, impacting families across the nation. I don’t think we’ll be able to really understand the full impact of this for a long time to come.

>It's the same in the EU, the only difference is it's worse and it started before Covid-19.

What? Do you have any sources for those EU claims?

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