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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>STEM jobs are the main viable path for economic stability and freedom.

>We really need farm workers, and most of them live in poverty. I love having more engineers, scientists, and doctors, but we desperately need non-STEM work to be a viable option

This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market. If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.

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> If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.

Serious question - have you ever been poor? Are you aware that sometimes people have to work at shitty jobs because they have no other options? And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?

I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.

>Serious question - have you ever been poor? Are you aware that sometimes people have to work at shitty jobs because they have no other options?

OP was talking about the problem from a practical perspective (ie. "We really need farm workers", presumably worried about a future where there aren't enough farm workers and we starve or something), and I was addressing that in the same way. Your objection seems to be from a humanitarian perspective (ie. how can we provide a minimum standard of living to non-STEM workers?), which is valid concern, but ultimately not relevant to the original problem.

>And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?

combination of:

1. stubbornness/price stickiness

2. belief that it's better to hold out in the short term and wait for the labor supply to return, then it is to give out pay raises now. Wages are sticky, which mean wage hikes would turn into ongoing expenses into the future.

3. belief that the raising wages would raise prices, which would decrease demand and ultimately make the business worse off.

>I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.

The market seems to be working just fine in my area. Some restaurants have shut down. Some have raised prices. Some have decreased service. Which is the right approach? I don't know. The restaurants that took the right approach will win out in the end. In the meanwhile I'm still able to eat out.

The whole price stickiness thing is the free market not working. How can you say the market will sort it out and in the next post give the mechanism for why it doesn't do so?

What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.

> The whole price stickiness thing is the free market not working

Wouldn't the standard response to that be that it's not really a free market, and if it were made more free then such inefficiencies would be less likely to occur?

Lots of people might say this, but no one believes it.

I think you'll find that many do, and I also don't know why anyone persists with making absolutists statements that are clearly wrong or can be shown to be so with barely any effort.

What does it contribute?

OK then please provide an example of a market for labor (since that's what we're discussing ITT) that has been "made more free" and that has seen wages rise as a result.

Those of the former USSR. There are many other examples that are also such low hanging fruit that I wonder if you were trying to get at something else with that question?

The absolutism was in no one believes it, by the way.

I'm willing to imagine that there was some point in USSR history at which this would have been the case, but please let's not pretend that this describes the period after the fall of USSR during which life expectancy dropped by a decade. The incomes of billionaire "oligarchs" are not reflected in the median income level.

By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.

If you wish to cherry pick those years, then yes, you would find some non-Soviet years that were bad, but it wouldn't be a persuasive case so be my guest.

> By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.

You're not being charitable, if you were you wouldn't have begun with hyperbole, then moving the goalposts when challenged, and now cherry picking. You don't seem interested in any case but the one you already favour.

Either you meant that time, which in light of public health numbers is obviously not a good example for the argument, or you meant some other time. If you care to specify some other time, we'll be happy to consider it. If you want to forget about USSR and nominate some other time and place, we'll be happy to consider that.

I make "absolute" or even "hyperbolic" statements because I'd like to learn something. If I'm wrong, some example to that effect may easily be provided. In doing so, I'm letting someone else win all the internet points because I care more about learning than about internet points. As you observe upthread, a statement in such form can be shown to be wrong "with barely any effort". I invite you, if you please, to expend that small amount of effort. However, absolute statements can't simply be assumed to be wrong. Absolute statements exist that are absolutely true. "Any living human will die if deprived of oxygen."

I grant that you've already expended a smaller amount of effort, to somewhat imply that you yourself (or perhaps others not present in this thread?) believe that less regulation of labor markets leads to higher pay, but in the absence of any relevant example that implication is itself suspect. We know that some people believe silly things, and some other people claim to believe silly things that correspond to their particular psychological commitments (this seems common in the context of religion), but those beliefs and claims do not prove their silly objects.

> The whole price stickiness thing is the free market not working. How can you say the market will sort it out and in the next post give the mechanism for why it doesn't do so?

I suppose it's "not working" if by "not working" you mean "behaves exactly like economics 101 models that assume rational actors". But as it relates to this context, business are reacting approximately in the way we would expect, albeit with some delay/hesitancy. Average pay has gone up in the past few months, for instance.

>What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.

I don't argue that because it's not clear what "satisfaction" entails. If you mean the optimal choice every time, I don't think you'll find any free market advocate who would make that claim. In the meantime, I'm pretty satisfied. I can still eat out, and I have the choice between "higher wages but more expensive" restaurants and "lower wages but worse service" restaurants. It's not really clear right now which is the best choice here (eg. maybe I'd rather accept reduced/worse service than pay more), so letting consumers as a whole decide seems like the best course of action.

The free market applies at every level, but it does take time to find it's level. Is the problem that people won't just raise the wages, like the other poster described? Absolutely not. The location that doesn't raise it wages will end up losing in the end if there truly is a labor supply problem. They may refuse to raise their wages, but they will get the lower quality applicants, lower quality workers, and maybe not any workers at all if they don't raise it enough. The fact is it takes time for market to adjust and those that don't follow the market get left behind. The businesses that aren't efficient enough to run on fewer employees will get left behind. Companies don't go bankrupt overnight but they do go bankrupt eventually if they aren't as efficient as other companies. Those that make bad decisions, that raise wages to much, will get hurt, and those that don't raise them enough will get hurt. The fact is wages are only one factor and in a free market it will always find the correct level over time.

I'm no student of this, and it might come under rational/irrational actors, but I think any casual consideration of employers and wages needs to understand that the vast majority of small businesses are flying by the seat of their pants (I'm one of them, so I think about this a lot).

If the owners were competent, the businesses might have grown to the point where the enterprise isn't so much an extension of the owner's personality. A small restaurant's style extrapolates strongly from the owner's quirks - whether they feel they make enough money, they're disorganised, they're under stress going without leave or getting hit by taxes at the worst times. I figure they're the ones most likely to hold wages down almost out of angst because they themselves feel hard done by. "Why should that teenager get $15/hr?! I have the risk of the lease. I started this business! I got $5/hr when I was a kid!" I'd bet this is a solid factor in local restaurants.

Once a business is large enough to have a tier or two under the owner, I suspect this buffer helps. I notice this separation a lot when working directly with an owner versus with their marketing person. The latter has to uphold their end of the relationship with me or they'll get fired. The owner meanwhile can miss deadlines and forget to write copy and so on, and usually their worst case is they keep flying by the seat of their pants. If their business fails, it's usually much later and harder to tie to specific issues along the way.

> If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation

They are. Farmer suicides over the past 10 years have skyrocketed. Farmers are committing suicide at twice the rate of combat veterans. [1]

I'm afraid I can't take your comment seriously as a dispassionate economic analysis since it lacks even basic empathy for people caught in this ongoing trainwreck of "supply/demand" mechanics.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer...

This is quite convincing. We should ban independent farmers. It is too dangerous a job for independents. Industrialized commercial farming is the only acceptable recourse since we need to grow food.

As an escape valve for independents we could have them post a sufficiently large bond that will come due in the event of farm failure and bail them out.

People committing suicide rather than quitting and doing something else (declaring bankruptcy if necessary) means it's not just a supply and demand thing.

It's also important to distinguish between farm workers (hired hands) and the business owners.

At least in my limited knowledge, it's the small time farmers that commit suicide (so owner that works), and generally in the older population. What else are you going to do if you've been doing that your whole life, you're 50, no college (or it was for agriculture)? You likely can't stay where you are because many of the areas are depressed and they'll take your land if you can't pay the taxes, are foreclosed, etc. Just making it to the next year and all the hard choices become a heavy burden - one that you can struggle with for years and only make it that long because you've motivated yourself that it's the only way and only goal. So it's not just a job, but their entire way of life and identity that are lost.

Yes, people agree that farm works sucks and have low wage.

But the point that you and others are missing is that if farm works sucks, and pays low, then that means we should not be sending more people to become farmers.

And what exactly are we going to have them do that doesn't suck and isn't low wage?

The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done. If we ship many the low/medium skill jobs over seas and then automate many of the remaining ones, what are those people to do? Surely if they were able to get a higher paying job that didn't suck they would have done so.

The better solution is to make sure we appropriately value tasks that are necessary and have some level of potential self sufficiency should we find ourselves in a global event like conflict, famine, etc. Not to mention, the non-industrial farms are generally better for animals and the environment. This shouldn't be a race to the bottom.

> And what exactly are we going to have them do that doesn't suck and isn't low wage?

I am not saying that we need to retrain all existing farmers. Instead, I am saying that we should simply discourage more people going into that industry, instead of what the original poster was claiming, which is that we'd need more people there.

> The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done

We don't need more people in that industry, no. We can have less in that industry.

> what are those people to do

At a very minimum we shouldn't be adding more problems by encourage more people to go into these bad jobs, is the point though. That would just make things worse.

You didn't answer the question. What are these people going to do instead? If we keep eliminating low/middle skilled jobs, what is left for them to do?

I don't think you can win this one.

The free market might as well be a religion for some people. Nothing (not even historical facts) is enough evidence for it to not be the answers to all economic issues.

Also, there are lots of US tech people here - with overly inflated salaries compared to approximately everyone else. And everyone knows those winning the game have a tendency to lose empathy and think the game is fair, no matter how much evidence against it.

> "Also, there are lots of US tech people here - with overly inflated salaries compared to approximately everyone else. "

And even then, you're usually required to live within reasonable driving distance of the office. You don't make enough to buy a place. At least half your salary post-tax probably goes to rent. So yeah, you've got a few bucks in the bank probably, but it's not like you're saving up to buy your third Porsche or something lol.

> The free market might as well be a religion for some people. Nothing (not even historical facts) is enough evidence for it to not be the answers to all economic issues.

Aside from their lack of empathy and the ignoring of the distortion of the supply of labour happening that makes the "non-problem" an actual problem, what is incorrect about pointing out that supply and demand are, if not the most fundamental factor then close to it, in a market?

A close to most fundamental factor must survive close to most observations of the real world. That's not the case.

Monopolies have historically shit all over the notion that supply and demand is a good model to use for the market.

Much like most economic models, there are underlying assumptions about it that make it bad at actually predicting the real world. Things like perfectly competitive markets (haha), prices being adjustable (haha) and the forces that act on supply/demand being rational (extra hahaha).

There are lots and lots of cases where it fails, like the housing bubble, administered prices and wages.

Still, it might as well be a religion. Afterall, people can say it is close to a most fundamental law about markets with a straight face (despite it failling all the time).

Monopolies are the opposite of a free market. I'm not sure how a critique of using supply and demand to explain how free markets work will apply if you choose a monopolised market as your rebuttal. You may as well say that supply and demand doesn't hold under communist conditions.

What I would counter is that it that we can see that free markets work preferably to monopolised ones, or any of the other ones you've provided where selfish intervention of one kind or another has interfered with supply or demand.

monopoly is the goal of the free market, not its opposite. "supply and demand" are clearly forces at work in the economy, but the idea that an unspecified dynamic simply called "supply and demand" is predictive of anything is not accurate.

this false dichotomy between monopoly and its precursor is non sequitur.

> monopoly is the goal of the free market

Ignoring the fallacious teleological argument, I'm happy to rely on Wikipedia for this as this is basic knowledge:

> In economics, a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are self-regulated by buyers and sellers negotiating in an open market without market coercions.

What are market coercions?

> Examples of such prohibited market coercions include: economic privilege, *monopolies*, and artificial scarcities.

So you're implying me the only place supply and demand actually works is in an idealized free market that doesn't exist? If that's the case, yeah, we agree on it.

All those cases I mentioned came arose under one of the most (maybe the most?) free market of modernity.

> So you're implying me the only place supply and demand actually works is in an idealized free market that doesn't exist?

No. I don't believe you're trying to create a straw man intentionally but if you're going to jump from black to white, and a large jump at that, then it produces the same outcome all the same.

The labor market - especially the low paid labor market - is a lot less liquid than it needs to be for pure supply/demand to work in the US (that's also taking human suffering caused by poverty out of the equation, which is pretty callous).

Laissez-faire markets are also bad at taking negative externalities into account. Food being too expensive to afford in the stores while it's also rotting in the fields (which has happened in my state multiple times on the last few decades) is really bad. Children not being being effectively taught because teachers are quitting due to burnout and terrible wages is really bad. I don't think it's sufficient to shrug out hands and say "it'll work itself out" when we can actively see very these kinds of detrimental problems

> Children not being being effectively taught because teachers are quitting due to burnout and terrible wages is really bad.

The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'.

Neither is the farm/food market. It is heavily subsidized and regulated by the government to incentivize very specific outcomes.

The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'

Whatever that means. In Alabama the low wages and poor working conditions have now led to a grave teacher shortage. The government's solution? Suspend teacher certification. To use graphic imagery: the talent pool is full of piss, let's open it to the incontinents!

"the talent pool is full of piss"

This suggests 'teacher certification' isn't effective at distinguishing between good and bad teachers.

"Suspend teacher certification"

If 'teacher certification' isn't useful for distinguishing good/bad teachers, then removing the requirement may be a good idea.

"In Alabama"

It's hard to fire bad teachers in Alabama. If you're a principal in an Alabama public school, you can't just give a poorly performing teachers 2-4 weeks' notice, freeing up the money to hire someone new. Look up 'Alabama teacher tenure'.

The way to raise standards isn't to lower expectations. But you have to offer something in return, money or job security, either will work, no one will work for free.

And what's this obsession with firing people? You can get rid of subpar performers, but the rapid turnover isn't going to improve the average unless you manage to hire and retain above average performers. In the long run, it's a supply issue, and the revolving door model is going to do nothing about the subpar supply.

Re: #1, I didn't talk about lowering expectations. I talked about removing a requirement that you said resulted in a poor talent pool.

Re: #2 getting rid of underperformers helps you hire good teachers (because, unless you fire someone, you have no money to hire someone new), and retain good ones (because, if you're a good teacher, you're not going to want to work somewhere where your students' other teachers are bad).

If you look at the PRAXIS exam (there's example tests out there) you'll see that the bar is set extremely low already. Dropping it does nothing to improve the talent pool and will certainly not attract quality applicants.

I've said it already - it's not the best students that go to work in teaching. You can fire a low performer, but chances are that the replacement is just as bad. It's a supply issue, a training issue and a culture issue - the anti-intellectualism in large swathes of the population really doesn't help matters.

You say "It's a supply issue, a training issue and a culture issue".

This may be true, but it's the result of how the system is set up and, in particular, the interaction between:

a) politicians

b) teachers and teachers unions

c) school district leaders

d) school district administration staff

e) students

In most systems, group (e) is the one with the least power. Their parents may be able to vote for school board members, but these elections are infrequent, and the way to get elected is not by being an advocate for students, but by aligning with a particular political party, or getting the support of teachers unions.

Parents cannot easily opt out of that system. In Alabama, per pupil spending is ~$10k/year. This distorts the market: a parochial school that costs $10k/year to run cannot compete with a public school that costs $10k/year to run, even if the former better. Because in one case the marginal cost to the parent is $0.

It comes back to what I said at the start of our conversation: The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'.

Ever time I have had co-workers fired in some desperate attempt to blame low quality of a system on individuals in the system, I leave, because that shit is demoralizing.

Yes, your past experience sounds sad.

But, with regard to public education systems in the US:

- it's definitely true that some people 'attempt to blame low quality of a system on individuals'

- it's not generally true that this leads to firing (of teachers)

If you want to know more about some of the problems, you might enjoy the documentary 'Waiting for "Superman"': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_%22Superman%22

It is not a non-problem for people without your privilege. Gig workers, immigrants and others with no viable options are forced to do these jobs or starve. All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs". Graduating high school seniors aren't lining up to mow grass or pick fruit or work as a meat packer for $15/hour. They want to come out of college to a 6 figure job with no skills or training. It is going to be a long long time until we have enough automation to not need workers for things like picking apples, etc. A lot of people coming out of school with out a tech or medical disposition would be best served by picking a trade. We have a shortage already and it is only going to get worse. Running a 3 person plumbing company could easily compete with most tech jobs.

> It is not a non-problem for people without your privilege. Gig workers, immigrants and others with no viable options are forced to do these jobs or starve. All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs".

That’s exactly what’s happening. With a steady flow of cheap labor to take these jobs, the wages for them will remain stagnant. It makes perfect sense for low income workers to be complaining about immigrants taking their jobs because that’s exactly what happens.

Cut off illegal immigration for a few years and watch as the price of all unskilled labor increases. It’s basic supply and demand.

The ones at the top generally don’t care because the people coming in are not competing for their jobs. And they arguably benefit from the cheap low end labor through lower prices for staples and even luxuries like landscapers and nannies.

Even that is changing with remote work and offshoring. I don’t know if it will take five years or a decade, but the so called knowledge workers who don’t sock away their savings now are in for a rude awakening when their own paper pushing jobs get replaced.

This is exactly right. Here in Australia, the borders have been closed for two years, and surprise surprise, we now have some of the lowest unemployment figures in the country's history. And for the first time in a generation, wages are starting to increase.

For knowledge workers who want to work from home, the end result will be competing on a global market against workers from developing countries who can afford to do the same work for less. We already see this on various freelancing platforms where it's only a viable side gig for those in places with a low cost of living.

At the end of the day, workers need some kind of protection against these movements, by putting local workers first and managing immigration to protect the middle and working classes. The problem is that we have a political class who have gotten rich on the back of removing such protections, because they're also business owners and property investors.

And don’t forget helping the workers in low wage places to organize and get their fair share of revenue from the multinational corps. Long term, a more level income landscape world wide is needed to protect even domestic workers power/income.

you may find that labor shortage and shrinking population takes some of the joy out of the exclusion of additional participants in your economy

>It is not a non-problem for people without your privilege. Gig workers, immigrants and others with no viable options are forced to do these jobs or starve.

Nothing I said precludes aid for these people, to ensure a minimum standard of living. I'm just pointing out the implied consequences of not making "non-STEM work to be a viable option", isn't we run out of farmers and we all starve because the market will correct it long before the number of farmers drop dangerously low.

>All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs".

I don't get it. Just a few sentences ago you implied that the jobs are crap, and that people are "forced to do these jobs or starve", yet here you're implying that we should allow "immigrants crossing the border" to take those crap jobs?

>Graduating high school seniors aren't lining up to mow grass or pick fruit or work as a meat packer for $15/hour. They want to come out of college to a 6 figure job with no skills or training.

People don't want hard jobs and want easy money. Can you really blame them for that? Also, the solution to this, as mentioned in the previous comment is to raise wages.

>A lot of people coming out of school with out a tech or medical disposition would be best served by picking a trade. We have a shortage already and it is only going to get worse. Running a 3 person plumbing company could easily compete with most tech jobs.

In other words, the market is working as intended, by making jobs more lucrative because there's a shortage?

> This is basically a non-problem because of the supply/demand mechanics of the labor market.

You’ll have to back-up that assertion.

Supply/demand mechanisms fail the labor market badly. By law of supply and demand, professions introduce artificial scarcity to boost their income; and the market responds either through some combination of: Immigration, automation, consolidation (less businesses), cut-corners

Farming has aspects of all three, and it’s a major national risk.

He justified it with his next sentence:

> If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.

Not everything is like the laws of physics, which continue to work over many orders of magnitude. Supply and demand for employment works backwards at both the top and the bottom of the salary range. At the top, beyond a certain point supply decreases because people save enough to give up working. At the other end, reducing post can increase supply because people's need for income of inelastic below a certain point, so they start working longer hours and working second or third jobs.

>Supply and demand for employment works backwards at both the top and the bottom of the salary range. At the top, beyond a certain point supply decreases because people save enough to give up working.

Is this really applicable to this context? In other words, are farming jobs really going to get to a point where the pay is $10M a year, and people only take the job for a year and then never work another day? Considering that being a farmer has basically no barrier to entry, I doubt it will get to that point. Not to mention, if farm labor was really that expensive, so would the cost of living, so those would be FIRE farm workers would have to come back to pay the increased food bill.

> Considering that being a farmer has basically no barrier to entry, I doubt it will get to that point.

Care to breakdown the costs?

No, the case of farm workers is much more likely to be the opposite one, where workers are paid so little that they take multiple jobs and increase supply, leading to a low income trap.

Every mechanism has regimes in which it fails. 'Supply and demand' isn't always the answer any more than 'mongodb' or 'rust' are always the answer.

Macro-farms and thousands of automation systems can make your need for human labour decrease more rapidly than people can find other jobs...

It´s going to be a fuckin´mess, 4 dudes richer and everyone else screwed

In that case, this statement would become false:

>We really need farm workers

We really need them if we want to farm in sustainable and moral ways, as we have done by thousands of years.

But point maken

> We really need them if we want to farm in sustainable and moral ways

How so? Sustainable farming has nothing to do with a man vs machine doing the labor. Moral as in we need to make sure people can keep doing this job or what kind of argument are you even making? I'd rather see improved social safety nets and job training then some appeal to history that people need to work the fields because we've always done that.

> How so?

Modern industrial farming practices, designed to optimize agricultural output per unit of labor, are an ecological and environmental travesty. They require the widespread use of pesticides and toxic fertilizers that are decimating the biosphere. Monocropping unsustainably degrades soil quality. And the large contiguous areas used for industrial agricultural operations are extremely disruptive to wildlife.

The most obvious solution to the above is an agricultural system with many more, much smaller farms, where human beings do the work currently done by machines and chemicals.

Not sure about this: everyone else screwed seems kind of a far reach. If you consider screwed “unable to buy luxuries” then maybe, but I consider screwed “unable to buy food” and Macro farms stand to make food substantially cheaper.

How will the four people get richer if the food they create is priced so high that no one can buy it?

I get this is deeply economic and philosophical, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.

If they can make food cheaper, what pressure is there to sell their product at a lower price? The economic answer is that a competitor will do it first to get a larger marketshare, but the pratical answer is nothing will force them. If the regulatory and capital cost to enter the market are high, then a competitor isn't likely to appear and the existing players can continue functioning in a quasi-cartel.

Taking this to its logical end, the owners of said farms will get richer as the general population earns less on average (due to their labour no longer being needed).

Before it gets that far, they build a hierarchy of underlings that oppress the labor force. (See CGP Grey's "the rules for rulers" on YouTube.)

Either that or everyone else gets fed up and violently overthrows them. It could, perhaps, be avoided with higher taxes on the rich, but the rich have the most influence over the tax code.

The government steps in and subsidizes food for those who can't afford it, either by printing money, or using taxes. The end result is robbery from the commons while your four mates who give you kickbacks and a cushy post government gig get richer.

during the peak of the COVID labor shortage, many producers did increase wages but found that they still couldn't get workers. also in North America at least, many/most laborers are undocumented immigrants. white collar workers aren't quitting the desk to go out in the field..it is backbreaking work. if the labor pipeline dries up (which is a very real thing as immigration has decreased in North America/the US) then no one will be doing that job.

i suspect the amount of money that farms would need to pay workers to fix these shortages would drive all producers into bankruptcy

>if the labor pipeline dries up (which is a very real thing as immigration has decreased in North America/the US) then no one will be doing that job.

>i suspect the amount of money that farms would need to pay workers to fix these shortages would drive all producers into bankruptcy

I definitely think it's the latter rather than the former. Producers being driven to bankruptcy is an issue, but that seems like it's something that's going to happen regardless if we made "non-STEM work to be a viable option". At the end of the day, if it's a shitty job, then you'll have to pay more to get people to show up.

Probably because farm labor is skilled labor and seasonal. It sucks to live out of a vehicle traveling with the crop harvest. If you want them to work just within the area you need to make the month or two of work worth more than just a month or two of wages, because they will soon have zero work and will fuck over holding other non-seasonal jobs while every other seasonal industry also competes for that labor. Agriculture is also exempt from overtime pay. On top of all that, you can't just throw some rando in a field and expect them to get anywhere near the output of an experienced picker, especially with 12 hour days and a physical workload far higher than most people have ever experienced.

Their meager wage increase is not worth uprooting your entire life just for 2 months or less of work unless you are sending that money back to a country where a dollar goes much farther. They need far more than just add 2 bucks to an already way underpaid job to not only attract workers now but keep them around and available for following years.

Doesn't supply and demand not apply here though? There are tons of subsidies and small farmers who are propped up more by government assistance than they are the market though?

Abstractions around frictionless marketplaces don’t work well in markets with as extreme friction as the labor market.

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