A nationwide shortage of public workers
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The globalization and demographic trends that has undercut the value of labor in the west for decades are now reversing. Expect inflation, financial system struggles (collapse?), higher taxes but also wage increases and the working class getting larger chunk of the pie.
> Expect inflation, financial system struggles (collapse?), higher taxes but also wage increases and the working class getting larger chunk of the pie.
The Fed is clearly going to engineer a massive recession and financial crisis to throw enough people out of work to get inflation under control and make people continue to work for peanuts.
They're not giving the working class a larger chunk of the pie without a massive fight (and what remains to be seen is if how far they'll go before they realize they're harming themselves in the process, and even if they capitulate before they destroy everything).
If you want working class pay to go up, go vote for people who will help working class pay up instead of assigning conspiracy theories to the fed.
If we assume this is what they meant, I think the post is reasonable. The fed is targeting labor in this way specifically to avoid a wage/price inflation spiral. Those hurt the most by such a spiral are capital holders as the relative power of their capital decreases.
(all this said, I would actually prefer solutions targeting the land-holding class, over labor and capital).
[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20220... [1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/wage-price-spiral-column-do...
The continued running of the economy is practically dependant on a wealth transfer to labour so we can enable a second wealth transfer to capital.
The extract of money to the rich has created the wealth gap: CEO pay , investors with money to invest, all of got richer when the money supply was expanding while keeping worker (actual producers) pay raise at a far lower rate.
Now that there are supply issues, due to different Covid rules across countries for global trade, and demand relatively high, the rich are looking for “growth” still. But with a cash tightening, they can’t borrow as much to produce goods at an accelerated pace. Hence “worker shortage”.
If CEOs and companies are cutting staff, the board should consider readjusting executive pay as well to save money and reallocate the savings towards hiring! It’s time to adjust executive pay vs. worker pay and shrink the wealth gap a little.
I don’t usually agree with Robert Reich as I’m more moderate than he is positions, but topic I’m in agreement: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/25/inflat...
I'll give a real world example. In Canada, they privatised almost every public telecom in the country except Sasktel. Since Canada has lots of rural customers that would be unprofitable to service, connecting these customers is subsidised by the government, in return for the companies among other things accepting price controls on what they both charge companies and also charge 3rd party providers piggybacking off their infrastructure like MVNO's. Canada has some of the highest telecom prices in the entire world, so price controls at best were inadequate and at worst failed. Yet Saskatchewan notably pays less than the rest of the country, and that's because there's no incentive for them to collude with the big telecoms to raise prices, so they don't.
He also mentions anti-trust, anti-trust is all well and good but historically only a very few companies get broken up and it tends to encumber than less than expected, Microsoft is doing OK. Taxing corporate profits more is almost totally hopeless, especially for something like Big Pharma which has countless means to shift around which country profit was realised in. Price controls for pharma make no sense, the government is artificially raising pharma prices through IP enforcement, just don't enforce their patents and you'll have lower drug spending and lower enforcement costs. Why do governments enforce patents for tax dodgers anyways?
To me, I feel like Reich is dancing around the crux of the issue, talking about moderate approaches which mostly buy into the status quo, talking about things like price controls with a degree of embarrassment.
Right now I think that equilibrium is out of sorts because I think it's almost self-evident how much somebody poor could do with a thousand dollars, whereas a company like Berkshire Hathaway right now is at such a loss as to what to invest in that they're literally just sitting on cash when they get it. There's are exceptions but I see too much of this these days. Wealth also isn't distributed like a Pareto distribution, it's too top-sided to follow the distribution perfectly, and if history repeats itself we will see that unravel. I expect the top to fall more than I expect the bottom to rise though.
It’s pretty obvious when you think about it.
I have the suspicion this will only be used to import cheaper labor, not to treat current labor better or pay them more.
It may not be THE problem, but dismissing it as just one of the culture wars items is in itself counter-productive ( if only, because perception is reality and people do vote based on their belief systems ).
I do not disagree with you on the clear focus of US on the true beneficiary of this system ( corporations ).
The conditions are so shitty and pay so poor that I almost question the motivations of people doing it.
A lot of ‘saints’ but also a lot of theft and abuse , particularly around medication occurs in these low cost facilities and low pay home help.
- Java developer / C++ developer - 10+ years of experience - Low end of medium wage. - Something about excitement in your advert.
I don't see this happening as a net result. There are just too many powerful (wealthy) interests working multiple angles to ensure that a vast majority of any gains go to the top.
There will be faux gains or benefits which appear substantive but are either offset by some new life cost (such as inflation, but not necessarily so great and complex) or are outright new expenses.
The reason there's a surplus is egalitarianism. Most of the developed world realized we didn't economically tap much of society because of whatever *ism. Fixing that produced a huge benefit. But it also ended up with 2 key problems. Huge surplus of low-skilled labour AND a problematic population pyramid.
>The globalization and demographic trends that has undercut the value of labor in the west for decades are now reversing. Expect inflation, financial system struggles (collapse?), higher taxes but also wage increases and the working class getting larger chunk of the pie.
The problem after that im sure they'll call the 'great unretirement' where people who retired ran out of money but lots of those people wont want to work. Nobody will hire them. They will turn to crime.
Without that dramatic shift in power, you'll just get what we have: worker pay rising half the speed of inflation. Good luck with that.
Until the corporations stop posting record profits and we stop pumping the stock market to dramatic new highs every year, you're not going to see the working class better off.
That's more like thanks to disinvestment in retirement funds to build capital for future payouts.
Only smaller local unions are effective at negotiating wages and benefits
Your point is basically "the worst union imaginable is the same as no union".
That's not the own you think it is.
The railroad union got screwed. For one they didn’t get an actual contract. As far as I can tell they got Tentative deal that was used as a procedural trick to delay the strike till after the midterms. It’s not even clear that there was anything in this “tentative deal”. More importantly the strike wasn’t about pay as much as it was about absolutely terrible scheduling practices. Employees were on call 24/7/365 had to show up at very short notice, couldn’t take vacation or sick leave etc. There was no promise of actually fixing any of the problems in that deal.
This happens a lot in union strikes, workers want better work conditions but instead the union negotiates like 1-2% more pay and the media reports it as greedy unions getting overpaid. Even though that’s not what the workers even wanted.
Winding back the clock to stimulate growth seems to be the order of the day
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2...
edit: updated link to last 15 years
USA GDP per person growth, 2000 to 2022, 87%. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/gdp-...
EU GDP per person growth, 2000 to 2022, 126% https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/EUU/european-union/gdp...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Though double checking my calculation the US should be 91%.
I mean you can compare things over the last week, but that’s obviously meaningless.
You’re wrong and you know it, this little do-Si-do is just embarrassing
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...
Governments have offered modest raises that (mostly) haven’t kept up with inflation. Meanwhile, they’ve devoted large chunks of their budget surpluses to tax cuts.
I dug up the lede from where it was buried.
Reads like someone has discovered that the government sector has a hard time competing with the capitalist sector.
> Neither of those have to be properly accounted for in dollar terms today
They actually are, at least for pension contributions.
No. The government exempts taxpayer funded pensions from laws about calculating pension liabilities, and so they use discount rates far above what non taxpayer funded pension funds are required to use. And even these liberally calculated costs are not even funded properly, because there is nothing stopping the politician from not kicking the can down the road.
On the whole the lifetime employment model was abandoned by the private sector decades ago for many good reasons, namely the impossibility of funding defined benefits after population growth stalled; as usual the government is the last place in society that makes necessary changes.
1) implicitly you are saying that lots of public sector jobs are so bad they can/should only be done by “others” that move “here” to do them for us.
2) who will do the crappy jobs where the immigrants came from?
Getting immigrants to do exclusively jobs that locals won’t do feels like a bandaid to me. Does anyone else worry about this?
Immigration is basically arbitrage on living conditions, the US could directly institute “compassionate slavery” and many very poor countries would gladly sell themselves and their children into it.
In fact, there are likely people who would rather live in US prisons than in the country they’re currently in.
For this reason, we will never have "everyone has immigrated" be a serious problem.
Also, legal immigration has been down under Trump and has not bounced back to Obama levels under Biden.
Increased immigration from poorer countries only results in lower wages and less leverage to negotiate for the most vulnerable. Regardless of whatever laws you try to bring forth to counter this, you’ll be fighting a permanent uphill battle against physical reality.
The modern progressive attitude is to simply be for everything indiscriminately, without regard for the contradictions.
growth was so large that society could accommodate such immigration rates
"Increased immigration from poorer countries only results in lower wages and less leverage to negotiate for the most vulnerable."
In the US especially, it cannot be forgotten why people from Central and South America are flooding the southern border. It's because of the US's meddling in the affairs of other nations, particularly via the War on Drugs.
So if the immigrants are supposed to take these public sector jobs because the current citizens refuse to do them, it would be considerably more ideal if they were to not take them under duress, which the US actively caused.
Cause and effect is what matters. Not some abstract purity test of "supporting a system" that's totally disconnected from actual moral outcomes. If you advocate a policy that blocks immigrants from working in the US, you are directly causing their suffering. If your position aligns closely with ethnonationalists, it's time for some deep introspection. This is malevolence masquerading as compassion.
This is my exact position. You are assuming I am against immigration. In the big picture, the system that makes immigration is not compassionate, but it would also not be compassionate in the small picture to stop immigration.
The America First, America for Americans type people at least have a position that is coherent even if it's not compassionate.
The anti immigrant liberals for whom class solidarity ends at the border just don't make sense to me.
The system is basically in a zombie state since Covid-19, a sizeable portion of staff either left those areas because of redundancy, overworked or stressed, died from Covid or went and found a better job elsewhere.
These institutions have become atrophied (weakened) but not given a chance to replenish.
No-one has done anything to address it. Giving payrises or better work conditions won't solve it, there is an apathy in these institutions, brought around by crippling bureaucracy. This apathy translates into poor recruitment and external sentiment by the public, "oh you don't want a job in the NHS, its hard unforgiving work with low pay".
Going to be a hard and unforgiving winter for the poorest and most vulnerable this year who need public services in the UK.
Anecdotally - a friend in North of Spain says a similar issue as well.
> "oh you don't want a job in the NHS, its hard unforgiving work with low pay".
You're saying fixing the root cause of this sentiment, wont fix the sentiment?
- Work hours / shifts
- Holidays
- Micromanagement of your workload
- Having orders given down but taking full responsibility if it goes wrong?
- Miscommunication and resources not being available or sent to the wrong place?
And she is a public employee and looking to stay in the public sector.
The underlying harsh truths of health care in the United States is that it became bloated by design (incentives for high base prices), and also that the US population is incredibly unhealthy. And that a few million of health care workers (mostly in insurance companies) will have to lose their jobs to make it fair for the rest of us.
But because unhealthy people are lumped together with healthier ones, it tends to lower the costs to a tolerable (still very high) level. Also, many workers don't pay their full premiums, which again helps mask the true costs of health care.
Eventually it will all come crashing down and there will be far more suffering than there had to be, had we addressed the problem earlier and in full (Gut the insurance companies, Single-Payer, Cost ceilings on critical medication).
Net income: 2.9B USD
HOWEVER:
1. They paid 3.6B USD in dividends in 2021
2. They paid 10B in operating costs and receieve ~70B in premiums on top of other streams
3. They increased their interest expense for the KAH acquisition
4. They hold $44B in assets and $28B in liabilities
The story they are clearly telling investors is they are seeking to consolidate Payers with Providers to improve efficiencies, which ignores that they they could improve operational efficiencies today.
A move to Medicare for all at current reimbursement rates would require drastic budget cuts at every healthcare provider in the country. That may be what's necessary to fix the broken system, but it would involve a lot of pain.
Worst case: we go back to what things were before the ACA where if you had a preexisting condition you were screwed.
I think we might save some money right away, but more likely we'll lose a bit, gain the ability for our citizens to not have to worry as much about their jobs being their literal lifeline, and over time we'll save more and more versus the current system due to an increased quality of living due to better health outcomes and longer lives.
In the book he offers some numbers on the healthcare system in the US, where in administration and insurance there are indeed many such bullshit jobs. What is worse, they often bring a bureaucratic burden on people like nurses, who do have real work to do. (All by the assessment of the people doing the bullshit job)
He offers quotes to show this was even the point of view of Obama
> Everybody who supports single-payer health care says, ‘Look at all this money we would be saving from insurance and paperwork,’ ” the former President noted. “That represents one million, two million, three million jobs.” Graeber describes this comment as a “smoking gun” of bullshittization. “Here is the most powerful man in the world at the time publicly reflecting on his signature legislative achievement—and he is insisting that a major factor in the form that legislature took is the preservation of bullshit jobs,” he writes. Politicians are so fixated on job creation, he thinks, that no one wonders which jobs are created, and whether they are necessary. Unnecessary employment may be one of the great legacies of recent public-private collaboration.
In healthcare, I imagine there is a lot of bullshit that would still have momentum in a post-single-payer world that we couldn't eliminate right away, but I still want that. See my other recent comment, I went into more detail on why I think single-payer would be great, but isn't a panacea for healthcare costs and efficiency.
People complain about terrible bosses and think that it is a symptom of "out of touch elites." But the general public is the worst boss I have ever had.
It is that going out of your way in the public sector is not rewarded and just gets you dragged into meetings, so if your manager isn’t telling you what to do, why not just sit on your ass?
The public sector’s motivation problem is relying on intrinsic motivations.
Why do they rely on intrinsic motivations? As the public screams when they hear of people getting large raises or bonuses.
The biggest problem is merit pay is politically impossible. Imagine paying a hotshot developer $300k to introduce a new LMS for a school district. That very well might be cheaper than hiring a consulting firm and paying a team of developers $85k.
But there would be howls about taxpayer money being wasted on such a highly paid individual. The public only tolerates raises based on seniority because absent some tragedy everyone gets old, so everyone can imagine themselves in the public workers' shoes.
This in turn attracts workers who bank on seniority rather than merit for pay increases, creating a culture of mediocrity and tall poppy attitudes.
The private sector is shielded from such criticism by the magical "just don't patronize them" argument (when in fact many businesses are monopolistic and essential), and frankly because the public is ignorant of how well-paid certain individuals are within firms.
Not arguing against high merit pay, as it can lead to the most efficient outcome, but boy oh boy is it unpopular with a lot of people who never fall into the highly paid bucket.
If that's the pace of the project, then the project was never important in the first place.
I've read plenty of job descriptions' sections for qualifications, and they're out of touch with reality. Many orgs want unicorn employees (e.g. 5 years in machine learning, 3 programming languages, also PM experience and SQL, and must have comp-sci degree of course) and are barely willing to pay market rates for it.
It's unclear to me if they're actually serious about work needing to be done. They're certainly unwilling to train non-perfect-fit employees and/or let someone competent post a job ad that's realistic.
The danger is, as a society, perhaps the feedback look has inertia: WAY too many people have resigned from the “hustle life” and we are not yet feeling the effect of what happens when so few people work.
Maybe, after 10 years, the Western countries will drop off the G8, and be replaced by cultures who are more willing to work.
Maybe in the West/all over the world the workers have also noticed that the wealth is getting funneled more towards the top (Bezos can now send Captain Kirk up to the sky in a penis and buy a yacht that made headlines because a bridge in the Netherlands had to be allegedly disassembled so it would fit through...).
Even in China the youth are (or they were, was it just a fad?) doing the "lie flat" movement that the government has made statements of "Everyone has to work hard for the greater good!".
No. No one wants to work for you at the rate you're offering.
Private companies have constraints too of course but generally have more flexibility in dealing with them--which can of course be to decide that some job isn't worth it if they have to pay $X to fill it.
We do this all the time at a personal level. While there are some service people who I would pretty much have to grin and bear it. There are plenty of other things I'd just let go, do it myself, etc.
Most managers end up doing the latter because slowing things down against organizational inertia is really hard
General public reflects the existing social order. In a society that chews people raw and spits them out for profit, the general public won't be responsible or caring. They will start caring about the society and related morals and responsibilities as much as the society cares for them.
Why is the project delaying starting until some roles are filled? (What was done during this time?)
We couldn’t hire any senior level technical talent, so there was nobody who could actually tell management whether what they wanted was possible.
What was done during the time? Endlessly updating project timeline docs about the new deadline with assumptions about when senior tech people would be hired. I didn’t touch code for months.
Whose job is it to tell the hiring team that hiring senior level technical talent at the budgeted salary is impossible also?
Do you need to be a senior HR manager for that? Are those also impossible to hire?
Customer service people get treated like this all the time, public or private sector.
Probably cause a huge outrage by people who don’t understand math.
Yes, the voters want their potholes filled but that doesn't mean they'll approve a bond issue or whatever to pay for it.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/unpacked/2017/07/11/the-kansa...
“Voters choose to withhold funding for public services they expect” would be a better headline.
Seems perfectly fine. And maybe they decide that they don't actually want to pay for some public services or they're fine with more automated/online versions of certain things. For example, where I live you do a lot more associated with the DMV online than you used to and I assume significantly fewer people are employed. Of course there can be issues with access and those need to be dealt with.
It's not clear to me that, in general, state governments are massively underfunded.
I mean there clearly is one. Ukraine got billions within two days of asking. We've sent them what, $70 billion this year alone? Funnily enough no new outlet seems to be tracking the total, just covering each one individually so it doesn't look like we're doing what we're doing: Prioritizing Ukraine over US citizens.
In current geopolitical climate you would lose a lot more than $70 billion if Russia would win in Ukraine, there is a lot more on stake than Ukraine independence, US debt is financed by the rest of the world. US is world hegemon because of its influence granted by military and economical power. If you lose that status you lose influence, if you lose influence you also lose your country "safe heaven" status for other people money, next USD could lose status of world reserve currency, next your budget deficit is unsustainable anymore, your social contract gets broken, 2008 crisis would be nothing compared to this. Not mentioning that US was not ready to fight Russia and China same time, elimination of Russia from equation through proxy war in Ukraine will allow US to focus on China. Additional benefit to USA is Sweden and Finland joining NATO and strengthening US influence in Europe, making it a lot easier to flip Europe against China (see how NATO joint statement about China changed in Madrid summit in July 2022 compared to stance of leading EU countries before the war). $70 billion is not a high price to show the world that you are not a declining superpower (especially after that Afghanistan retreat and rise of China) and retain your status and influence, if I were a US citizen I would be glad it costs me only $70 billion knowing the alternative.
Pure speculation.
>if I were a US citizen I would be glad it costs me only $70 billion knowing the alternative.
I am one and I completely disagree. We have no business helping either side when we have so many huge problems at home. Our citizens don't even have national healthcare. An incursion in Ukraine should be about 50 spots down the priority list.
No it's not, I wrote about how debt works in USA and you have 1 trillion deficit a year.
> I am one and I completely disagree. We have no business helping either side when we have so many huge problems at home. Our citizens don't even have national healthcare. An incursion in Ukraine should be about 50 spots down the priority list.
Remaining a world hegemon is number 1 priority for USA, sorry but being US citizen and not knowing this is ignorance and lack of knowledge about how the world works, if you lose that position I assure you that you will have a lot more problems than national healthcare, actually you can forget about national healthcare then.
Yeah there is. It's called the weekly handouts and tax cuts for the rich.
It's unfortunate that the city can't hire enough secretaries. Do I want them to poach competent workers from my ISP, Target, Amazon, or my insurance company? Not really, no.
After all, where else can public sector wages come from?
It also needs to be said that this is a common and despicable tactic of the right wing: first, vote consistently against any support for the public sector; then, claim that the public sector is fundamentally incapable of doing a good job (and should thus be deprioritized further), rather than it having been deliberately starved of funding and public support over the course of decades.
We have the public sector we vote for and are willing to pay for: no more, no less.
Galbraith's get it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Affluent_Society
I am being a bit pithy, but I think these sort of opinions are based in ideology, and not experience. If you are untrustful, you will always be skeptical of government, and too trustful, will always accept that more money is the answer.
And if government had ever been funded to the point that the left wing actually wants (note: not "to the point that politics actually allows in compromise budgets, either with the Republicans or with the fiscally conservative parts of the Democrats"), over the past few hundred years, and it had still failed to solve the problems that are trying to be solved with more money, you might be able to derive a valid criticism out of this.
And I did the math and noted, first, to get a dollar out of State of California, you have to pay them a million in taxes. In aggregate. Like if you pay a million dollars in taxes and it's equally distributed, maybe not a million to one quite but around there. Very close, ballpark, at least for the purposes of the following estimate:
I got a 1000000000x speedup (actually a bit more but I frequently round down to a more impressive number) on an algorithm thanks to those stimulants, and then it made sense: I still got 1000x ROI from paying taxes. Purely mathematical about it. Best money I ever spent! If you get a big enough speedup, taxes are a great investment. And they're the only thing that get people out of the absolute deepest holes.
If that's what it takes for public sector employees to be well taken care of. Unironically, yes.
No, they don't. In a democratic system, they need to pay what the voting public wants them to pay. Give the People a referendum to decide this: they can choose between paying public-sector employees well (competitively with private industry) and raising taxes to pay for it, or lowering taxes and keeping public-sector pay low.
Which one do you think they'll choose?
Or, if you prefer that elected representatives make these decisions, get some people to run on a platform of jacking up taxes to raise public-service position salaries. Let's see if they get elected.
The People are getting what they voted for.
Raise pay, train on the job, hire competent managers that fire people who do nothing, improve working conditions. (For example, public universities are filled with administrators who don’t do anything useful at all)
It’s not a “crisis” it’s just competitive pressure. There’s nothing quite like people not needing your shitty jobs to improve conditions.
Employers have enjoyed exploiting workers for much too long and now they feel entitled.
Productivity has greatly increased. Pay and respect have not.
How organizations work has changed dramatically over the last 20-30 years. Pensions are gone, salaries are higher, job security is lower, performance expections are higher, management is more merit-based than seniority based, etc. (yes, you can see exceptions in any workplace, but the overarching trends are clear on a multi-decade scale.)
As with any change, there’s a spectrum of early adopters to laggards.
Public services are generally going to be in the laggard category by virtue of being old and bureaucratic. However, there are lots of other established companies and industries that are laggards as well and they must be feeling the exact same pain.
The boomer generation grew up in a world where the old model was the norm. On average, they would be most comfortable in that style of company. This becomes self-perpetuating as the world changes around the organization: the current staff reinforces the culture and keeps it resistant to change. Doubly-so by virtue of the mutual loyalty in those positions.
And now, the baby boomers are retiring and none of the new workforce is accustomed to the legacy org model and the tradeoffs it requires (are you interest 40% lower salary for a pension? You only have to stay for 20 years).
I predict it’ll be up to the organizations to adapt to the times. Management experience in “modern” companies will be in hot demand over the next decade or so.
Where are salaries higher? That doesn't seem to be the case in real terms in most places.
The most conservative estimate I've seen shows that if the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation over the past 50 years, it would be over $21/hour now. The minimum wage.
From what I've seen, Dunkin and Amazon* pay a $15 minimum wage—which, yes, is better than many other places now, but not compared to what you could expect to get for similar jobs several decades ago (adjusted for inflation). And I haven't heard anything one way or the other about Dunkin, but Amazon is actively hostile to unions, which were the strong sword and shield of blue collar workers like them back when they could expect pensions and such—not at all coincidentally.
* For those actually designated employees; I'm given to understand that Amazon also does all sorts of shenanigans to designate various people who work for them as contractors of some type.
Yes. That's the only metric that matters for most people.
Red tape may have its costs (as well as benefits), but bureaucrats do not add a lot of tax burden at the local level, which is where most public sector jobs are.
When you go into the bowels of government, you realize how many steps are "Send X document by USPS, an employee evaluates for 6 weeks and sends Yes, No, Invalid, Request for more docs by USPS again." Then you send more documents and they take 8 weeks to evaluate again.
>...vicious cycles happen at state/city level. Financial duress ⇨ higher taxes/worse services ⇨ decline in tax base ⇨ financial duress. There’s no solution for this. No one can "fix" Illinois. It’s trapped in its debt.
https://twitter.com/JohnArnoldFndtn/status/12953914014637506...
Where are the anarcho-capitalists when you need them?
Seriously, I would love to see a state or municipality try an explicit move to private sector provisioning of "essential" services as an experiment. Imagine if instead of voting for politicians, you voted for what fraction of city contracts should be assigned to which commercial providers. The space of possible institutions is way underexplored, and the risk from a single failing municipality trying something radically new seems low.
https://fee.org/articles/the-man-who-outsourced-the-governme...
I don't give a fuck about 5 choices if they are all bad. In fact, most people in the USA are in this exact conundrum with certain types of utilities (e.g. Internet). In fact, public ISPs in the USA have a phenomenal track-record compared to their private competitors.
I want one good choice for my utility. Portland, for all of its problems, has a pretty excellent electric company, also named "PGE", which absolutely mogs the fuck out of the other "PG&E" that people on HN are likely more aware of due to the blackouts that the public private partnership, PG&E have instituted.
In fact, I can't think of any large-scale situations where public utilities in the USA were privatized and it led to improvements in services rendered.
As it turns out, fiduciary duty is kinda fucked up when you're talking about essential utilities. I want there to be no profit incentive.
But even accepting your premise that Portland's PGE "mogs the fuck out of PG&E", under the scheme I proposed, California voters could vote to assign say 5% of California energy contracts to Portland's PGE and see how it goes. That % could increase every year if the voters think they're doing a good job.
The thing I proposed is not the same as traditional utility privatization. Utilities are natural monopolies, so privatizing them doesn't actually create competition. With the proposal above, the voters get to vote on exactly how much competition they want in each industry, including utilities.
It seems to be working decently well.
But we also have a very local town power and water utility that is also working well, too. So perhaps it’s something else.
The result is... Four different garbage trucks from four different companies clatter through my neighborhood in the early-morning hours of four different days of the week.
decibels emitted * estimated fraction of the population sleeping at the hour services are delivered * population size affected
And if you allocate the contract city-wide each year very quickly there is only one company that CAN fulfill the contract.
I’d love to see something like an electric dumpster that collects the smaller cans and then goes to a main location to be truck collected.
Your point about there being only one company that can fulfill the contract is a good one. My suggestion was to vote for what fraction of city contracts should be assigned to which commercial providers. I haven't worked out exact details of how this voting would work -- maybe voters could upvote/downvote service providers reddit style, and their contract percentages could be adjusted accordingly. But the overall thought was that if company A is currently providing 100% of Centerville waste services, and company B from Borderville is looking to expand into Centerville, they try to convince voters to assign 5% of Centerville waste disposal contracts to company B.
Monopolies arise because it is an individual's best interest to buy whichever option is cheapest. But it is in our collective best interest to have healthy competition. By having voters vote on what % of contracts should go to which provider, they end up choosing in our collective best interest, and keeping providers on their toes by maintaining a bit of diversity.
It's a bit of a wacky idea, I just had it this morning actually. My larger point is there is a disappointing lack of willingness to discuss and run small scale experiments on wacky ideas that could totally work :-D For example, the scheme I described incentivizes companies to tattle on each other for bad behavior like harming the environment! Isn't that interesting? It also goes a long way to address the classic problem of charter schools trying to goose their test scores by kicking out low-performing students.
Naturally, the outcry was that these 'greedy' corporations are taking people to the cleaners. In reality, the formerly public ran sewer was horribly managed. Maintenance and capital expenses were deferred from day 1, and now the bill is coming due. The bill from the private Corp accurately captures the ongoing maintenance and capital reserves, which the local gov just kicked the can down the road to avoid pissing off the voters.
With public workers, they are organizing indirectly against tax payers. Tax payers can't close their doors - they have to pay their taxes. Although I've had my eye out for many years, I've never come across a good solution that would make this relationship work as well as unions versus business owners.
Libertarians hold off. The answer is not privatization. Some public services (e.g. NHS) are far more cost efficient and match the quality of private competition. Having used both NHS and the US system, I'll avoid the mess and gamble of the US system pretty much anytime it is convenient.
And you can't privatize national defense for what I hope are obvious reasons.
So how can you preserve the factors offered by public services and then somehow determine fair wages? That question doesn't seem to have an obvious answer. The best I've come up with myself is to allow the private sector to compete with public services and then simply match the free market wages.
The nationalist/populist reasons for these policies (again, speaking only for Quebec) are going to suffocate a burgeoning and relatively young tech industry here in Montreal and Quebec City.
I don’t think Quebec is anti-immigration, but they expect immigrants to make more of an effort conforming to Quebec culture and identity than other Canadian provinces do.
we've seen in other more liberal communities (Denmark, Sweden) that influx of culturally different immigrants tends to create nuclei of those cultures where they just interact amongst themselves, and never integrate.
I would argue that expecting a middle eastern to integrate into a northern European society is a farce.
I would argue that if the children of those immigrants are not fitting in then you have a problem. And that problem usually has to do with marginalization. In heavily immigrant areas do the people see themselves reflected in public insitutions? In teaching staff, bus drivers, police? America and Canada have historically been much better at this part than Europe.
Does immigration offer so much more other than cheap labour ?
Polarisation in the US, in my estimation, has a lot more to do with democratic backsliding [0] cause by economic inequality, populism, cultural conservatism and the concentration of power in the US gov't.
Lots of things with much more evidence to point at before you start blaming immigrants.
>>What is your motivation for lying?
Unhinged.
And what I saw was not racism, what I saw was Arab immigrants trying to make Danish schools ban pork, or having a complete disregard to the "tidy" Danish way of life (whether you like that way of life or not)
[0] https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/1912126/legault-apol...
[1] https://www.lesoleil.com/2021/11/21/le-parti-conservateur-du...
Montreal is an incredibly diverse city and then you have Levis across the river from Quebec City which is something like 90%+ white French Canadian.
A few of our recent far right terrorists (groups and individuals) came out of Quebec; the historical leftist nationalism associated with the FLQ in the 70s is not the only style anymore.
Siphoning away the most ambitious and capable people from around the world also hurts the places they are from.
To be clear I do support immigration, just not as an easier to acquire and cheaper source of skilled labor.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19892155
Under this story about bootcamps there was also the experiment by Google to run fiber through those towns. I believe the lesson was that only a handful were employable as fully-remote devs.
I expect I’d find it moderately hard to learn coal mining at my age and though I don’t believe it would have been impossible in my youth.
But of course, I agree that increase in immigration needs to be balanced and met with social and financial support for those who immigrate.
I suppose when the pain gets too great than we will consider expanding our immigration policies, as the USA is still considered a favorable immigration destination.