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Comment by rcme | Hacker News Reader

> The first example is a junior level social worker -- that's fine, but come now: we all know that social work is not a high-paying industry.

This is an unfair dismissal. Most industries are not high paying, therefore most workers are not earning enough to save. You're basically saying "they're not saving because they're not earning more!" Also, what is your proposed solution here? To stop having social workers?

> someone with three jobs, who still manages to save $200 a month!

Saving $200 a month is basically nothing, especially in NYC. It would take multiple years just to save a few months worth of rent.

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> Also, what is your proposed solution here? To stop having social workers?

Training for a job that pays below what you need to live comfortably is a choice. You may feel passionate enough about that job that you are willing to accept the consequences of a low salary. If you are not, then you should not train to do that job.

I do sympathize, as it's essentially impossible for a 16- or 17-year-old to fully understand the lifetime ramifications of the profession they're about to choose.

But if people stopped making dangerous financial compromises to take jobs they are passionate about, then those jobs will either have to get funded more such that the salaries go up, or yes, they'll cease to exist.

I think social work is a job that's extremely valuable to society, so I would hope that, in the face of a shortage (due to people not wanting to take the job because of low pay), legislatures and whatnot would vote to fund it more. But that's up to communities to decide.

> Saving $200 a month is basically nothing, especially in NYC.

The woman who saves $200/mo (the article actually says $200-$300/mo, so it's a bit better, even) lives in Bensenville, Illinois.

I think the pertinent question is do we just stop having social workers?

They provide essential services, you're focusing too much on the choice to do something that pays a lot vs choice to do something you're passionate about

How about the choice to do something that simply needs to be done?

Under the current circumstances, if someone chooses to do a job because they find it socially important then they won’t have much leverage to bargain for better pay.

If there are people who will todo your job for the amount of money you find unacceptable, you will have a hard time bargaining for more money.

We, the people who pay for social worker through taxes, must be willing to pay them more. AND the social workers must be willing to walk away if their own needs aren’t being met.

> But if people stopped making dangerous financial compromises to take jobs they are passionate about, then those jobs will either have to get funded more such that the salaries go up, or yes, they'll cease to exist.

If a "passion" is common enough, it will get systematically exploited by employers.

How is it exploitation to pay market wage if it’s well above minimum wage?

Because minimum wage is well below what it should be if you want to consider it as the line for what is and isn't exploitive.

Like any industry social work has a ladder and options including getting licensed as an lcsw and doing more profitable private therapy or even being head of hospital departments or other administration tasks. You certainly have the lower paying end as well but no it’s not a poverty guarantee.

> Training for a job that pays below what you need to live comfortably is a choice. You may feel passionate enough about that job that you are willing to accept the consequences of a low salary. If you are not, then you should not train to do that job.

My problem with this is that there are a lot of jobs in the US that are important (physical therapists, speech language pathologists, some nursing positions, pharmacy techs, educators) that are getting to be not worth paying for the training. You don't make enough to money to pay it back.

And I want people to choose to do those jobs. :)

I'm not dismissing the person. I'm saying: if the author's purpose is to generalize from this example to all 20-somethings, it's obviously biased. Placing this example first was an editorial decision, and it's designed to elicit sympathy. Imagine if the author had led with the 28-year old NYC resident who saves 2k a month.

Also, I just want to add: I'm not engaging you in a debate about whether or not social workers "should" be paid more. I don't run the world.

$40,000 is an above-average income for a 22-year-old in America. If anything they should have picked someone who made less if they wanted to generalize to all 20-somethings.

> Also, what is your proposed solution here? To stop having social workers?

Reduce expenses to live within your means, or figure out how to earn more money. The plight of... every person on earth

> Reduce expenses to live within your means, or figure out how to earn more money.

This means "stop having social workers".

You can only reduce expenses so far, and the easiest way to earn more money is to get a new job.

Unions & collective bargaining is another option - depending on the profit margins of the companies involved.

Basically, if social workers collectively refused to work for the current pay, either social work would be eliminated (unlikely), or pay would rise - either through government subsidies, or at the expense of profit margins.

True. I wonder if social workers would find themselves in the "not allowed to strike" group of government employees.

A lot of social workers are not government employees, there are a bunch of private counseling practices, NGOs, and hospital systems and the like that employ social workers as well. (I’m only familiar with the situation in the US)

But I think your point stands even aside from any regulatory specifics. Asking social workers to strike for better wages is essentially asking some of the most vulnerable in our society (e.g. kids in the foster system) to bear the brunt of our collective underinvestment in meeting their needs. I think that’s less acceptable of an impact compared to stressing out some BigCorp’s bottom line in the case of Amazon or Starbucks and similar

"I don't want to see you, I don't want to hear from you."

People in the US seem to just hate poor people

You're too kind. It's not hate. It's contempt.

I've decided that many Americans believe that the definition of "freedom" is "freedom from having to even think about people who are outside of my family/social group". The homeless person on the street isn't a tragedy because human beings shouldn't have to sleep on the street, it's a tragedy because I have to see it and think about it.

>Reduce expenses to live within your means

Which is cool until the point that rents take up 100% of your income and then you're screwed.

Let's imagine a world where almost everyone makes $7 an hour. You would expect pricing in the world to reflect that and housing to fit in that budget.

But now in that world you create a small percentage of people that can print as much money as they want. These people that print as much money also have a terrible problem as they are completely greedy and always want more. You'd expect the first outcome of this situation to be asset inflation. The behavior of the greedy would be to buy up as many 'real' assets with their fake money as quickly as possible. Eventually the behaviors of the people earning $7 simply don't matter. The greedy will extract as much wealth as possible and drive up costs beyond the point of survival until a significant portion of the population is tossing the other half of the population in to guillotines.

It is important to keep income inequality under control if you want a stable society (that's not a police state).

True, but many people look back and say “back in the day people could do X” and cherry pick.

What they ignore is how long people lived at home for, how many people jumped immediately into marriage. This whole business of everyone having their own place is not sustainable, despite what we see in TV.

Interesting thing I learned during the pandemic: There are actually countries where more people live alone than in the United States. In particular, in Sweden, the vast majority of all unattached adults, even young ones, live alone, without roommates. So, I have to push back against the idea that a permanent housing shortage forcing people into multi-person living arrangements is the natural default.

Saving $200 a month just means you won't have to go into debt when you need to hire a plumber or auto mechanic or have a very-minor, insured ER visit.

[EDIT] Assuming you don't have more than ~2 such urgent expenses per year, that is. And none worse than that.

I have I think good insurance. It still asks for $350 for an ER visit.

This is probably off topic, but I would gladly pay a few more $$ in taxes to have social workers have pay equity with other professionals.

Don't most government jobs have a great benefits plan including 401k with matching and the ability to have loans dismissed?

Someone with the skills to be a social worker, on average, can use those skills for higher paid work.

They are knowingly trading the good feeling they get when helping people for the cash they could get by being a cold capitalist. You can make the argument social workers should be paid more but probably not the argument the person is employed in the highest saving ability profession they could reasonably hope to work in.

Again, you seem to believe that eliminating the job of social worker from society is a viable option.

What are all the capitalists going to do if everybody wants to go for the big bucks and not do things like social work, nursing and many other jobs? Society is seriously f...ed up if it's ok to exploit people who do a valuable job for society and only selfishness gets rewarded.

Same for entrepreneurs. What are the genius billionaires going to do if nobody wants to work for them and everybody wants to be an entrepreneur? We need to reward all kinds of useful jobs and not have all reward go to the sociopaths at the top.

If nobody does at the current wage, then wages will have to rise to meet supply/demand.

As it stands individuals see the good feels as part of their wages. Otherwise they would do something higher paying. IF nobody does the job because the good feels does nothing for them then they'll have to start paying as much as the cold capitalist job.

Yes, that's how it works. Certainly nobody would just complain loudly that "Nobody wants to work anymore!" and demand more suffering for the people at the bottom of society.

It would be an interesting experiment if we fired all the social workers and gave the money of the salary and all the overhead of those programs directly to the poor, and compare the outcomes.

Yes, because statistically valid studies are cheap and don't require highly-trained professionals.

Would you give that money to the abused/neglected kids that social workers protect, or the parents that are abusing/neglecting them?

Who would be in charge of identifying who gets that money and managing the systems that distribute that money and would they get paid more than the social workers that got fired?

I would do a negative income tax basically at the lowest earnings (that is they basically get graduated credits). I'd simplify the tax code so we'd only need half the IRS or less and then repurpose some of them to making sure the negative income tax is refunded. Unemancipated children would not be included in the refund.

My prediction is especially neglect but also abuse are often symptoms of poverty and insufficient economic security. I do not believe economically starving the parents is somehow going to help the neglect of overburdened parents, but I can respect some possible hints that may be drawn from your question. My belief is the number of kids saved through such a measure would outdo the number the social workers would have saved. But that is just a theory.

Is nobody else going to tell this guy that the earned income tax credit already exists?

Your argument ignores the fact that people need to work at every point in their adult life unless they're privileged enough to have someone subsidize their existence. There is a large group of people in society who only have low paying work available to them with their current set of skills. Without being able to save, they don't have the means to acquire new skills. So they're quite literally trapped in low paying jobs.

Also, I think you're too hung up on "social work = good feels." Do fast food workers get good feels from their work?

You don't have the opinion social workers have the skills to obtain higher paid work? How do you have such low opinion of social workers that you find their skills non-transferable and even compare their skill level to that of fast food workers? This is a pretty uncharitable view of the skilled people helping our more vulnerable elements of society.

And as an aside, very few people deliberately take a reduced fast food wage in the goal of helping others whereas a large number of our skilled and caring social workers knowingly entered social work knowing their college education could be used for higher paying endeavors.

I'm not comparing social workers to fast food workers. I'm saying there are other low-paid jobs in addition to social work.

And I would be very curious to hear some suggestions for jobs a social worker could get without any additional training that pay better than social work. NYC requires posting salaries in job openings, so with a suggested job alternative, we can easily find if there are many job openings for the new line of work and whether or not the job would pay materially better than social work.

If your position is they're literally getting the highest amount possible they could, even more than they could in private cold capitalist industries they're qualified for, then it's kind of crazy to characterize them as being the victims of sub-market pay. They're the market makers in that case at the top of their skill pyramid!

Which leads me to my response:

>What are all the capitalists going to do if everybody wants to go for the big bucks and not do things like social work, nursing and many other jobs?

Well if what rcme says is true, they're being paid the top dollar of anybody with their skills... that kind of answers the question. They're at the biggest buck profession they can get (remember rcme thesis is they don't have the resources to retrain or whatever) therefore the profession will still exist.

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