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Comment by rqtwteye | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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