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Comment by rcme | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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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