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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion time...

Feelings are important for individuals and that can have an impact en mass.

But they are not accurate or meaningful ways of measuring someones actual worth. For that we have money.

This is why bankers earn more than nurses and teachers: everyone pays lip service to the urgent need to care for the sick, educate kids etc. But when it comes time to spend money or cast votes what they actually want are cheap credit and cheap goods and services.

This is the problem with all sorts of commentary like this. It relies on people's own internalized hypocrisy. And that's both very strong and very misleading.

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> This is why bankers earn more than nurses and teachers

I think it has more to do with the proximity to money. A banker is close to lots of money moving around, and in a position to craft some scheme to extract parts of it. This basically applies to all of finance. The closer you are, the more opportunities to extract large amounts. A nurse is far removed from the flow of money.

Not just finance. If you want to be wealthy get as close to large sums of money as possible. That's why people move to big cities and go to top schools. They are proxies to being near large sums of money.

It's also much harder to make money by creating value (i.e. nursing a sick person back to health) vs stealing value at scale (i.e. charging $25 overdraft fees to poor people's bank accounts.)

I think it is always about the efficiency. Both nursing and teaching is low efficiency jobs. With teaching the customers or users are poor be it students or pupils. Just take a number of students in class. And multiply that by amount of money you are ready to pay for teaching each month. Now add everything else, it just doesn't scale.

Same goes for nursing, a single nurse can only nurse so many people in single month. And it only gets worse if you want 24/7 coverage. At least with teaching you could do 6 hours teaching + 2 hours other work during weekdays.

Most people would rather pay a $25 overdraft fee, than not go overdrawn and keep the $25. That's what the fees popularity tells us.

Most people would rather keep $25 (or spend it on an overdraft fee) than give it up to pay a nurse to nurse a sick, poor person.

These are the unpopular truths we all deny and yet all see daily.

> Most people would rather pay a $25 overdraft fee, than not go overdrawn and keep the $25. That's what the fees popularity tells us.

That is not the case. In the US, only 41% of the people who went overdrawn did so willingly. About 20% knew they were low on funds and expected their deposit to clear first, and for the remainder, the overdraft was a surprise.[1]

The popularity of fees indicates that those who charge them want to keep charging them; it does not indicate that those who pay the fees are in favour of going overdrawn and paying fees.

1. Page 15 of https://curinos.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Curinos_2021-... (2021)

You miss my point.

My interpretation of the evidence is that 41% happily admit it. And another 50 plus pretend they don't. A few are unlucky as you say.

If this were not the case, those 50ish percent would stop doing it. The fact they keep paying these fees tells us one of 2 things is true: EITHER they are honestly not capable of managing a current account OR they (like the 41%) choosing not to but are conditioned not to admit it.

Personally I find the second option much more likely.

The same is true in a lot of other pieces of evidence: people routinely vote against their own interests for instance. And they knowingly eat food that's bad for them despite being offered alternatives.

This is a fundamental part of human nature no one wants to address: people are not logical, dispassionate, long term thinking, selfless, analytical, strategic entities. They do dumb shit that is bad for them. And then they lie about it.

"Lie" might not be the right word, people will claim passionately they want X then do Not X without a moments hesitation.

> The fact they keep paying these fees tells us one of 2 things is true: EITHER they are honestly not capable of managing a current account OR they (like the 41%) choosing not to but are conditioned not to admit it.

The fact that people keep getting robbed at gunpoint tells us one of two things is true: EITHER the victims are honestly not capable of living in a crime-infested world, OR they choose to get robbed but are conditioned to not admit it.

See the issue with your logic? There's a third option: there is a large power imbalance (like people designing exploitative bank account UXs/people in shady corner with guns) and that is being exploited against the wishes of the people who are victimized by them.

I mean, if you keep getting robbed by the same guy, in the same alley, and you could easily avoid that alley, but you don't and you know you will get robbed when you go down there, then yes. Sooner or later you're not actually being robbed. You're giving the guy money presumably because you like the service he offers?

I am all for clearer labeling etc. The few who legitimately don't want to go overdrawn should be offered all the assistance possible.

I just think we need to acknowledge that 40% admit they choose this and another 40% choose it but won't admit it...

> if you keep getting robbed by the same guy, in the same alley, and you could easily avoid that alley, but you don't and you know you will get robbed when you go down there, then yes.

Or rather, there is a robber at every alley, because there is no law that prevents robbing, and no enforcement of the laws that exist. In that society, if you have a gun but aren't robbing people, you're giving up money. What are people without guns gotta do?

I think it certainly helps. But if that were the only factor, nurses would earn the same as doctors as they're side by side all day. And the guy making coffee in the financial district would get a fantastic bonus. :)

Money, as you're defining it, is a good example of Goodhart's law: when a metric becomes a target, that metric becomes useless.

Money, initially, may have been a good metric to judge which role is contributing more to society. But soon, a parasite class emerges whose goal is to maximize "money" itself regardless of what value they are providing to society. Just like any other metric, the concept of money as a yardstick of "good for all of us" has failed a long time ago because of that.

I don't think that's 100% true. But I also don't think it's 100% false.

I think it's a problem people pursue money they don't actually intend to spend. But I also think people buying the "wrong" things (chocolate instead of vegetables, bank bailouts instead of universal healthcare) is a weird mix of feature and flaw. Or at least it is just a reflection of human beings own flaws.

> But they are not accurate or meaningful ways of measuring someones actual worth. For that we have money.

Prices in an efficient market (which the labor market is not, but that's another discussion entirely) are determined by marginal cost and marginal utility, not value. The value I get out of having as much water as I do is enormous, but I'm basically indifferent as to whether I get even more water than that, and so water is cheap.

The upper limit of the price is the value you derive. The upper limit of a bankers wage is very high. The upper limit for a teacher less so. Hence price is not value as you correctly say. But it does tell you something about value. At least the free market sense of value.

Nurses and teachers are both bad examples, because both professions willingly get underpaid because they care about who they are helping. In both cases they aren't paid by their customers, and also don't strike often for that same reason.

Respectfully, the person paying you is your customer by definition. That's sort of my point: the people paying teachers do not want to buy teaching because they don't actually care about the next generation. At best they want babysitting. The same people DEMAND ez credit and cheap plastic shit in Walmart. So they pay the bankers who are key to producing those things handsomely.

The person paying is the customer. The person receiving the service is a "cost centre" in basically all underpaid, "socially useful" roles.

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