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Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

A shortage just means that the quantity supplied is less than the quantity demanded. You can have a 45% increase in the quantity supplied, as TFA says, and still have a shortage. We don't know anything about the change in the quantity demanded during that time.

That being said, the article is correct that there is no shortage because there is no ceiling on the price of truck driver labor. Companies just don't want to pay more.

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I have a friend who is a truck driver.

He went through the whole interview process, including a road test (which he easily passed, as he's very good), and found out they were only paying $30/hr.

After bitching about it, they went up to $35/hr, but the extra $5 was put into a 401(K).

Guess what the investment for the 401(K) was?

BTW: He walked.

Getting paid hourly can be a boon in some cases. I know multiple truck drivers governed by time on the road which happens to include "time waiting" and many don't get paid for that wait time.

It is an interesting industry as you have short haul, long haul, large companies and small.

> I know multiple truck drivers governed by time on the road which happens to include "time waiting" and many don't get paid for that wait time.

It's always been bonkers to me that we've allowed lobbyists to carve out exceptions to labor laws for specific industries.

If you are required to be at a specific place for a specific time, and you're paid hourly, you should be getting paid, full stop.

Why we allow trucking companies to not pay their drivers because they're waiting for something and not driving is beyond me. Just like flight attendants that don't get paid until the doors are shut. If you're not allowed to leave, you should be getting paid.

Airline workers and all those airport shop employees are not paid for their time going through security. Recently reaffirmed by the courts. Can you imagine arriving at the office and then spending an hour unpaid in line to get in?

Yup, I have a brother who is a truck driver. It's a brutal industry that looks to screw over it's workers at every angle possible.

They try to get you to purchase your truck, so you are locked in but also so you are on the hook for the inevitable maintenance (we are talking $250k).

They push you to work the limits at every angle. The maximum road time, the maximum ranges/etc.

And when you start talking about 401ks/etc, it's almost always real garbage. Everything is nickel and dimed to the maximum extent possible.

Is there no union?

There are truckers unions, IDK how popular they are. The issue is every truck owner ends up being a "business owner". There's enough freight companies that unionizing can be really tricky. One business will simply die and reform.

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-most-of-americas-2-mil...

When you say companies don't want to pay more, are you talking about the trucking company or the company that needs goods moved?

I'd imagine that a trucking company will pay almost as much as possible to a driver, because as long as there is a profit in the shipment, it makes sense to pay the driver to move it. If you book a piece of freight for $1000, would you not pay a driver $990 worse case, just to move it, because that's better in the long run than losing business?

It seems more likely that the people that need things moved think it's too high and decide to not move the items at all.

I was talking about the trucking companies, since they are the direct participants in the demand side of the trucking labor market.

I agree with your analysis though. They should be willing to pay truckers whatever wage allows them to profit. They would rather have more of that surplus to themselves though. The price that the clients are willing to pay to have their goods moved ultimately dictates how much of that surplus there is for the truckers and the company to split.

> They should be willing to pay truckers whatever wage allows them to profit.

That's pretty superficial. The critical question is "how much profit?" There is a world of difference between coming out $0.01 ahead of costs and coming out $10M ahead of costs.

But IT people should 'charge by value'. Why shouldn't truckers be able to do the same?

I'm not arguing that. I'm saying that "willing to pay whatever allows them to profit" is missing any consideration of the desired magnitude of the profit, and although this is elastic, it's not infinitely elastic.

Trucking is so under competitive pressure that it is essentially a race to the bottom. You only get into trucking when you don't have a whole lot of options left. The hours suck, you make peanuts and your body goes to shit. It should cost a lot more than it does.

I know truckers making $150k a year, living on 5 acres of land with a decent house and a 3k sqft metal shop for all their toys. Let's not go crazy making superficial judgements just to feel better about programming as a career.

Exceptions, rules and all that and I wasn't making any superficial judgements: trucking is a harsh life, besides the fact that it is downright dangerous, iirc the most dangerous job short of the fishery industry (on ocean going vessels).

Forbes says it's #6 on a list, behind loggers, roofers, fishing and more

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/workers-comp/most-dange...

So, read 'one of the most dangerous'. I've also seen articles that list it as the most dangerous, I don't have access to raw statistics nor do I care to argue the finer points of this for the sake of fake internet points, the fact is: trucking is super dangerous, far more dangerous than IT jobs ever will be and is on average comparably badly compensated. If you disagree with that in principle feel free to state why.

If you pay $990 on a $1,000 job, you'll lose your own business soon enough, that it won't matter if you lose any business!

From my experience in trucking the industry is full of webs of middlemen all looking to take their slice. The result is that everyone is trying to screw everyone else. Drivers have the least leverage.

Software contracting is similar.

There's a lot of overhead to running a business, some of which is captured on a balance sheet and some not. There's risk, there's stress, there's wear and tear on both man and machine, and there is opportunity cost. Just because you expect to make a profit on paper doesn't mean that it's worth the effort.

These simplistic models of Supply/Demand don't work in the real world. We have price-controls on rent, property tax increases, utilities, healthcare, etc, etc. Would you support removing those?

I didn't think my comment indicated any policy prescriptions.

The law of Supply and Demand is maybe the most rigorously validated theory offered by Economics.

It correctly predicts what will happen in each of your examples:

- Rent price ceiling, shortage e.g. Apartments in NYC

- Property tax increase, decrease in demand for those properties

- Utility price ceiling, shortage, e.g. water in CA

- Healthcare price ceiling, shortage. e.g. long wait times in countries like Canada

Whether or not any of those shortages/surpluses is good or bad is going to depend on your own personal situation. But you aren't even in a position to correctly evaluate that without something at least as predicatively powerful as the law of supply and demand.

It doesn't "correctly" predict anything because most of macro-economics is junk science with value only in the limited context of political platforms and giving people some sort of false hope. When the Nobel prize winner of Economics says its all bullshit, I tend to take notice :)

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/09/famous-econom...

Supply and demand effects and the effects of price controls on supply is a topic of microeconomics, not macro.

> For the record, Romer is calling out one theory and one mathematical construct. The theory is RBC, or Real Business Cycle theory, which suggests that fluctuations in growth are caused by external shocks (oil prices, new inventions, etc.) not by anything central banks do

Soooo not the theory of supply and demand.

Important to note here: "The Nobel prize of Economics" is not actually a real Nobel prize. It is another third party "prize" setup to emulate the nobel system, so it's much more like the "Nobel peace prize".

It's another example of economics pretending to be more rigorous and functional as a science than it actually is.

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