‘We need to see pain’: Multimillionaire says unemployment must rise
smh.com.au
smh.com.au
This guy confirms that thinking is likely prevalent.
Workers need to be reminded who they work for? They need to be reminded that the Hamptons isn't a defensible position.
These people are dangerous.
No lie, I’ve seen a slice of avocado toast on a menu for $12. It made me irate. When I go out to eat, I optimize for price, and difficulty to make at home. Thus, I often opt for Ribs with brusselsprouts, because both take a lot of time: tending to the grill, chopping annoying Brussels in half…etc. Even then, you can mess it up, rendering your time spent wasted. I’ve eaten bangin’ ribs with Brussels for $25. Avocado toast takes 2 min, tops and requires 0 skill.
I think that’s the point he was trying to make.
Look at the other complaint - espresso drinks at cafes. People whine that young people could save more money if they just stopped buying lattes. Given that virtually nobody has an espresso machine at home, this is the polar opposite of the "well, you can make it at home" situation.
No. The complaint is "young people should stop complaining about their economic fortunes because it is their own damn fault." Nothing to do with trading money for convenience.
So in some ways younger generations are not setup for success. Their own fault. In some ways they create their own self-demise. Eating out constantly when making your own food or coffee is a perfectly viable option.
In total, society owes it to itself to ensure future generations are successful. I don’t think we’re doing that well enough.
But "why can't young people afford houses" is well explained by student loans and high home prices even for financially careful young people.
And why shouldnt they? It's not like not spending that money would have allowed them to buy a home.
If rich people would have shared more, making things like buying a home possible, you would most definitely see more people skipping avocado toasts. But rich people fucked everyone over, so might as well go for the little things in life.
If he really cared about this stuff, he'd be advocating for stricter antitrust (monopoly regulation is I think what it's called in Australia) rules, but weirdly you find almost no multimillionaire business owners doing so. Instead they spend their column inches arguing that we need to whip the rowers harder so the boat goes faster.
Or hey, CEO pay spiked too, meaning they've also been paid a lot more to do at least the same amount of work they were doing. Is he also advocating for higher levels of unemployment for the CEO class? Definitely not!
> No lie, I’ve seen a slice of avocado toast on a menu for $12. It made me irate.
For a point we have in common, I have problems in most Italian restaurants because of exactly this. I'm like, "I know this cost $4 and 15min to make, why does it cost $25". Yeah yeah I know I'm subsidizing the steak or whatever, but:
- I probably more than make up for that w/ my drink orders
- I still don't like it! (lol)
I would love to see more coops start up as it puts each employee with the responsibility of working as hard as they wish, but also taking on the responsibility.
Or at least giving employees stock shares.
Oh also raise taxes, on the rich or force them to invest their excessive money into the economy (investment projects or even funds/stocks for instance).
Idk if they said this in the episode, but I believe this to be true, even if it were the most optimal economic arrangement. People’s desire for finding their local maxima prevents us from achieving a global maxima.
Says the person who has been allowed to accumulate $912M under the very same economy.
> "We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around."
The people work for themselves. Too bad the free market is slightly inconvenient for you right now.
> "There’s been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around."
So they 're supposed to believe that they are so lucky to be able to have a job at all and (most importantly) behave accordingly.
The nerve of that shithead...
And this time you can't just throw people at the problem, because it's a worldwide phenomenon - at least in countries where most of the population gets the 9+ years of education required to participate in an advanced economy.
2. Immigration is a thing.
3. Kids are labour intensive so if we weren't having kids, maybe that freed up labour depressing wages that are now returning to 'normal' rather than wages being 'normal' previously.
4. What nation has anywhere near zero employment?
Wait wasn't capitalism supposed to bring us less work hours and less overall working years ? That's what every politicians/economics were saying in the 60s/70s/80s, where did it go ?
> Immigration is a thing.
A thing that brings other things that are less and less accepted in a lot of countries
No, that was labor unions and the government. https://www.npr.org/2021/11/05/1052968060/how-the-40-hour-wo...
The market has no rational incentive to pay people the same for less work or to keep paying superfluous workers as automation evolves.
At the end of that article, an economist is quoted as speculating that the rise in productivity would decimate the hours we need to work, but that makes no sense when you think about it. If I can get yesteryear's daily productivity in a minute, why would I, holding yesteryear's productivity as a constant, decide that I and my employees should only for 1 minute? Why not just work for a day and reap in the TONS of extra productivity, especially considering competitors might be doing that? The only way it works is if the government forced everyone to.
It did. For the few who are willing to accept the lower standard of living of the past, this era is quite comfortable. A lot of things that people think too basic to give up today were special treats or luxuries in the past, like eating out at restaurants or going out to the movies.
But, no, the majority wanted to keep up with the Joneses and are happy to spend away all their income even if it dooms them to toil away at a unloved job forever.
It won't because you're adding like 5 years of work from a cohort that amounts to around 3% of the total population, while at the same time you're already missing at least double that from the deficit of births in the 90s and it's only going to get worse.
> 2. Immigration is a thing.
From where? The supply of immigrants who went to school is dwindling - and has been for over 20 years now because they're not born in source countries.
> 3. Kids are labour intensive so if we weren't having kids, maybe that freed up labour depressing wages that are now returning to 'normal' rather than wages being 'normal' previously.
Children aren't "full time for the rest of your life" labour intensive - I should know since I'm a parent.
> 4. What nation has anywhere near zero employment?
I don't understand this question and how it relates to what I wrote.
- Tradies (construction workers, train workers, etc) are super common, it's a well-respected job, and it pays well (something like $25-30/hr AUD). - Sydney has so many construction projects. Every little bit of road is endlessly built, ripped up, redesigned, and built again. There are MANY train stations (~200?) and many of them constantly get refreshed and made super nice. - Speaking of trains, there are like 7 competing public transit train systems in the greater Sydney area. Many of them are not interoperable - Construction is FAST here. From train station upgrades to apartments (though they're cookie cutter like the US), everything goes up in like 6-12 months.
A part of me feels they have so much money to slosh around everyone's got jobs, and they can throw it on endless civic projects. It's like playing Sim City with an infinite money cheat.
The joke here is that Australia makes money "by selling pieces of it to China" but that will probably end sooner or later... and that's when unemployment will soar, and the good times will end.
Until then, let the good times roll (on one of the competing train lines)
I wish my midwestern US city had some more money sloshing into civic projects.
You mean the way it worked in the 1950s [Narrator: No, it didn't] when the U.S. had something like a 91% top marginal tax rate?
https://slate.com/business/2017/08/the-history-of-tax-rates-...
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/income-taxes-on-t...
When corporatist dems say "tax the rich" they are talking about income tax, but that isn't how the rich make their money. Paul Pelosi's insider trading profits shall not be infringed!
To your point though, the marginal rates these folks are exposed to should go up.
is this driven by something fundamental in human nature or is it a byproduct of neolib capitalism.
Politicians and rich people treat ever increasing GDP as some kind of admirable pursuit when in reality it’s making Australia far worse. We are not investing in infrastructure and any investments we do make are quickly skimmed and shipped overseas.
I want to try a stagnant economy, as I’d rather everyone works 20 hours and have great lives than what we have now.
What costs more, training people or hiring many replaceable people to backfill some tool?
What "training"? You're getting ripped off if you're getting billed for that beyond a subscription to Udemy or whatever. I can't think of any dev projects I've ever worked on that weren't full of unique problems to solve web or otherwise. Most of the work is integration, not just making a frontend, and much of that bleeds into the frontend anyway.
What costs the most is destroying projects and burning bridges with clients after delivering crap just to save a few bucks. Assuming your projects are scoped correctly, the ratio of devs to projects tends to be about pizza scale (3 to 5 people or so). If you're trying to lean it out more than that, expect disasters or at least to be significantly late on deadlines.
If you try to hire "replaceable people" you must anticipate what happens when they're replaced. False economy is what's being sold to ignorant bosses the world over. If cutting payroll despite all this common advice still looks like the only way, you're dealing with years of debt at the hands of severe incompetence. What's being made is always more important than how much it costs. Costs are far less flexible than the sale price. Automation is not a silver bullet and most software dev is already as cheap as it gets in any industry. Just give up and sell the company to someone who knows better before further eroding the value left. Leave the employees alone.