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Comment by dotcoma | Hacker News Reader

Not sure. Luddites knew a craft; most of the people ‘employed’ in the gig economy lack knowledge and real skills.

Or their knowledge and real skills don't get used because we've decided they are better exploited as servants for overpaid paper pushers, like us programmers, who can't bother to even move themselves to a restaurant.

> overpaid paper pushers

Oh don’t worry, that’s changing.

Yep. Sooner or later capital makes sure that working doesn't pay off.

That hasn't happened so far ever. What makes you think it will happen soon?

Has happened many times before and is happening again right now.

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/employment-and-gr...

> The labor share of income in 35 advanced economies fell from around 54 percent in 1980 to 50.5 percent in 2014.

3.5% in 34 years is not exactly something to get all luddite about.

Also keep in mind, that it's not the capital share that's expanding at the expense of labour. It's the share that goes to land that's taking from labour. The capital share is relatively stable. (Alas, few apart from the Georgists care about differentiating between land and capital.)

Land is capital. And the importance of land in economies have lessened quite a bit from the 19th century.

And even Henry George wasn't really a Geoist. He criticized all forms of unearned income, and called for e.g. abolition of intellectual property and nationalization of banks.

Yes, Henry George had some good ideas, but nobody is perfect. His ideas about the business cycle were also rubbish.

The supply of land is fixed. We can make more capital.

If you tax land or labour, you get less of them. If you tax land, it's still the same amount. Land is also hard to hide [citation needed], so tax evasion is harder.

Also note, that labor income is usually higher taxed than capital income.

Yes. And both are wrong. Neither labour nor capital should be taxed, as long as there's still land to be taxed.

See Land Value Tax.

Private capital should not exist. See socialism.

Why not? Attempts at socialism haven't worked out so far. They have invariable devolved into 'not real socialism', despite best efforts and noble intentions.

Socialism is all over. Schools are socialist, socialized healthcare is socialist, and police and military and public roads and social security and libraries etc etc. Also plenty of state owned industry doing just fine.

Attempts at capitalism haven't worked out so far. They have invariably devolved into 'crony capitalism' despite ruthless profit maximization and widespread selfishness.

Land is capital.

This does depend on definitions. In classical economics the factors of production were labor, land and capital stock. Notably "land" means any non-man-made resource, probably including legal monopolies like intellectual property, which contemporary neo-Georgists seem to totally ignore. Capital stock means man-made stuff that is used to produce something, e.g. buildings and machines.

Marx generalized capital to roughly mean anything that makes money for the owner without them doing work.

Neoclassical (the current mainstream) definition is quite close to Marx's.

Land is capital.

For purposes of taxation, what's important is how 'elastic' a taxed good is.

If you tax beer a lot, people drink wine instead.

If you tax labour or capital, you get less of them. Especially in a globalised economy. But the supply of land is fixed, it's perfectly inelastic. So you can tax land without any deadweight losses to the economy.

We can make more capital. We can't make more land. [0]

The supply of land is perfectly inelastic, it's fixed. So taxing it doesn't burden the economy, there are no deadweight losses.

[0] Yes, I know that land reclamation is a thing, but that's mixing up definitions of 'land'. In the generalised economic sense, sea floor is also 'land'.

The equivalent of the Luddites here aren't all the gig workers, they're the people who are "rising up" against gig work. Many of them are now themselves gig workers because they had nowhere else to go (like former taxi drivers driving for Uber now), but their skills and training are no longer valued and they get the same inhumane wage as those who have none.

Meanwhile the rest of us get lower quality for a lower price and no ability to pay more if we want.

You can hire a driver without using Uber. You can pay more for better service.

(And you can even give Uber more money to get better service, within some limits.)

You can pay Uber for a nicer class of car, service seems like it would always be a roll of the dice, as that is up to the personality of the driver.

Even when going with the cheapest option on Uber, getting a nicer car is luck of the draw. On my last weekend trip where I took a few Ubers, I always picked the cheapest option, and we had 3 new Teslas, Model S, X, and Y, and a new Benz. No beat up old Toyotas. I’ve had people pick me up in luxury SUVs who mention they are Uber Black, but took my fare because I was close, it wasn’t any better than an UberX with a friendly driver.

I’d be curious to know how many people actually pay for things like Uber Black. How long is someone going to be in the car where it’s really worth paying 2-4x the price? It seems like it’s more of a status or ego thing.

Outside of the super high end, the middle ground is simply not available any more where I live. Even the old taxi companies, under pressure from our regional Uber-copycat, have switched to an app-only, quantity-over-quality, throughput-focused model. I can't call and book a ride at a specific time in advance (this used to be possible, of course with a waiting fee), the drivers will no longer let us make detours or stops on the way because their next ride is already booked by the time they pick you up, they drive like maniacs to hit their time targets, all while constantly fiddling with the three phones stuck to their dashboard viewing and accepting rides from the three platforms they "work for".

All of this for a 20% decrease in fees (which started rising back up the moment a near-monopoly was established) and having them "all in one app", even though there are now 3 "all in one" platforms, each with their own set of quirks that you need to remember just like we had to remember for the different taxi companies before.

Yet the canonical example of gig work is the Uber driver – a job that requires a tremendous amount of knowledge and skill.

The trouble, economically, is that most people have had a vested interest in acquiring that particular knowledge and skill, making it common, and thus, by the properties of supply and demand, not terribly valuable.

I'm having trouble parsing this comment... if facetious not following the point. If not, what is the knowledge and skill outside of having a driver's license and the ability to work a smartphone?

What are you asking, exactly? Driving clearly requires a lot of knowledge and skill, from the workings of vehicles to the rules of the road, and a lot of practice to be able to develop the skill necessary to move the vehicle around in the framework. Nobody is born able to drive and nowadays most jurisdictions require a lengthy apprenticeship under another experienced driver before one is able to move into being licensed to drive on their own accord because history has proven that it takes a long time to develop the necessary skills. Even then, it is questionable if drivers are skilled enough, but such is life.

Indeed, it is a common skill[1], at least in car-centric North America where there has been a strong incentive for all to learn those skills. That makes it not particularly valuable to offer as a service. Why pay someone to do work you can, in most cases, just as easily do yourself? It has to be quite cheap for you to consider it. But that's something else entirely.

[1] Albeit a dwindling one. While ~85% of American adults have their driver's license, only ~60% of 18-year-olds do, down from ~80% in the 1980s. The youth today are backing away from obtaining this particular skill as compared to the past.

Speaking English (or any other language) is an even bigger, more complex skill than driving - and we take it for granted too. Basic electrical service in houses is the result of a huge effort to build infrastructure. There are many examples of these "complex but ubiquitous" resources.

Nobody, at least nobody who is thinking straight, would claim that someone who can speak English, particularly one who can do so fluently, doesn't have immense knowledge and skill in that area. It may not be an economically valuable skill due to the ubiquity relative to the need, but that, again, is something else entirely.

There's also a big difference between being able to just speak English, and being employable in a job that focuses on use of English as a skill... like writing a TV show or a book

I’d wager that someone who learns English as a second language has a better technical understanding of the language than the average native speaker, even if they don’t sound as natural speaking it.

> ... is the Uber driver – a job that requires a tremendous amount of knowledge and skill

My doctor friends who studied for about 10 years would like a word...

What would they like to say? The data suggests that it also takes approximately 10 years to form the skills one needs to drive. Hence why insurance rates typically decline to a meaningful degree when one turns 25.

But, like all things in life, there are tradeoffs. While road safety would no doubt improve if everyone had to spend 10 years learning and developing driving skills, there would be a lot of social consequences to keeping people from driving until so late in life. Consequences we have not been willing to accept.

We could just as easily allow medical professionals to practice without such lengthy requirements. Anyone can become a shoddy doctor. It is not hard job to do poorly. But we've selected different tradeoffs there. It is not as socially impactful if a doctor can't practice until later in life, and is arguably more socially beneficial to see them wait until their skills have really developed.

> Hence why insurance rates typically decline to a meaningful degree when one turns 25.

Germans, for example, typically learn driving much later than Americans. Would be useful to check the data to see whether their insurance rates drop at around the same age, or around the same years of driving experience.

Because the obvious null hypothesis to explain your observation of insurance rates is that young people just take more risks.

Age does affect it yes. And it starts dropping earlier:

    drivers between the ages of 25 and 67 can expect a discount on the average claim requirement - the insurance premium drops thanks to age being taken into account. Drivers aged 27 to 41 receive the largest discounts of 26 percent, while those aged 63 to 67 benefit from discounts of 6 percent

So while Germans start driving later they also drop rates earlier. And the older you get the less you get your rates dropped based on age! Around 45 is where you benefit the most from your age for rates.

But older people according to this also have the advantage of having a longer driving record and if you didn't have an accident in that time it can counteract the bad effect of advancing age on your rates.

https://www-gdv-de.translate.goog/gdv/themen/mobilitaet/so-w...

Thanks!

I would argue taxi driving was a craft before it got commodified. Being a good taxi driver especially in a big city required specialized knowledge of the city.

Before cars also got more common driving skills were more of a craft.

I wonder if the day will come where this happens to lawyers and doctors with ai.

The main point is that the bar is constantly rising and most people can’t stay above it.

Jesus that’s a peak techbro comment that couldn’t be more tone deaf.

You will find out what it means to have your valuable skills replaced by technology soon enough - just as for example translators have found out.

Citation needed.

I wish I could help you.

Citation needed regarding what?

That Luddites knew a craft? I thought this was known and/or accepted. The revolt was largely against new machines that delivered lower quality products at a much lower cost, with workers being paid a fraction of what they were used to.

Or regarding that most gig economy workers don’t have qualifications? I thought this, too, was accepted. Not many are SWEs earning 1k a day or more. Most deliver you pizza or stand in line so you can have the newest iPhone on day-1. There’s even a website called TaskRabbit. It doesn’t sound like gigs offered there are very qualified.

You seem to live in quite a bubble. Working in the gig economy is more about a lack of options than a lack of qualification.

And the Luddite movemebr was as much about working condition as it was about pay, e.g. having children do maintenance on running machinery being maimed and crippled. Luddites were no backward people, they wanted a livelihood, one the lost during the industrial revolution.

Maybe that is too hard to research and understand, when you are so qualified and busy making 1k per day as a software whatever.

If you are referring to me, I am not a software engineer and I make nowhere close to 1k a day.

Nor do I think Luddites were backward people — not at all.

On the contrary, I think that, mutatis mutandis, we could learn quite a bit from their struggle.

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