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Comment by Tichy | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that point of view also colored by ideology? Even supposing there are enough people capable of becoming that kind of "talent", what if those talents are also sought for in other kinds of jobs?

Granted, if it were really urgent, perhaps companies would start looking in the most remote places for talents, so with a population of 6 billion perhaps there really would be enough who could be trained. How many of those 6 billions are "free" in a sense, as in not needed for maintenance of human life (farming, medicine, building shelter and so on)?

But do economics really work that way? Could we extrapolate that logic to conclude that there is no problem in the world at all? All it takes is enough money to solve every problem - alas, the money doesn't seem to be there, or allocating it properly is apparently hard. (Hm, some of those talents might be able to help, for a true bootstrap solution).

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It's not that you can solve every problem, but supply and demand are very real. If the wage rates for Big Data get high enough more and more people will try out the field, which will generate a larger supply.

The reasons companies don't just throw out huge salaries though has to do with the demand side. The salaries companies are willing to pay is related to the marginal advantage they can gain from hiring someone with that skillset. If for example a company will gain say 200k per year in total advantage, that would place a hard cap on how much they would be willing to pay in salary.

So if the advantage is very high, companies will pay more. If the supply increases sufficiently wage rates will drop because there is over supply. If the supply doesn't increase enough, wages will increase more - however each company will drop out at it's own value point. This provides the natural limit to where most salaries cap out.

If those talents are also sought after for other jobs then the price will go up until one of the jobs will be done by some other method or some other person. I do have trouble imagining that anybody who is working on a farm would be a good data-scientist but then I no very, very little about farming.

Economics is not tainted or colored by ideology, it is a science. It is the study of how best to allocate limited resources that have multiple conflicting uses.

In this world there is nothing that is free, everything comes with some price. As long as there is a human want that is not fulfilled, there is no additional humans.

That isn't necessarily bad though. You can charge societies progress to how few people are required to provide food to the rest. Once most Americans worked in argriculture, now only a few do. That is a good thing, because the rest of us can the do something else and satisfy some other human want.

And the remaining farmers are better of too, since they don't have to work as hard and have things like tvs and computers.

> Economics is not tainted or colored by ideology,

You must be joking. Economics is the most ideological of the sciences, because so much of it cannot be tested in nature or a lab, as it only can be tested an impractically large scale and with many confounding factors.

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