It turns out that good truck drivers could also be doing other useful work, and want to be well compensated and taken care of for their labor.
Under colloquial usage, as it is being used here, the term is meaningless. Under that definition, everything is always in "shortage". It is simply used as an attention grabbing mechanism to express some kind of emotion towards the subject.
Surely a transient shortage is possible due to licensing requirements. You could offer ten million dollars a year, but there are only so many people with a current CDL and finite capacity exists to grant new licenses.
You have done well to highlight why a technical shortage is defined the way it is.
In fact, where I live, it is quite illegal for a doctor to accept any amount of payment from a patient. We as a society believe that people, no matter how rich or poor, should have equal access to healthcare, so a doctor giving priority to a billionaire who can offer a handsome reward to get his common cold looked at over someone suffering something much worse is considered abhorrent. As such, we rely on a mixture of first-come, first-serve and needs-based priority instead of a price-based mechanism.
Never heard of any attempts to place similar restrictions on truckers, though. If you want to try and charge a billion dollars per mile, go nuts!
In common use it means that something costs more than many people are willing to pay for it. So your Ferrari example would be a valid use under this meaning.
More likely it costs far less than people are willing to pay for it. When the Colonial Piepline was shut down for ransomware, the shortage occurred because a reasonable populace correctly assessed that the local value of gasoline had just skyrocketed far beyond its steady state price, so the demand became limited only by time and social costs (e.g. you don't want to be the guy whose picture is shown filling trash bags of gasoline) plus ways to store it.
Or it can mean that there's insufficient supply to meet demand at a "reasonable" price.
A commonly used example is milk, yogurt, cream and ice cream. Every year, the farmers produce milk. Some people want yogurt, some want milk, some want cream, &c. Say that one year, everyone wants yogurt for some reason. They are lining up to pay 200%, &c, for it. Then the allocation of resources adapts -- more milk is used to make yogurt. If demand for other products does not go down -- people still want just as much milk, ice cream, &c -- then their prices may go up. Over a reasonable time frame, the effect of this is that more land will be turned over to pasturage and more milk will be produced. Gradually the prices will come down. More people have more yogurt than before; more people are working on that and less on something else (whatever it was). The workers and consumers live happily ever after and resource allocation has adapted to price signals.
One important consideration in the above example is that if people want more yogurt and are willing to pay more, they must also be willing to go without something else. They only have so much money (so much of their own resources to allocate). That is why the resource allocation has to change. Now that might not be milk, per se, but it is probably something adjacent to it, like tofu. We can see how if the shift is from tofu to yogurt, the reallocation of resources might take longer -- people can't just take the milk consumers don't want and turn it into yogurt, they have to get more milk first, which means feeding more soybeans to cows and less to tofu machines -- but it still happens.
A simple example of a shortage is a situation where a virus affects a certain fruit tree, preventing it from growing (or, at least, preventing it from growing the desired fruit). Although people are willing to pay a lot for this fruit, and by extension are willing to consume less of other fruits or other foods, there is no way to turn resources over from the production of other goods to the production of this fruit. It might be that only a small number of areas are isolated enough to produce this fruit; they might all be turned over to it; but after that, there would be no elasticity in the supply of this fruit. Given what we know about the pricing, demand, ordinary cost of inputs for producing the fruit, the supply of this fruit before the virus, we must conclude that there is considerable demand which is not being met.
(Something else notable about the second example is that most of the new, elevated price of the fruit would go into some form of rent. The ground on which the fruit could be produced would be exceedingly rare and valuable, but the material inputs, labor, skill, &c needed for the fruit are the same as before; the new high price would mostly go to the ground rent or financing costs.)
Source? That feels extremely low, maybe even by an order of magnitude.
The recent estimates are closer to 4.4 million software engineers in the U.S. (~2.75% of the working population)
Heh, we are probably more than the secretaries we replaced.
I honestly believe most companies are worse off using computers at all. At some size, you'd probably want some computer system for pay slips. But I am not too sure about that ...
source? I found a better BLS page that grouped all types of software professionals together but it still only came out to about 1.5M
is basically the same thing as
> there's a shortage
If anyone wants to work on this problem with me without solving the self-driving truck / Aurora problem outright - I think the answer is something like remote operation, level 3-4 autonomy for highways, and nice comfy air conditioned driver hubs in cities so nobody has to be away from home for days at a time. Boom - all the drivers come back and get paid decent wages to drive trucks. Ideally the per-truck subscription fee for the service is an add-on to the cost of doing driver business.
I'm not referring to "sim", I'm referring to remote piloting. Real time sensor and controls feedback from a truck that is only autonomous when it makes sense to be. We can pilot drones over 100s of yards in real time without a hitch. We just need a bit more range (few kms) via, say, the internet, and you can do this fairly easily. I don't see a research problem, I see a funding problem and an aversion to autonomous trucking b/c people think it's either completely infeasible, or completely solved by Aurora. I'm not sure of either.
Just to add spice the convo: Backing into a loading bay is quite easy, autonomously. Once you stage the truck you can push a button and just watch it go. See: https://outrider.ai (which is where I work, and we do all the staging _also_, but I'm actually interested in "everything else" as well). There's a lot of very human-ish problems to get to that state, that I think remote operators can really help with.
I've long thought that to renew your drivers license you should have to spend a day every few months in a simulator to prove you can drive safely. Do you maintain a safe following distance? Can you maintain the speed limit? Do you stop for pedestrians? Do you zipper merge correctly? Here is a situation where someone else screwed up and you will crash, can you choose the best crash? Here is an icy road, can you control the car? there is a lot that modern simulators can do but few people have used them.
Interestingly: The base CDL is a one and done skill test. There are no CPEs like with other regulated industries (nurses/teachers/investment advisors) - but there is a health and fitness check.
Freight tech companies have been talking about automating every BUT the last mile/last few miles for years. Have a stable of drivers who you have on hand to take over the last hour of a delivery. Automate everything else.
There may be some limited use cases for remote operation on specific local routes where sufficient network access points can be provisioned.
Having a pod with local drivers near major hubs, for example, means the drivers take over when the trucks get close enough for it to matter. It wont' work for delivery to, say grocery stores (which can be local driving anyway), but it will work for center-to-center transport ala between Walmart hubs. It's the long haul OTR trucking that has high attrition / people shortages, because you're away from family for so long. That little bit can be somewhat autonomous, with handoff of remote operators only near hubs. Think air-traffic-control for trucks and hubs, except probably more hands on than just telling it what to do.
https://projects.research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/en/hor...
is basically the same thing as
> there's a shortage"
No, it's not. It means the drivers are not being paid enough to stay, as they explicitly say is the reason they're leaving.
>If anyone wants to work on this problem with me
Sure, here's the solution: pay the drivers more. Problem solved.
therefore
> drivers leave the industry
therefore
> there's a shortage ... at the going wage
I don't see how we can argue over the problem statement. We can argue over the solutions, of which there are infinite, but at least two:
1. increase wages
2. decrease shittiness of the job via ideas like mine
Or why not both? The only dichotomy here is a false one you've introduced.
>We can argue over the solutions
No, we can't, because there's no solution needed to this non-problem artificially created by employers unwilling to pay enough to attract and retain employees.
Your ideas aren't needed except by the employers trying to perpetuate their false self-made "shortage", all to avoid just paying employees more.
The only actual problem is uncritically accepting the narrative of the employers as you are doing here.
OK, well, let's not mince definitions. For the purposes of my thought process, a shortage is defined as "Number of people we want to do a job" minus "Number of people who do that job". The semantic difference between that and what you said is so small as to be negligible to me and doesn't preclude "increase wages" as a solution. I think that's fine for you to have a preferred solution or even a different preferred definition.
Again, there is no actual problem here, just an artificial one created by employers unwilling to pay their workers and crying about it. Don't buy into it.
At the end of the day, society (in the form of government regulation) gets to decide what is and isn't an important job (i.e. government subsidies), and we the people can certainly put our thumb on the scale.
People collectively decided truck drivers were overpaid [relatively] in the 1970s, hence the deregulation of the trucking industry which led to a collapse in trucker's salaries. No use blaming employers here - it was decided by the government (representing the people of the U.S.)
In this case it is. The discussion is about how employers have a dream that isn't being realized. They are metaphorical 10 year old-boys drooling over the idea of owning a Ferrari, without the capability to actually buy one.
The only "problem" is that their dream is remaining a dream. Which isn't actually a problem. Dreams aren't supposed to be realized. They are meant to be just dreams. Who gives a shit if a 10 year old can't own a Ferrari? And that is what the parent is pointing out – that the '10 year-old cries' of business are meaningless. Let them dream, but it ends there.
If people of the U.S. want to give truckers more money, they are free to do so, but that is well beyond the topic at hand.
Notably, you ignore their autonomous driving pitch is supposed to increase working quality of like, like many instances of automation (in theory).
What if someone can think drivers deserve better pay and ethical treatment and that self driving is a long term solution to a grueling job?
Why would I acknowledge a flawed premise?
>like many instances of automation (in theory).
That (in theory) is doing so much work here it ought to be paid.
>What if someone can think drivers deserve better pay and ethical treatment and that self driving is a long term solution to a grueling job?
What if mythical beasts like unicorns existed? That would be pretty cool, I guess. Sadly, we'll never know.
In the US, we un-solved this problem decades ago when we abandoned railroads for subsidized auto development.
Only labour gets the special shortage definition seen here. Seemingly because shortage was originally used with respect to healthcare practitioners, where true shortages are possible with price ceilings often imposed by government in order to allow equal healthcare access to all citizens regardless of how much they can afford to spend, and then misconstrued onto other fields.
More or less, but "how much is needed" is dependent on price. You need an infinite number of truck drivers if they are driving for free. And you need no truck drivers if they are driving for $100,000,000,000 per day.
In a functioning market, price will rise until you have exactly the right number of truck drivers. Remember that the dreamers not willing to pay the price are simply not in the market. You don't have a shortage of Ferraris when 10 year old boys with Ferrari posters on their walls can't have the real thing.
However, if something stops the price from rising – such the government stepping in and saying: "It is now illegal to pay truck drivers more than $30,000 per year" – then you have a disconnect. The market wants more drivers and are willing to pay more to get them, but are not allowed to pay them more. That disconnect is what the shortage defines.
There is absolutely no upper limit to driver pay and no nameless bureaucrat filling out some permissible wage table but only "what the market will bear".
From experience I can tell you the main two culprits are it's kind of a shitty job and it's kind of a shitty job that can turn into a really shitty job (or no job) really, really fast.
No serious solutions ever treat it like the quality-of-life problem that it really is -- parking is a major problem, shippers/receivers suck up large quantities of unpaid time and living in a truck/being away from home for weeks at a time is not for everyone are probably the top 3 complaints I would hear. Well, and all the crazy shit the "4-wheelers" get up to but that's usually entertaining.
Right, because there isn't a shortage of drivers. There isn't even a lack of drivers. We have the right number of drivers – along with a whole lot of metaphorical 10 year olds with Ferrari posters who like to talk big with their friends about how they want truck drivers, but when push comes to shove, they really don't.
We can't simply pay more money to get a personal chef, doctor, and pilot for everyone, even if there was a magical infinite source of compensation to pay them.
Remember, money is debt – an IOU, a promise to deliver something later. It says "You do this for me now and I will give you this token (money) that you can redeem for what you want from me in the future.". 'Compensation' is just the other side of the transaction – you offering the same in kind. If there was a magical infinite source of compensation then there would necessarily be an infinite ability to provide chef, medical, etc. services.
In the real world, you only have so much to offer others, which limits how much you can receive from them. As before, transactions must be balanced. That is what it means 'to compensate'. In the real world, you have a pick what you want from the limited amount of value you can offer in kind. There is no such thing as an insatiable demand for chefs or doctors. People will stop considering those services when they become too expensive. The more expensive, the fewer people needed.
This only becomes a problem when price is prevented from rising (e.g. due to government intervention) – and that is when you can encounter a shortage.
Isn't this backwards? This is the colloquial plain-language use of "shortage" (though intentionally misleadingly and wrongly used by employers), you're talking about a technical economics-only definition.