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Comment by porphyra | Hacker News Reader

There's a national truck driver shortage, with a particular lack of young drivers [1]. Perhaps automation technology will become widespread just in time for the current generation of drivers to retire.

[1] https://www.iru.org/news-resources/newsroom/worse-you-though...

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The terms "shortage" and "surplus" are usually meaningless for most economic situations.

Generally, your chosen price determines how much you get (unless you set your price at 0, where you get nothing, OR if you set your price to infinity, where there literally doesn't exist 1 more of the thing you're talking about).

So in this context, there's really no shortage because all you have to do is raise the price you pay truckers and it's pretty much guaranteed that retired truckers and others with CDL licenses start putting their hands up and saying yes to that job.

"Why is this the case? Why are there so few women and young truck drivers? How can we get more of them behind the wheel?"

Well, it's like literally everything else.

Pay more.

No the solution isn't to pay more. We shouldn't be trying to figure out ways to get more people into shitty hazardous jobs.

You don't "pay more" to get more young people and women to apply to moving spent nuclear fuel, you give the job to the robots.

I think most people agree on that point, but what are truckers going to do after they lose jobs to the robots? In the USA, there is never any planning for that, they just say "oh well" and in a generation those folks die out, having lived a shitty, destitute life with no chance of recovery.

The fact that there are too few younger truck drivers means that most young people have already found higher paying, better jobs than current truck driving jobs.

I don't think B necessarily follows from A, here.

There's an ideological assertion when automation happens: the workers will retrain and be better off.

If it was true, Youngstown Ohio and Flint Michigan would be jewels of the Midwest - bustling metropolises of highly skilled retrained workers in wondrous utopias. You'd have AI unicorns popping out of Huntington and Wheeling, West Virginia.

Whether you count number of bankruptcies, overall mortality rate, number of offspring, percentage that own versus rent... The fervent assertion that going from a union job to hustling for say Postmates, is somehow the rising tide lifting all boats is baseless.

Doesn't matter though. It's ideologically, not materially based so evidence is irrelevant.

There Are state interventionist ways to make it work. China moved from agrarian to industrial. South Korea, Taiwan Japan.... The difference is they don't have this pentacostal snake handling level blind faith in the free market where they go around like Peter Popof preaching Hayek and Rothbard like it's sacred scripture.

I know this is a convenient meme and narrative but this post is literally the consequence of having to pay more for labor, you get more people trying to automate it. We're talking about logistics, probably the most important component of the economy. Trucking salaries are probably the closest thing to "market clearing wages" that exists. Pay more -> more expensive shipping -> less demand to ship things -> lower wages.

If you woke up tomorrow and the clearing price for gas was $10/gallon it would still be accurate to call it a shortage. I can buy a crappy house for $2m tomorrow, it’s still a housing shortage.

It won't just be truckers, there's always follow-on impact like people who work in diners along these routes, etc.

But also automated long-haul trucking has been pretty clearly on the short term horizon for the last decade. I think most young people know that this is coming, and hence trucking is probably not the best career to invest your time in.

Not one mention of pay? Really?

In other news, there is a terrible shortage of Lamborghinis at the $30k price point. When will the horror end?

No mention of pay. Also not mention that for about the past 10-15 years, we've also been telling young people AI was going to make truck driving a job of that past also. I remember in 2014 (we are all getting old, that was more than 10 years ago), hearing about comments Elon made that truck drivers were gonna be a thing of the past any day now. Granted, that didn't end up happening, or at least not as quickly. But the fact is, when kids hear a good chunk of their life that a job is gonna be antiquated, we can't be surprised when kids grow up not wanting to be the people to fill those jobs.

Survey of trucking company finds shortage of workers. Well I for one am shocked!

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