Every single time someone says "there's a shortage of <profession>", you can mentally substitute it for "we can't get <profession> for cheap".
Pay is part of it, but for most skilled professions there's big bottlenecks on the training for the skills.
Or look at police officers in places like San Francisco. The pay is actually fantastic but the process of getting hired is hellish and takes a year or something ridiculous.
Or doctors, there's a massive shortage because there aren't enough residency spots, something controlled by the AMA. Pay is amazing (hours suck) and there are people clamoring to do it, but the bottleneck is structural, not because of pay.
If there is a shortage of something, I would expect these trade companies to backfill with apprentices who will then grow into their roles.
If there's too high a risk that someone won't be worth the investment, then that seems entirely financial to me.
But I don't know if that meaning is shared by anyone else in the world! Thanks for asking for clarification, I'm interested in how you'd communicate that idea.
This was the whole issue with allowing guilds in the first place... If you only allow a guild to do a job (legally) and the guild also controls how many members they train and accept... The end result is a labor shortage.
Because it's better for the existing members of the guild.
If they train a large number of new members... they spend time and money on training, and they've increased their competition during bidding which drives down rates.
So instead you train the bare minimum for replacements. This keeps your members' rates high and competition low.
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Any time the "pay is great" but the "process to get it sucks!"... you're seeing this in action. It's not that the process really needs to suck, it's that the process roadblocks are there to maintain high pay for the existing trained members.
If there's one thing monopolies don't like... it's competition. And legally enforced certifications are wonderful monopoly creators if you don't manage them carefully.
Where are the free market advocates that aren't just phonies?
They liked competition and markets, delivered strong economic growth, and brought the deficit down, but they fucked up by not funneling some of those efficiency gains into education and training, and toward building a robust social safety net to help the economically displaced.
Think of a prize race. The people organizing the race and the audience want a highly competitive race. But the racers, if they are in it for the prize, would love to have little to no competition.
Artificial restrictions on who can do a thing is not good and it is violence behind, whether it is government or not.
Anarcho-capitalists are the true expression of the ideology of free markets.
As it should be. I’m tired of dumb roughnecks attending a 6-week course and then getting the ability to legally beat people up. It should be difficult to become a police officer, we should hold them to a high standard, especially if we’re gonna pay them so much.
Making less than $105k per year in SF is considered low income.
And they get a kickass pension which is worth a lot
(Would you want someone performing surgery on you who "passed a test" but didn't have any formal education or training experience?)
This got solved in tech 20 years ago. You don't look at credentials and instead design a very arduous interviewing process that selects for both high IQ and people who are willing to study/work at it.
Then you provide lots of training. 20 years ago at Google (or Apple etc) there were tons of well educated non CS hires who were given good training and became exceptional software engineers.
Their "solution" rides on an unfathomably large tsunami of money. Which is great for them (and by extension, my bank account while I was there), but how do we accomplish that when there isn't one?
I worked for a small (~300 engineers) well run org in Verizon before I went to Google, and I was surprised at how well their training was, even with smaller budgets, and a tier below compensation wise and interviewing rigor.
This org supported being deliberate about hires, getting people who were experts and liked coaching/training along with those who were newbies with aptitude and desire. There was good documentation, good shared culture, and lots of safeguards like linting, excessive testing, example projects, if not quite the full fledged codelabs google has.
But part of it, both for Verizon and Google, was signaling that "good people work here and are well rewarded" (comparatively).
e.g. http://www.calapprenticeship.org/programs/electrician_appren...
You need a diploma, a smattering of algebra, a driver's license, and the physical ability to do the work. Everything else you will be taught on the job, while being paid.
I reckon the San Francisco PD salaries are not really all that "fantastic".
And rightfully so, the cops here are fantastic.
We do have lower level “enforcement officers” though, but they also take 2.4 to 3 years. Just not a bachelors
For instance, take something with a small marginal benefit like a dedicated person at a supermarket to bag groceries. It's a nice to have but the value to the employer is probably less than a $15 minimum wage. So you could say there is a shortage of grocery baggers since there is no one willing to do it at a market clearing price.
Doesn't mean we should do anything about it. There will always be some extra activity that would take place at a lower price, but it's worth while to notice that.
Seems like theres either a demand for something or there isnt.
And the amount of demand sets the rate of pay.
The invisible hand.
You can argue about the need for the minimum wage laws. You can argue about the morality of paying a living wage. But that's a different argument.
1) Labor costs go up with inflation
2) Rent goes up
3) New vacuum prices go down
At some point in the past, the downward line of vacuum price crossed over the upward line of repair cost. That's when this profession cratered.
Cars may have a while until that price point hits. But the quoted mechanic's suggestion that engineers optimize for simpler repairs instead of simpler production may be something similar. If simpler production makes the price of a new car $X cheaper, but increases the labor cost of repairs over the car's lifetime by $Y, there could be a time when X > Y.
I used the map and found the two nearest I quite far. plenty where I used to live, and a lot in other parts of the UK. Good to see.
...generally I've seen weekly/monthly "fix-it" workshops as a kindof open-house / membership drive.
Probably best to 1) have people sign safety waivers, especially if they're not members 2) have people sign a "we can offer to help you try, but your widget might end up worse than before" waiver 3) run it as a volunteer outreach event with a focus on getting membership rather than a transactional "fix my ____ for free" outcome
Cars have become more reliable and relatively cheaper then they used to be, but they are a lot more expensive so have a long way to go until that point is reached.
It can be argued that all taxes and subsidies are "artificial distortions" of market value, but capitalism strongly encourages externalisation of costs -- "the cost of making X" is often severely underestimated by "the cost of running a machine to dig X out of the ground".
This would have been in the early 2010s.
The reporter asked the owner why TV repair was dying: were TVs getting too complicated? Help too hard to find or too expensive? Nope, the owner said it was 100% parts availability. The vast majority of business coming through the door he'd have to turn away because manufacturers didn't want him repairing their equipment.
There may sometimes be a tradeoff for manufacturability vs repairability but even when there is not -- holding everything else equal -- manufacturers will choose the less repairable option because they perceive it to be in their interest to do so.
PS is probably harder nowadays since it might be more integrated but not 10+ years ago.
I have a more recent personal experience. My parents refrigerator went out. The repair man came out and diagnosed it as a bad inverter board and he'd get the part and come back in a few days. Great! The next day he calls my dad and tells him the part isn't available from the manufacturer so he can't actually fix it.
So I helped my dad go on an internet search and we eventually found an aftermarket (counterfeit?) board and installed it ourselves. My parents were thrilled they didn't have to buy a new refrigerator, but the repair guy got paid for the diagnosis but didn't make any money for the repair. I don't know if that's a long term sustainable business.
I took an old monitor that started failing to a local makerspace (which has a very popular monthly repair cafe), and it took some physical force to crack the case open. Once inside it was relatively easy to get the board out and find the leaking capacitors. Not exactly high-tech parts.
It was fun for me and for the volunteer, but I can't imagine anyone trying to do this for a living -- it would take a lot of time, and charging people for what the labor's worth would probably come close to the price of a new monitor.
The key difference is whether rentism plays a role or not.
It's one thing to claim that no one will pay a mechanic if it's too expensive. It's an entirely different thing to claim that some employers are abusing their position to pressure wages to stay low to maximize their profit margin at the expense of their employees.
There's a good litmus test: is there a massive wave of car shop bankruptcies due to lack of business? Or are car shop owners complaining they can't get enough employees to keep up with demand?
The article cites a mechanic commenting on Ford CEO's remarks on lack of mechanics by referring to how Ford fails to pay rates for warranty repairs that justify the volume of work required to pull them off.
This suggests the root cause is the automaker's refusal to pay for warranty work at a market rate.
The article raises some points on how Ford both designed cars that are too expensive to repair and fails to pay mechanics to make their product line attractive for any maintenance business. This doesn't sound like a market efficiency issue.
I'm not going to pay someone to punch me in the face but I wouldn't call that a shortage.
In your example there would still be people willing to do it, but the government doesn't allow it?
Try this with: housing, nvidia GPUs, toilet paper (when there's a pandemic)
Honestly, between how soft-science macroeconomcis is, combined with the fact that this planet does not contain a single person willing to argue about it in good faith, makes it simply impossible to have real conversations around it, especially on the internet.
A shortage of an asset is a reflection of inventory levels. A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
They're different for good reasons.
There might be an exception for natural resources that are exceptionally easy to exploit even without labour, like sunlight or fresh air.
So the housing crisis in just an "inventory" issue? Maybe it's just that people aren't willing to pay enough for a dwelling in desirable coastal cities?
>A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
How's this different than for goods? You're just substituting "time" for "production". Moreover
Lack of demand for labor and skill can produce an asset shortage, but in an economy where supply and demand float, the theory is that shortages reflect supply-demand failures, and the degree to which supply of labor is invoked to solve shortages for goods depends on the elasticity of demand and the elasticity of supply.
Someone here posted that the balance was better in the west in the past because the Soviet Union was sitting there on the sidelines like a boogy many to capitalists waiting if they pushed people too far.
You can argue the same for labor as well. Everything from off-shore competition to strained government budgets are excuses for why employers "don't have the option to just pay more".
The point is, shortages being a price phenomenon is not all that actionable. You can't avoid digging in to the details.
People that can't achieve home ownership right now want houses to be cheaper.
People that already got theirs don't. Yeah, supply is a problem but it's more than that. Housing cannot both be an investment and broadly affordable, those two goals are in conflict.
We need to change the way we treat housing so that it cannot be used to both store and generate wealth.
The car companies have basically set up a monopsony with cartels, squeezed the mechanics out, and are now complaining that they squeezed them out too much.
Oh, yeah, it's definitely them getting underpaid—but in a way that I wasn't expecting and was surprised to learn about.
In the case of doctors and electricians, you have structural problems in both, but also a true shortage of individuals in electrician work (could be in the medical field too, but I can't speak to that).
* companies complain about lack of trained workers
* more people start training
* after a few years companies complain about too many workers and don’t hire them
* people stop training
* companies complain about lack of trained workers
I was part of this in the 90s in mechanical engineering. When I started studying the job market was great. When I finished there were no jobs. Luckily I could jump to programming.
I think we are seeing the same with CS now. Too many people jumped into it.
Trying to move everyone up the value chain leaves a vacuum in the pipeline