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Comment by energy123 | Hacker News Reader

That's not the case when it comes to professional bodies. Tradespeople are similar to surgeons. They use licensing as a tool to restrict labor so their wages remain artificially high and they can parasitically collect economic rents. Getting overseas labor banned is part of this.

I'm not in favor of throwing away all regulations and all licensing, mind you. But some pragmatic rebalancing needs to happen. If I go to India I do not automatically die inside a house with a $9500 solar installation. That'd be much more likely to happen on an American road with its 40000/yr fatalities that everyone casually accepts as a pragmatic trade-off worth having ;)

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> They use licensing as a weapon to restrict labor supply

In parts they do, but that doesn't mean that licensing doesn't have a point. They should not be able to limit the licenses but testing and training should absolutely happen. Especially for critical things like electricity.

> If I go to India I do not automatically die inside a house with a $9500 solar installation.

You don't but your chances are higher than a country with enforced minimum standards.

https://www.newslaundry.com/2023/08/01/electrocution-kills-1...

> That'd be much more likely to happen on an American road with its 40000/yr fatalities that everyone casually accepts as a pragmatic trade-off worth having ;)

India’s traffic fatality rate is 12.6 per 100k, which is about the same as the US’ at 14.2. India has a very low car ownership rate, and US a very high one, so I dunno that I’d be so quick to judge in your shoes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

It's likely the traffic fatalities are much higher than they appear on Wikipedia.

https://www.dataforindia.com/road-accident-deaths/

Since we're making ethnocentric assumptions and making comparisons between the USA and India, perhaps our building standards encourage safe public infrastructure?

Perhaps if India was more like the USA, safe road travel would improve - and consequently - their 172k traffic fatalities would fall to a more acceptable level (by the way there are doubts this figure is correct - people speculate it's much higher)?

And before you complain about the population difference, I checked the per capita rates of traffic fatalities. India outpaces the USA by quite a bit.

By the way, this is all an apples and oranges comparison. Building standards has nothing to do with road fatalities.

The problem is not the customer safety, it's the worker's. Look into how things used to be done in the "good old days" and see if you'd be ok going to that kind of job. [1]

[1] https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=CRN1913010...

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