Your biggest vulnerability is your shitty compensation
green.spacedino.net
green.spacedino.net
In the United Kingdom, a third of people claiming government assistance are in employment. Over 50% of those buying their first home get gifted money from their parents to do so. Starting from nothing means playing a rigged game. It's like playing Monopoly, where one player starts out with half of the cards and everyone else thinks they can win if they strategise well enough.
Many core economic theories that are taught about productivity and pay are wrong. Anyone living in the real world can see that marginal productivity and price theory are wrong. If the game was perfectly fair, these theories may have some weight, however there's a multitude of factors that skew the board. Poor compensation does have consequences, and they may be felt by individual businesses. However, by and large, these consequences are offloaded on to the rest of society.
Rather, the powerful will turn on each other and start waging war eventually, and the expendable bodies used in that is everyone else.
> Now at some point, the humans involved in handing out currency decided that too many people were living too nicely.
The origins of currency are mysterious. There were certainly some number of kings and tribal chiefs who minted coins and handed them out, mostly I think to soldiers. There were also traders using whatever coins and other small valuable objects. But I don't think anybody decided anything, except when messing around with taxes. I suppose company scrip comes closest to this vision, where your lack of money is determined by the mastermind who also creates it and hands it out and decides everybody's roles. That or communism. Generally no, it's not a rigged game, it's a messy brawl.
I disagree with the commenter that your replied to directly, who seems to believe the world is a zero-sum game. However it's also naive to believe that the game is not rigged, and that those who complain simply lack creativity.
In a healthy society, choosing to work to serve others 40 hours a week, should afford you the ability to acquire enough capital to buy a small house and start a family after 10 years. Unfortunately, this is now unachievable in many parts of the world.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but you seem to leap from "it is hard to buy a house these days" to "this is the fault of people accruing capital".
I'm trying to understand this leap. I think you mean that generational wealth means some people start with all the cards, and their buying power decides what house prices are?
Tim has to save for 10 years in order to get a down payment on a house (and borrow half of it from mom and dad).
Tim rents from Bob.
Tim has to compete with Bob when it comes time to purchase his home.
It is easier for Bob to acquire a house, and during the time Tim has saved, Bob has been able to add 10 homes to his portfolio.
Wealth consolidates more wealth at the top over time. The more consolidated, the more the velocity of consolidation speeds up (The point we are at) via not only how wealth/assets work, but also as Bob has more and more power/influence and the benefit grows of ensuring the system is in his favor he starts to exert more political influence. An orthodontist with two homes isn't bothering with political influence other than zoning around those homes. His son that inherited multiple homes and now rents out 50 is going to every government meeting related to renting in the town, taking the country planner to lunch, knows the council members on a first name basis, and exerts much more political power than his father. As wealth accrues, the ability/desire/benefit for manipulating/abusing power grows almost exponentially.
Then wage growth flattened out, at the same time that the wealth of the wealthiest few started to grow by leaps and bounds.
It is the fault of people accruing capital. They have taken a vast percentage of all the wealth created in the past 50 years, which would have otherwise gone to the rest of us.
Then they used that wealth as leverage to prevent the rest of us from having the power to do anything about it.
The world is multiple repeated games happening simultaneously all over the place. Many of them are zero-sum (e.g. purchasing a home in a certain zip-code) in the short term and medium-term, but not in the long term.
People using the "omg it's not zero sum" generalization are mostly incorrect. Not because everything is zero-sum, but because of how much of a gross simplification it is - so much so that it becomes useless without specifics.
The new deal in America roughly got things correct, and was followed by the greatest expansion of the middle class in history. What we're suffering from today is the systematic destruction of that social contract.
They can be use to predict and not predict anything depending on ones idea of "used correctly", which is why it's nonsense.
Thankfully the UK didn't follow France into the anarchy that was the French Revolution, and Earl Grey could make them see reason. But damn did we come close.
The threat of violence that the worker wielded against their employer was indeed a good incentive to keep things amicable.
Nowadays, we don't know where the Lords necessarily live, the size of the Lords private armies don't need to be more than a handful of security guards, and AI/Robotics is diminishing the need for that handful of guards at all.
For those unfamiliar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution . Which from the UK's PoV had lead to a hellishly long, expensive, bloody, and existential series of wars. Right on the UK's doorstep. The memories of which were very much living in 1832, to undermine the usual "can't happen here" motivated reasoning of the 1%.
And it took further horrors, including the Great Famine in Ireland, to get the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_laws repealed in 1846. Which, arguably, was a far greater reform - destroying the economic foundations of most of the wealthy land owners, and greatly reducing how many poor folks lived on the brink of "if you can't afford the food prices..." starvation.
ADDED:
> Nowadays, we don't know where the Lords necessarily live, the size of the Lords private armies don't...
Sadly, it's far more complex than that. While amoral billionaires and mega-corps get the headlines, late-stage capitalism has very efficiently allocated nice-sounding slivers of its loot to a huge number of minor stakeholders. Pretty much everyone who has savings (for retirement or whatever) invested in equities. Pretty much every homeowner. And pretty much everyone who still believes that they'll somehow manage to break into those "just sit there and watch your wealth grow" classes.
No, the real difference with back then is that "bread and circuses" and "divide and conquer" have been optimized to an extreme degree. A populace on opium isn't going to manage to band together and take it to the Lords.
I know of a big, white, home where a number of them keep showing up :)
You could just as easily say Europeans are entitled because their salaries are high compared to an Ethiopian. It’s not a useful comparison
Perhaps another US state would have been a better comparison. It might be hard for a software developer in Montana to identify with a Silicon Valley rant about salaries being too low.
It would not cross my mind personally to complain about low compensation for my skilled work, precisely because I know my collegaues from areas with lower compensation are just as skilled and earn less. In what way would the world be better off if I was better paid? If it helped my company increase their security posture then that would say more about the ineffective ways we organize work around here than anything else.
Everyone would like to make more but I was interpreting this thread as suggesting a us dev whining that as a field they’re being mistreated comes off a bit gauche
I'm writing this because I don't consider NL to be the top country in Europe where you can make a lot of money being a SWE. And I'm not talkin about FAANG salaries either, they are higher here.
Of course the downside are absurd taxes, up to 62% on a large part of that, so I hope people try to escape that as much as they can (considering the politicians and the wealthy do the same just orders of magnitude more and in the open).
2. You have to take the numbers relative to corporate profits and shareholder earnings, which have ballooned
Think he’s wrong about this being close to blowing up. Think that’s coloured by his own personal situation. I suspect unfortunately the powers that be correctly read the situation as significantly more room to squeeze.
It might read as bad to usa ears but keep in mind there are people breaking down ships with zero safety, zero job security, low pay, bad equipment and certain heath impact etc. People will bear crazy stuff and still show up to work
Because the "in the real world" alternative is so much worse. In theory: "Workers unite!", in practice: "Lose your home".
The difference is my desperation for the job. I had to pay for my studies back when 1$ an hour seemed like more than nothing.
Now working for less than 50$ feels like being exploited. This is the matter of perspective and situation in life, you can never fix it for everyone in the world. There will always will be people like me who will work for 1$ an hour because they have needs to meet and scholarships or handouts don't make up for it all.
An effective attack? I would say, not really. (Has he improved the economic lot of the people who voted for him? No, he hasn't.) But the sentiment is there to "tear it all down", and it's resulting in action, at least at the voting booth.
Is it resulting in direct action in the streets? Not yet. But we may be closer than you think. (Or perhaps I should have said "not currently". BLM, for example, was kind of in that direction.)
When the incentives of workers favour burning buildings rather than working for wages, the next step is either to use force/control or to rebalance wages.
This is a product of a resource rich economy, you can see it today.
It is calles Dutch disease
If we assume that services jobs will be, primarily, the jobs that survive automation, the cost disease might also swamp the Coasean Singularity.
Today is international workers day and we are sharing a capuccino with my colleague.
He either worked for federal government for too long or just thinks world owns him something. Probably the latter, based on him being 4 months in unemployment and stating "Employment inquiries should check the TXT record on job.spacedino.net for contact info."
"X. Employee, 19xx-20xx, beloved and refined human resource; dutifully sacrificed health and happiness to maximize shareholder value."
If nobody pays their workers well: All companies suffer from a disaffected, burnt out workforce that is unable to consistently perform at the best of their ability. As well as many industries suffering from the fact that their products are non-essential. If you're paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by rent, you're not going to bother buying a new board game, pick up a book, get the latest and greatest console, or its overpriced games.
If some pay their workers well, and others don't, the companies that do will be at a disadvantage financially against their competitors. A healthier and happier employee almost certainly directly results in higher profits, but not to an extent that matches or outpaces the increase in wages required to reach that point.
If all of them pay their workers well, workers become less financially stressed. They do their job better, because they are healthier, less exhausted, etc. This also results in the exact opposite of the first case above: People have more money, they can spend more, you make more profit from people spending more across the board.
This is part of the reason that minimum wage laws are actually really important, and why the fact they have stagnated for so long is such an issue. It breaks the prisoners dilemma game by mandating that everyone together makes the group-optimal decision over the individual-optimal one.
Or, you know, we could also try UBI! Or help free up discretionary spending power by nationalizing the most essential goods and services (targeting the ones that are the least elastic). It's not like we aren't lacking in options that would work to alleviate the issue here.
You pay workers well and retain institutional knowledge it helps you 5+ years down the road. Who in 5+ years is going to run a study that shows retaining the people that created a system made it easier to maintain that system?
Like think about Jack Welch who ran GE into the ground but keep the stock afloat through financial craftsmanship. He spawns a ton of copy-cats because despite making poor decisions he was visibly successful for a long time.
It's not like the NFL where if you decide to fire all your receivers and play the running game you'll immediately start losing next week.
However the economy has always moved in cycles. When things are going well again there will be more jobs than workers and if you want to get employees to take advantage of the money coming in you will be forced to pay more - even just to retain the workers you have you will be forced to pay more.
Thus this is not prisoner's delemma. The situation over time is far too complex for that simple analysis.
I don't know why median house prices are even factor at all in what you think you wage you a wage you accept would be. If you can't afford a house, that means you have to lower your standard of living. There are lots of people who live in less than median houses. That's part of the way averages and statistics work. If you don't like the median house prices, you may have to look at what's going on in your city that the house prices are so high. There are certainly issues in Silicon Valley that need to be addressed, but they are not issues of wages. They are other issues that they need to address. You are always welcome to live in a house that is lower than the median wage and that may be what is needed in order to afford something.
Signed, Anyone who you'd like to care
> This society has been arranged around using currency to purchase necessities, because some people decided that necessities are not guaranteed.
It's crazy to me that we've advanced to the point that we could guarantee necessities (we know how to grow enough food and extract enough natural resources to do so), we still hold to the above. And before you shout "Communism", guaranteeing necessities doesn't necessarily mean communism. It just means there's a floor that everyone is at, and then what you earn from your labor (which varies depending on the labor) is on top of that.
I'm interpreting this as venting, but the attitude on display here is madness. It is totally unreasonable to throw these sort of temper tantrums because an employer isn't adding crazy high wages to what is already a quite pleasant and comfortable desk job. One of the issues tech workers have is that even at a slightly lower wage than median it'd still be a much better deal than what an average worker is being offered.
People do far more work for far less money to a high professional standard. And trying to burn down a business because the person offering you the best deal you can find isn't what you imagine yourself to be worth is entitled to an undignified extent.
My personal take is that the 1950s were such a great time for blue-collar workers not just because the US was the dominant economic power, but also due to the threat of the ideology of communism. Capitalism faced a competing ideology, and business owners restrained their own greed out of fear that their workers would decide that a communist revolution was the answer.
On this reading, what went wrong for the American worker was the fall of the USSR plus the switch of China to a capitalist version of communism. After that, the owners felt free to get greedy, and to leave their workers with no real hope of things ever getting better for them.