The other interesting finding here is that only 57% of these "job stayers" beat or matched inflation, while 43% suffered a real wage cut. A huge chunk of the people who's wages beat inflation only did so due to job hopping
Greater turnover is good for all employees and worse for employers
Since the early 1980s, start of the Millennial generation, inflation is 300%; takes $800k/yr to have the buying power of $200k/yr in the 80s
Millennials and GenZ have only ever known austerity and oligarchy.
And that Exxon computed the min-max of the climate trend back in the 1970s just says they know, given all the data, they know.
GenX edge lords don't give shiiiit
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/style/gen-x-generation-di...
I have zero respect for people >50 especially any in official policy roles. Zero fucks for anyone but themselves this whole time; ignored reality just like religious nutters and presumed political dogma would be on their side
Jokes on them; Millennials are even more convinced it all just goes black with death, fewer young people going into elder care jobs, population decline crushing those jobs... GenX can enjoy hobbling to their toilet unassisted with bed sores and gout. Fuck them too then
*For long time periods, not cherry-picking small time periods.
Historically the way white folks have squared that circle has been to say that those folks aren't really people and simply don't know the joys of Christian city dwelling.
I can't make the math work, though.
There's the whole ignoring externalities of capitalism and reality itself for toxic positivity thing.
Sure is great though watching where I grew up slowly become engulfed in wildfire smoke; something that never happened until 10 years ago.
American freedom; off the hook assuring a social safety net exists for you is pretty great.
Will go my entire life never having to worry if you end up buried in medical debt living in your car.
It’s my observation a high-turnover business is often good for nobody. There’s more spent in retraining etc than if you just paid halfway-competent people properly instead of literally rolling the dice every year or more.
They can.
Employee-owned companies do it all of the time.
Properly-ran privately-owned companies do it all of the time.
Who’s the odd one out?
And while it is inefficient if a company has to constantly retrain employees, overall you can have a more efficient market when people are given options, since employees can find the best fit. If you're working a job that isn't the best possible fit (something that's harder to find when your limited by time and resources) that's worse overall for the economy.
Of course there's more nuance here, but this is the core debate of unemployment payments. More unemployment benefits incentivizes people to stay unemployed longer (bad), but when they do find eventually find employment, it's usually better employment (very good).
Maybe "a competitive labor market" doesn't, but "job hopping" does. That is, in fact, the definitional meaning of job hopping. They specifically made the claim about "job hopping" as pertains to a mechanism for achieving wages. This is incompatible with finding an optimal fit -- even if you found your optimal fit, you would essentially be taking a massive wage cut to stay at your optimal fit job for more than a couple of years, if job hopping is the chosen mechanism for society-wide wage growth. I was responding to the claim that was made about job hopping, not some other claim about competitive labor markets.
Job hopping is the result of competition in the labor market, and while some may find it unfulfilling, that is usually the exception, and macroeconomically speaking, more job hopping can be really good for the overall market. That's all I was saying, though I forgot to mention how competition in the labor market relates.
My definition of job hopping is to switch jobs continually until you find the right fit, the right fit including wages as a factor among many others. I suspect that your definition means jumping jobs arbitrarily for the highest wage. In that case you are right that job hopping is bad, and it's my fault for confusing job hopping as wage increasing mechanism vs job hopping in general.
The reason for all of [job hopping, fluid labor markets, bankruptcy, startup formation, inflation] is because the world doesn't stay the same. Desires change. New technologies are invented. Resources get depleted, and substitutes need to be found. Bottlenecks emerge. Old people die, and young people are born.
Changing wages and periodic layoffs are ways of adapting the jobs that people do to the new realities of which jobs need to be done.
Or maybe it was because I was younger then?
Stayed at Google over a decade and it wasn't quite the same, particular when working with people in distant offices.
If your mindset is "The economy is an incredibly dynamic, living thing whose purpose is to satisfy the consumer desires of the moment", then job-hopping can be all of very satisfying, very lucrative, and very purposeful. Your purpose is to do whatever is most needed. You don't get attached to any one task, but treat yourself as malleable and adaptable, and think of your past roles as a portfolio of skills and experiences that you can draw on to meet new challenges. You could describe your approach to work as "Work is something I do, not what I am."
If your mindset is "The economy is the society that I grew up in, and I'm seeking my place in it, and then I want a role where I can grow and build expertise", this is extremely unsettling. You view your job as an identity, a part of yourself. To leave that job is to leave a part of your identity behind, and to be fired or laid off is to have a part of your identity ripped away. And so you'll fight hard (and take many poor bargains) to avoid being put in that situation. It's not simply a matter of economics; it's a matter of being and belonging. Work is not just what you do, it is who you are.
Commerce vs. Guardian syndrome [1], or growth vs. fixed mindset [2]. There isn't really a right answer, but American culture, society, and business favors commerce syndrome over guardian syndrome, while many other cultures (really, most of the rest of the world) is the opposite.
[1] https://jebkinnison.com/2016/04/29/jane-jacobs-monstrous-hyb...
[2] https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/growth-mindset-vs-fixed-min...
A certain amount of churn is good on the national or even global level, because it moves knowledge between companies. Probably not great for the company you depart, but great for the company you arrive at.
Much like housing, the best solution usually isn't government price controls. Better (if feasible) is abundance in the market.
I think a flat tax + UBI is the only way to go. The dream of AI should be a society where maybe 10% of people have to work. The nightmare is if the other 90% still need work but can’t find it.
Where do all jobs come from? Ultimately they’re created by people, so I wouldn’t worry about there being a demand but no supply.
Our wants today are vastly different from our wants a hundred years ago, and thus the labor pool looks vastly different. We shouldn't make policy decisions based on the assumption that there is a limited lump of labor.
This made me pause and think for a moment.
Desire is not an external entity or being that manipulates us. Our biology generates desire, since it has been selected for by evolution through natural selection.
People create jobs.
But unlike the conventional picture people have in their head, it is a unidirectional creation process (i.e. by the "job giver"). The job is created through the dynamic of the "giver" and the "seeker".
Citation required. I assure you, wanting vs. being able to realistically acquire is a very powerful force of want extinguishment. You cannot, in fact, get a thing, if the world around you is not conducive to enabling you to pull the requisite capital together to meet the prices set. Something that is getting markedly harder for various strata in the economy currently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity
Sorry to be so overly-intellectual. I probably should’ve been simpler.
The corporate veil is extraordinarily valuable to the point where a minimum 10% tax on any money passing through options makes a lot of sense. However, the idea you can pass liability off for free is so pervasive you’d never get something like that to pass. Not because of how good or bad the idea is, but because of how effective voting blocks + donors are.
But I think the nightmare you imagine is not realistic. There isn't a lump of labor. We shouldn't make policy decisions based on the assumption that the labor pool will be limited.
Three people doing the work required to seed, spray, harvest 4,000 Hectares for assorted barley, canola, etc is commonplace today in areas that once struggled to farm a few hundred hectares with four brothers and a father.
Where labor has contracted in some places, it has grown elsewhere.
In any case, COVID was a hellish time for pretty much every economic metric, but for unemployment specifically, the catastrophe didn’t actually end up lasting that long, and the labor market in the U.S. has recovered remarkably well.
I think that’s fair, since even if you are homeless, as long you’re receiving unemployment benefits, you count as part of the statistic.
And there’s good reason to count certain people out of the labor force. Retired folks, stay-at-home parents, anybody else that’s willfully unemployed—if your working in or around government trying to make labor policy decisions, including these people gives you an inaccurate picture of the labor market. If you want to help people get jobs, you need to focus on the people that actually need help.
Of course no statistic is perfect, but broadly, I think that the unemployment rate is a useful and accurate measure. If you think otherwise, I’d invite you to propose a good alternative.
It’s not on me to invent a new statistic. It is on me to push back on ridiculous claims that minimize the fact that this statistic has been defanged over and over again in the decades since it was first introduced.
To include people who don’t want to be employed in the labor force is counter-productive, since why would you try to find jobs for people who don’t want them?
It’s not even that these people are “lazy” like many who (wrongly) disparage the unemployed say. They just aren’t looking for jobs at the moment—stay at home parents, retired people, anybody that doesn’t need/want to work. (And by the way, plenty of homeless people receive unemployment benefits and are therefore included in the statistic.)
The unemployment rate is useful because it helps us see how many people need jobs. If you start including people who don’t need jobs, the metric just becomes less useful.
To your other point, I’m not asking you to invent a new statistic. It’s just that when people say one metric isn’t working, someone smart usually has come up with alternatives. A lot of people for example don’t like using GDP, and thus economists have come up with HDI, GNI weighted GDP, or whatever else suits their taste.
I bring this up because there are few alternatives to unemployment metrics, simply because they are not nearly as problematic as you paint them to be. Practically every competent government on Earth uses the same measures for unemployment, and specifying the labor force to only people actively looking for work is very standard; if you want to say that this nearly ubiquitous method is wrong, I think it’s reasonable to ask what needs to be fixed.
Edit: only people who are homeless for less than six months would be on unemployment benefits. That doesn’t sound like “plenty” to me.
Eurostat, the Internation Labor Organization, OECD--what incentive do all these organizations have to globally misrepresent unemployment? Of course they measure and consider U6, but they choose to headline U3 instead not because it's prettier and they want to serve national propaganda interests, but because it's just more useful.
C'mon man. I have to give up on this thread.
Edit: it must just be a happy coincidence that U6 has never been lower than U3.
We would do well to improve safety nets so that everyone benefits.
You can't have a revolution based entirely on not having to wipe your ass (except when you still do because bidets are garbage).
Unless you are fresh out of college and working at some lame startup or coding sweatshop, mature white collar work has always been pretty damn close to "not having to work".
You're easily replaceable early on when your only value is doing, but with more experience come more meetings and responsibilities. You become valuable for knowing, and knowing is not mere knowledge.
Assuming that the years of experience have shaken out the chaff, the only source of stress for those who remain employed is what is already inseparable from life itself. Personal growth without work doesn't even make sense.
That's why it doesn't feel like work. That's why the concept of "not having to work" is pathological and ridiculous. Anyone feeling this way about "work" needs to get help. I'm totally serious when I say that.
For me they're a huge upgrade.
FYI in some places flat taxes are technically unconstitutional
Now days, companies offer top dollar for Junior-level AI talent. And you see where that's going.
So competition over a limited talent pool in combination with a vibrant economy and many successful companies that make a lot of money. At least historically.
High salaries isn't limited to tech. Bankers, lawyers, doctors e.g. tend to earn more in the US.
Another aspect is that you get paid more but you potentially have higher expenses. So some of the delta is related to cost of living. But not all.
I know that sounds like corny and biased American exceptionalism, but I think it’s just objectively true.
Other countries can have vastly superior government policy, and that shows up in significant ways (like Denmark having an even higher productivity than the U.S.), but nobody has played the productivity game at as big a scale as the U.S. has, and that’s sort of just an insurmountable advantage for the time being.
NVIDIA, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Google—-I could go on for a very, very long time. Those companies alone are going to create heavy competition within the tech sphere, and add on top of that Baumol’s cost disease from every other big U.S. industry, and you get the current situation.
No other country has the behemoth of capital and opportunity like the U.S. has. This will naturally have a big influence on things.
Why is funding harder? Culture and laws we created as a result. We're far less accepting of things like leverage M&As, options, flexible employee remuneration and conditions (especially for start-ups), etc. VCs therefore need to clear a far higher bar to mitigate risk, meaning only the very best proven ideas receive funding.
Further, investors tend to prefer lower, but more stable returns. There is much less appetite for moon-shots. I could speculate that this is partly driven by the tax structures. Why risk $50M if you know that 60% of the rewards would be taxed? You would use a much more conversative risk ratio, preferring 5% returns but very low risk. This extends to individuals, too. Why start a business when most of the rewards from the considerable risk will be taxed? Especially given the onerous business laws.
Denmark and Sweden are notable standouts. Our laws make it easy to start businesses, operate, and fire workers as needs change. However we still have very high taxes.
There is one final thought: most people I know do not aspire to become Ferrari owners with five mansions. We aspire to happy and healthy families with good friends, good wine, and cozy holidays. If this is one's aspiration, risking their financial stability for something they don't care about would not be very common. Danes who do aspire for the Ferrari lifestyle leave for the US.
One additional thing to mention though is that Americans are also just richer. Even if you include government benefits (social transfers), Americans rank extremely high on measures of disposable income per household. As far I’m aware that is the most complete measure of income, and despite being a massive country of almost 400 million, the median American is comparable to someone living in Luxembourg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income
As you’d expect, this effect only grows when you go up the ladder, and American millionaires are on average richer than say, Danish millionaires.
(Note, I’m not saying that this is good or bad, just that it is. For what it’s worth I think we could learn a lot from the Danish model, but that’s my own distinct, normative option.)
Thus, since there is just generally more capital to go around, capital is easier to raise.
(And as an American, there’s plenty of us here too who enjoy the good life, free of Ferraris and mansions!)
The people who risked their (and families) lives going west were taking very large risks for large rewards. And it's never stopped.
It's one thing to fight your baristas, it's another to fight your baristas, bean supplier, mail delivery, and freight movers all at once.
This conversation usually derails, so to be clear no, I don’t think people should work for poverty wages, a viable business should include happy non-subsidized employees.
My question is whether a global price floor psychologically depresses wages by establishing a global price anchor. Price anchoring is well known to influence the price people will accept.
For jobs like cashier that are fungible just blanket get minimum wage, would they pay more without one when the employer can’t just point to the anchor price and say take it or leave it? Would they be faster to localize wages to local costs?
You think it's possible that the true wage the grocery store wants to pay its employees is actually higher than the price floor? But for some reason they can't think of any other numbers to write down on the paycheck? And without the price floor they'd be forced to think for themselves and reconsider their morals and the market conditions and their balance sheet and pay $20 an hour instead of $15?
I think it's much more likely the minimum wage can be interpreted as "we would pay you even less than this if it weren't illegal." See the tipped wage. They would pay you $0 if they could.
Mind you, this does not apply to white-collar positions like IT in the same manner. The salary bands are still quite strict -- 6 figures is still a rarity -- but you do negotiate them and can get meaningful raises.
Like healthcare being tied to employment?
Worked for Alan Greenspan and his consulting firm Townsend-Greenspan.
If you run your own company like that, then the longer the market stays irrational the bigger your gain.
Since a public option will never happen, maybe the most feasible fix we could do is to do a REAL version of the P in HIIPA - portability. Let employees stay in the group plan of any company, paying the full premium a la COBRA, but forever, and require companies to give a tax-deductible cash benefit equivalent to the premium subsidy they'd be entitled to in their new job, if they show proof they're in a COBRA plan (which for efficiency, should just be a flag in some government database since they're all up in our business now with the 1095 forms anyway, they ought to know).
Anyway, the reason for employer-based care isn't to be evil, it was to create risk pools. Insurance being purchased only individually has big problems: the insurers can't price the risk for a new individual subscriber in any sensible way without going back to the "pre-existing conditions exclusion" BS that all of us hate, or penalizing people with high premiums based on the conditions they've had. Employer groups fix that because they can look at a company as a whole and understand that say a gym chain disproportionally employs young and fit people, whereas, say, Walmart, employs a more health-diverse and age-diverse set of people, so maybe they need to pay more per person. So they can price risk efficiently without punishing individuals.
Of course I personally think the insurance idea itself is the wrong way to model paying for healthcare, but it's what we have, and distorting the market even further will only make things worse.
Bottom line, if you want major changes, work on convincing more than 49% of the public to vote for your party.
Imagine if the risk pool was the entire country’s population. Just like it is for the cost of police and elementary school.
Now imagine you don’t even think of it as “risk”, but a human right that everyone gets. It saves everyone money AND you get better outcomes.
This idea is so well understood hundreds of millions of people in every developed country on earth - except one - use it everyday.
Also who wrote this theory? Sounds like the wet dream of some neoliberal econ grad.
That's good because you don't have to rely on corporations acting morally, and corporations who do act good out of moral obligation aren't punished fiscally for it. It also just works better than adding a price floor, if done right.
And although the idea is sexy, it's far from a wet dream. It's actually the standard in the Scandinvan social democracies.
Norway, Sweden, Denmark—these are countries where this model has been proven to work in practice, not theory.
If you still call bullshit though, I’d cordially invite you to show me similar evidence for price controls working as well as flexicurity does in the Scandinavian states.
I've often felt that I'm not very good at a particular company until I've been there 4 years... then I can really do good work. I wonder if there is any downside for society to incentivize switching often.
Maybe we can fix the things that make workers uneasy in the first few years.
I don't know for a shortcut for this. It's simply experience, though I do find the more industries I work in and the more jobs I work, the more I can pattern match across that experience to make better decisions faster in a new job.
well yeah - unfamilliarity, to a certain degree. But its more than that. It's the slow process of gaining expertise. There are of course many transferable skills from one company to another. and there are some that are not. Knowing the relationships between all the bosses, who got passed over for promotion, who needs a certain type of project on their plate etc. Also knowing all the history of various prior initiatives, failed and successful, really helps you get stuff done. Most work in non-small enterprises needs building yes but also buy-in from others, which needs them to respect you, and for you to know what hoops to jump through and what to say to keep tham all happy.
In my industry, 2 years is about what it takes to feel the ramifications for your bad decisions. Leaving before then makes you a bomb thrower in my not so humble opinion, leaving everyone else holding the bag. And unless you are a contractor, it's a resume red flag for me.
I get that not all jobs work out, but a long string of < 2 years makes me skeptical.
Ideally, you want to have a dynamic economy where people have very many paths to prosperity. In the US, you have people like Ted Sarandos who managed video rental stores for 17 years before taking a job at Netflix, which eventually led him to become CEO. Or you have Doug McMillion, who started at Walmart in 1984 unloading trailers at a distribution center and rose up to the CEO position. And you have Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber CEO, who started his career in investment banking, became a media executive, and then served as Expedia CEO. An of course, there any plenty of extremely successful entrepreneurs who never worked for anyone else before founding their own company.
In software it can take a long time between writing the code and seeing what happens to it in the long term. How it evolves. How it's maintained. Quality. If you never close this loop you're limited in your growth as a software engineer.
I don't know what the magic number is but I can relate to 2-4 years before you feel like you're comfortable in a new and complex domain. So ideally people stay some reasonable time beyond that. The company is getting a lot more out of this person then they did when they started so it should be a win-win. Instead what's happening is this guy is going to jump ship, get a higher pay, and be totally ineffective or even contribute negatively, and the company will hire someone new and possibly pay that new person more than the original guy, only to have him spend a ton of time getting up to speed...
I’m not sure that raising the median wage is even more desirable than raising the minimum wage. If the median wage enables a good life but, say, the lowest quartile is precarious exploitative jobs close to the poverty line then raising the minimum should increase overall happiness more than just raising the median.
Worth keeping in mind when doing any apples V oranges country by country comparisons of population percentages in poverty.
* AU: https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/poverty/
* UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_Kingdom
* US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_thresholds_(United_Sta...
The frictions we're talking about, like health insurance being tied to an employer, make things worse for families anyway - getting rid of the distortionary regulations that cause that can only be a good thing.
In some ways this could even be an argument for the cause of enshittification of everything. When everything is liminal, it somewhat directly leads to a 'get mine and go' type mindset, which in turn leads directly to enshittification, no longer term than next quarter thinking, and so on. I've always assumed the cause of this all was MBAs, and I still think it's the primary cause, but perhaps we're creating this certain from multiple directions all at once.
Here's a source, although it isn't that detailed and is more of a descriptive literature review: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/103581...
This too: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/07/oecd-employment... - but I didn't have time to read it in detail.
I don't think anyone believes labor mobility reduces productivity.
For my little hypothesis to be incorrect you'd need to demonstrate that a company with less experienced workers (in terms of years worked at that specific company) is more productive than with more experienced workers. I think that's very improbable.
To your point: yes, people who have a weaker bargaining position in Denmark earn less. However we also have generous social safety nets, so no one ends up destitute or hungry. Ultimately, I think wages should be between an employer and employee (with or without the assistance of unions - we like our unions). If an employee has fewer skills, less experience, is unwilling or unable to move for a job, etc, they should expect to be paid less. This represents materially different value to the employer.
In France the minimum wage is roughly indexed on inflation (especially if inflation isn't too high) but getting a raise when your salary is higher than this is very difficult, especially without job hopping. Your employer knows that he can risk not giving you a raise and you can't as easily risk being upset about it.
In addition to the $250,000 (or $500,000 for a couple) exemption, you can also subtract your full cost basis in the property from the sales price. Your cost basis is calculated by starting with the price you paid for the home, and then adding purchase expenses, such as closing costs, title insurance, and any settlement fees.
Also, most (if not all) states do not tax your primary residence unless you go past the federal exemptions.
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/06/capitalgainhomes...
The 15% I talked about is on the total value of the home, although to be fair 33+% of people avoid agency fees (about 7%) by selling directly to an individual.
> It wasn’t inflation per se, but the fact that wages didn’t keep up — that’s been weighing down consumer sentiment, he said. His proof: Belgium.
> “It is the only European country that had consumer confidence that bounced back after the inflation period,” Hurst said.
> That’s because it also happens to be the only European country where wage increases are directly tied to inflation. If prices go up by 7%, then by law, so does your salary.
The minimum wage is a strawman by comparison: it doesn't actually help workers.
Gig-work like Uber is a great safety valve to enable instant job hopping for unskilled labour. And not just the job hopping itself, but also the threat of job hopping.
Seriously I support having a decent social net so that nobody is starving on the street without healthcare etc. but the preference is always that if work is available someone should work (assuming it's reasonably suitable, they're not taken advantage of, they are able to work etc.).
So if you do the math using fairly roughly you'll find that the US can support a UBI of about $1500/month without significant inflationary pressure. That'll pay your rent (if you're sharing an apartment) and cover groceries (if you mostly live on rice and beans). If you want a car, vacations or the latest iPhone you have to work. So most would work and build those cars et al.
UBI doesn't mean no one works. It means no one has to work just to live.
And even if you want to ignore the actual scholarly research on the subject (which is ample), we have plenty of examples of people who would never have to work a day in their lives, and yet they still do so, sometimes even despite millions of people actively hating them for it: the very wealthy, particularly those who inherited generational wealth.
1. We could provide jobs for disabled people that makes feel better about themselves. Also remember this is jobs for all who _want_ to work. There is still disability for those that need it.
2 & 3 Government provided jobs could help caretakers and parents because they could be more flexible with hours and shifts. Work while your kids are at school.
4. Jobs causing poverty because you have to drive somewhere and eat out because there is no break room is ridiculous. I laughed out loud when he argued that if you work you are too tired to drive to the shop where the cheap groceries are sold.
5. Yep, some people need to be fired. I'm not sure what he is trying to say here. I think these government jobs need to be run well, and employees need to be paid bonus if they do good work. (Compared to other teams that do the same work)
I could go on.. but seems a little pointless.
If the government wants trees planed it's better for everyone that they hire a company that plants trees. Even that isn't always that great but it's less worse. The government doesn't want that and doesn't have the money for that. They could get that money by raising taxes which increases cost of living for everyone that works and that tends to be not popular.
Anyways- that's what the USSR looked like or maybe China before they switched to their version of a free market. Due to human nature and other factors it doesn't work.
People don’t work hard for crap wages unless you beat them with a stick. Government jobs are seen as cushy because there are actual rules and regulations being followed as to how much work should be done. Corporations just skirt that, do a worse job, and then spread your type of propaganda everywhere.
People wouldn’t be jealous of the government job holders if they could achieve a similar work life balance at Joes Tree planting service.
There is no rule that says you can't have performance bonuses as a government employee, nor are there any rules to say you can't have competition within government departments.
I'm no expert, but I think the problem with the Soviets were that you were not rewarded for effort, and I think we all understand why that's important.
I've read in the US there are teachers that can't be fired because of public school tenure laws and union contracts. So yeah, first thing you have to do is have a sane and functioning government. Then you can start dreaming about a better society.
Bad societies are a reflection of their people.
If you fire them, they're still entitled to a job, right? So some other agency has to hire them. The flunkies will progress from the most demanding jobs, on down to the ones where the assignment is like, "Just please collect at least one piece of trash per day, okay?" The net effect, I'd argue, is that jobs that are necessary but high-effort, like assembling important machines, constructing buildings, food production, IT support, are starved of workers because you can get paid decently for 1000% less stress to be on litter patrol, or the mailbox graffiti removal squad, or whatever.
If you pay piecework, the least motivated will just do terrible work (in many jobs a poorly-done thing can be a big problem), and if you don't pay the ones who don't manage to plant a single tree, then that's technically not a job (though it is daycare, and since you've still got to actually pay the overseers you're generating negative value on the whole operation).
> problem with the Soviets were that you were not rewarded for effort
We actually agree on the important points then, it seems. In my view of people, the ones who are motivated to be truly excellent even with the visible goal of the bonus are rare, and the ones who are motivated to cheat "the system" (which is really just cheating the rest of us who do our share) at every turn are, while not the majority, more than numerous enough to tank any system I've seen that tries to achieve aims like universal employment or true zero poverty. (And worse, they also seem to climb to positions of power of those systems in shocking frequency!) And finally, once people see the freeloaders defrauding society from both the top and the bottom, the truly excellent contributors to society are the first to flee to somewhere their efforts will be rewarded, and the reasonable middle of hard workers also do. This concentrates the low productivity further.
[citation needed]
By measures such as own-wage elasticity [DUBE & ZIPPERER] increases to the minimum wage evidently increase wages more than they decrease employment.
[DUBE & ZIPPERER]: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32925
A worker's compensation is a whole basket of pay, working conditions, career advancement opportunities, prestige etc. Similarly, what a worker does for the company is a whole basket of things.
Minimum wage outlaws baskets where pay per official hour is under some threshold.
For an illustration of different baskets, have a look at the hectic life and relatively higher pay you get working for Aldi with the more measured pace and lower wages at Walmart.
The country's culture matters a lot. The same system that works perfectly in a healthy society will end up an abusive nightmare in an unhealthy one. Mobility for salary raises can also become mobility just to keep a job.
The new budget just got approved. Last year a teacher with 15 years of experience made $58,270 and this year they will make $62,500 so right around an 8% bump but the prior two years was only a ~$1000 bump each.
So 2023 -> 2026 $56,250 -> $62,500 was roughly 12% increase in pay but adjusted for inflation $62500 in 2026 is ~$57,220 in 2023 so not even an actual raise of $1000 in buying power.
As the other commenter called out it's low considering to get to this salary at 15 years of experience you also have to have a master's degree. Master degree holders have a median salary $95k in the US so this is off the mark by a considerable amount.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/ctb/graduate-degr...
They're signals with low leverage since everyone has to have them in their field, so you end up with lower nominal pay from the institutions that buy most of that labor.
Consider acceptance rate as a metric - education has one of the highest by this report, up there with public service:
https://cgsnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/CGS_GED-2025_R...
The signal of supply and demand the cost (and debt) of an advanced degree is not reflected in the marginal salary bump over bachelors degree given the rising costs of tuition. From same site you used 46.7% of public university masters degree completions used debt so basically half.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_332.45.a...
so job hop
the market is trying to tell you something
For some reason right now everyone thinks they can get away without those. And I can't say they're precisely wrong. But as someone working on dumpster fire fighting, holy hell is a lot lost when you lose someone who's done nothing but X for 15 years. Now you've got someone with no experience with our processes, overworked, also underpaid, with nobody left with any experience of their own to train them. That can cost an awful lot of money.
Some have said job hop, I’d say unionizing can also work.
Michigan Insurance Giant Blames "AI" for Layoffs–But Evidence Points Overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49365161 - August 2026
> My investigation points to a far more conventional explanation: Acrisure is shifting work once performed by American employees to lower-cost operations in India, the Philippines, and Colombia.
Labor cost controls, in this context via offshoring.