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Comment by bayesianhorse | Hacker News Reader

If employers were looking for cheaper workers, your brother would have taken the cheapest job available wouldn't he?

After all, working as a Mech Eng even at minimum wage should for him be preferable to flipping burgers at minimum wage or being unemployed, especially with a family...

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It depends. Countries with actual safety nets often provide enough unemployment money that one isn't forced to take some ridiculous "just be employed" job while looking for their next real job.

In the Netherlands we have enough unemployment money that one isn't forced to take some ridiculous "just be employed" job. But the longer you are unemployed, the harder it will be to find a new job. A hole in your resume doesn't look god

Of course. There is always the driver to actually work. In places that lack a safety net you have to take some "flipping burgers" job which you still can't really report on your resume so you end up with no time plus that ugly hole in your resume.

It has been shown that humans prefer pay for work over the same pay for no work (within reason). Many othere species too. Except Cats.

Also there is lots of room between an "adequate" engineering salary and minimum or no wage...

Figuring out how to get underachieving academics into paying or even wellpaying jobs should be a higher priority in politics.

I am going to challenge you to find a single peer reviewed study that concludes what you just said. Almost all recent claims about how paying less is somehow better come from some random HR person's anecdotes. Studies either do not exist or are flawed in some obviuos way.

I did not say "paying less is better". That sounds like a strawman's argument.

I did say that "pay for work is (within reason) preferred over pay for no work", all else being equal.

The term is "contrafreeloading", and is for example explained in Dan Ariely's coursera course: https://class.coursera.org/behavioralecon-001/lecture/57

I respect your argument about how what you said is different from the example I gave. I am not going to comment on this person or the lectures. I am skeptical about any "cool" theory that can't be traced back to a peer reviewed study. People need to realize that really knowing something is very hard. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Type in "contrafreeloading" to scholar.google.com. Instant flood of peer-reviewed study.

By the way, "this person" in the lecture happens to be one of the preeminent researchers in behavioral economy...

I am sorry but I can't find a study that concludes "humans prefer pay for work over the same pay for no work". You are just trying to overwhelm me to go and read a vast library of articles. I found a few studies where the "work" was lever-pushing and the study was with children where as they age they are less and less stupid exactly as expected (by me) http://www.amsciepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pr0.1981.49.3.859?j...

So please try to refer me to a study that I can apply in a general office environment with people aged 30 and a real-world job so we can check the claim.

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