Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalke | Hacker News Reader

What does it mean to "outwork" someone? If I have two jobs, one at a fast food restaurant and the other harvesting vegetables, can I outwork someone living off of $50 million in inherited wealth?

Can I outwork someone working half-time as a business consultant and making $150K/year?

Also, GDP is a proxy, and not an end point. As Paul Samuelson pointed out, if a man marries his maid, then, all else being equal, GDP would fall. By this reasoning, getting married would have the same negative social consequences you pointed out.

View on HN

By outwork I mean work for more hours or be willing to. If a rich person with a degree from an elite university has a higher expected per hour productivity than a poor person with no degree then the poor person can sometimes compete for the same job as the rich person by being willing to work for more hours. Or the poor person might be able to get a different job that the rich person would not consider because the hours are too long.

I don't think getting married would have the same effect unless one party gives up work or reduces the number of hours that they worked after being married, this doesn't tend to happen anymore.

> I don't think getting married would have the same effect unless one party gives up work or reduces the number of hours that they worked after being married, this doesn't tend to happen anymore.

Dalke's point is that GDP is an imperfect measure. In his example, the maid's work counts towards GDP (because she is being paid a salary) but the homemaker's work does not count (even though it may be identical in nature and extent.)

The taxable income of the couple would go down only if the maid continues the same work that she did before the marriage but for free rather than getting a different job, but this is quite a specific case that is outside of the norm.

You wrote "this will impact GDP and thus the state's ability to ...", as if that were a bad thing, or at least something to be avoided.

If so, then your logic says that this "outside of the norm" case is also a bad thing for the country, or at least something to be avoided.

Most would disagree with you. For that matter, my own g'grandmother worked as a maid for a man, who she later married. I don't see why you get to call my family history "outside of the norm" simply because it disagrees with your view of economics.

I notice that you have switched from "poor people" to "poor person with no degree", and from "richer [than poor]" to "rich".

My example was of someone who did not work at all, and has $50 million in inherited money. By definition, anyone who works will be able to outwork someone who never works. How does a poor person "outwork" that multimillionaire?

Classically speaking, I structured this as a worker against an owner of capital. You have responded, it seems, by arguing that capital is irrelevant, and then reclassified "work" to "access to better paying jobs".

I believe you also imply that going to an elite university is an independent factor from poverty. It may be that someone poor cannot take the 4 years off for such studies, and must instead help support the family and take care of an ailing parent. Therefore, these are correlated, with the implication that being rich helps make your children rich.

Your original premise was that working hard is the primary factor, and ignore other systemic biases.

I will try to address both this comment and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8680361 in one reply.

I think you have misunderstood my overall argument, my claim is not that a poor person is likely to earn a higher income than a rich person by working more hours, but that all people regardless of wealth are limited to 24 hour days which they must divide into "work" and "not work".

A poor person can increase their value to an employer by being willing to forgo more "not work" hours than their competition. If the standard is a 40 hour week then they can offer to work a 50 hour week for example. The only people who they cannot compete with are those already working at full capacity (say a 100 hour work week).

They can realise this extra work either as extra wages or by being willing to work more hours for the same wage. This can be used offset other disadvantages that they may have such as a lack of a degree, lack of experience or lack of connections. If a law was passed that restricted the number of hours that people are allowed to work to a maximum then you remove a negotiation lever that some poorer people might want to use.

As far as the maid example goes, it is an outlier because the overwhelming majority of women (at least in the west) who are in salaried employment before they are married continue in salaried employment after marriage. Historically (as was the case perhaps in your great grandmother's time) this was not necessarily the case.

Embedded in that is the premise that increasing the number of working hours is a good thing. If the law insists upon a maximum of 30 hours per week, then the number of hours that one is willing to work is no longer a way to distinguish between employees.

This thread started with the observation, quoting bato, "as work gets "easier" the way forward would be to reduce hours worked, not increase them".

If you build into your analysis the assumption that working more is better, then of course you'll end up with that conclusion that working more is better.

You believe there is a negotiation lever by not having a cap in the law. To start with, I would rather have strong unions able to negotiate the cap as appropriate for the given trade. Failing that though, the US has laws limiting the number of hours to work, such as the Libby Zion Law in New York, which limits the amount of resident physicians' work, and hours-of-service rules for truck drivers.

Regarding the maid example, I believe you are suggesting that it's rare enough that it can be ignored for purposes of economic analysis. My suggestion is quite different - your justification says that we should not do things that reduce the GDP. I question the primacy of that argument. We make policy decisions to have our country more in the way we want it to be. GDP is easy to measure. That doesn't mean it's the right metric, or even a good rough gauge.

If we wanted a country where people had more time for personal enrichment, then we would have a lower GDP. So what? Studying French poetry of the 1800s or building sand castles on the beach or watching football games are cheap.

And if you're worried about the poor needing to catch up to the rich, then increase taxes.

I think our wires are still crossed a little.

Imagine that you are hiring for a programming position and have two available candidates. One has a degree from Stanford and three years experience at google, while the other has only fast food experience and has been a self taught programmer for a year. They both want the same salary for the job. All else being equal most people are going to employ the Stanford grad who is more likely to already be relatively wealthy than the self taught programmer.

If the Stanford grad has a limit to the amount of hours they are willing to work then the self taught programmer can offer to work for a higher number of hours, possibly making them a more attractive hire than the Stanford grad.

Once you place a cap on the number of hours that can be worked this gives the Stanford grad the advantage unless the self taught person is willing to significantly lower their salary requirement. Thus an opportunity for economic mobility is lost.

If you pursue policies that emphasise personal enrichment time over freedom to work then you are likely to hurt those who have the most need for the latter over the former, these are most likely to be poorer people. You also reduce the amount of public services that can be provided (or at least the growth thereof) because you need both labour and capital (from taxation) to provide these services.

It might not be a positive thing for google employees to have more time to spend studying french poetry rather than paying extra tax to support education programmes, drug rehabilitation programmes etc.

My main concern is your statement "... and also the ability of poor people to get out of poverty by outworking the more wealthy."

Your setup implies that the person from Stanford is rich, and the self-taught programmer is poor, no? When in truth the first could be $50K in student debt and the second in the black.

In any case, are they both equally qualified for the job? I assume they aren't. How is it that the lessor qualified candidate can still fill the position, simply by working twice as much? If after a few years, when the candidate has enough on-the-job experience to be equal to a new Stanford grad, will Google support reducing the hours worked to 30/week for the same pay?

If the answer is "no", then it sounds like you've set things up to exploit the poor for their willingness to work more. If the answer is "yes", then Google is working as a career trainer, which is quite noble of them, but atypical.

As I understand your description, you are also opposed to the existing 40 hour work week. You see the opportunity for additional work as a way for the underclass to achieve financial success. Historically the 40 hour work week law was demanded by labor because what you see as competition for a person to get ahead ends up as a race for everyone to get to the bottom.

Do you want karōshi to be part of the US system?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com