Most people work but most dont necessarily have to, at least as much as we do. People enter the "rat race" because it gives them something, not just a source of money but other achievement and identity stuff.
I think a lot of those incentives are changing. My take on work is that it's getting more exploitive, more administrative, less fun and less satisfying. Between politics and policies and management, work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs. It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before. And it's my theory anyway that a lot of people have had enough.
A simpler way to say it is that more people would rather exist outside society, in a sense, and do their own thing, than put up with all the BS that comes with working for someone else. Even if the pay is worse. I bet most Uber Eats drivers make less than fast food employees, but I also bet they have less non work corporate BS to deal with, and outside whatever algorithmic unfairness can work as they want. In corporate jobs, the situation is magnified because the requirements of conformity are much greater, but so generally are the options.
> My take on work is that it's getting more exploitive, more administrative, less fun and less satisfying. Between politics and policies and management, work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs. It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before.
Maybe I’m showing my age, but I have to disagree hard with this idea that working conditions are worse in 2021 than they were in the past.
Modern jobs are quite comfortable and flexible relative to what was expected a few decades ago. Companies today bend over backwards to retain employees. I’m not exactly old, but I’m old enough to have experienced a significant shift toward better treatment of workers.
At the upper end (e.g. us engineers earning above-average wages), the level of employee pampering we get at modern tech companies feels unreal, even outside of the stereotypical FAANG offices. The amount of flexibility, respect, and attention showered on us (meaning tech workers) now is miles ahead of working conditions decades ago.
Just ask anyone who worked through past recessions what it’s like to work in a crowded job market with far more workers than jobs and where everyone is trying to outperform each other to avoid the next round of layoffs. It’s nothing like our job market today where you can walk out of one company and into another in a matter of weeks or days.
For the white collar, everything has gotten better.
For the blue and especially pink collar, worse.
I understand your perspective as it's one that I shared, nearly 20 years ago. I was a minimum wage laborer for a few years, and when getting my first desk job, I couldn't believe how easy it was, and yet how so many complained. And it's only gotten more surreal since. When your back hurts from shoveling all day, it's really hard to sympathize with someone in an office who complains they didn't get a perfect review. The one thing it did teach me is that people just like to grieve, whether it's from black lung or a small monitor.
It definitely gave me humility, and perspective. Service workers are treated as disposable trash, to this day, by both their employer and customers. I'm beyond excited they're quitting.
Maybe I’m showing my age too (51 is around the corner), but I actually agree with the OP that things are getting worse. It would be interesting to delve into why you and I are having different experiences as we age. Is it the industries? Or other aspects?
Remote working is the peak of this. My company has pretty much resigned itself to the idea that they cannot create a better work environment than the one I create for myself. If I’m not happy I could easily be poached away by another other company anywhere on the planet, and the only switching cost on my end would be getting to know some new team members and logging into a different workspace.
It is not a good position to be in if you wanted to treat an employee like shit. There is far less leverage.
> Modern jobs are quite comfortable and flexible relative to what was expected a few decades ago. Companies today bend over backwards to retain employees.
Some modern jobs.
On the other end of the spectrum you have Amazon drivers pissing in bottles--something that a steel mill laborer would never have had to do.
>Between politics and policies and management, work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs. It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before.
Multiple comments have pointed out how this is wrong, but I have one more to add to the list.
Look up Henry Ford's Sociological Department. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class, but in order to qualify for his $5 per day wage you had to subject yourself to random inspections by the company's Sociological Department. This meant your employer would routinely check up on all aspects of your personal life. Your pay was docked if you weren't married, your home was too dirty, you didn't save enough of your wages, you didn't speak English well enough, your kids weren't regularly attending school, and if you got drunk after work. Nothing employers do today comes close to that.
> This meant your employer would routinely check up on all aspects of your personal life. Your pay was docked if you weren't married, you home was too dirty, you didn't save enough of your wages, you didn't speak English well enough, your kids weren't regularly attending school, and if you got drunk after work.
Employers can demand you give them urine, blood or hair samples to prove that you haven't smoked a joint sometime within the last 30 days. They can give you psychological assessments, and personal value assessments, and deny you employment based on the results. Sometimes they assess the level of your conformity, by assessing how well you'll fit into their culture.
They can deny employment based on your credit score, or via private background checking companies that don't have to give them accurate information about you. They can use your biometrics to track you, and they can hand those biometrics to private companies like Clearview AI[1] to track you outside of work. While you're at work, they can point several cameras at you, recording everything you do and say from multiple angles, and storing it indefinitely. Some companies will spy on you with monitoring apps on your phones and computers, a risk that goes up exponentially if you need certain apps to do your job, or if you're using company equipment. If they don't like what you're doing, they'll fire you.
Today's employers do similar things in subtler ways. After all, it's been 100+ years, things have changed. Lots of things have changed including the average quality of life, and the Sociological Department has kept up and changed with the times too.
You pointed some of this out yourself. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class. I bet upwards of 90% of corporate workers today would agree with a statement that Ford was such a champion. This convincing by way of constant Ford-praising literate is a first step in itself.
Sociological Departmentalism now manifests itself in subtler ways, like superiors throwing out casual questions about your personal lives, "team dinners" where people bring their spouses, and the ever so lightly dropped "see you early in the office tomorrow!" at the end (never "you must be tired – don't come to the office tomorrow, take some time off!").
I would invite you to consider the possibility that the intents of such practices have not changed since Ford's time, the methods have.
> Most people work but most dont necessarily have to, at least as much as we do. People enter the "rat race" because it gives them something, not just a source of money but other achievement and identity stuff.
What? In 2020, 50-78% of Americans earned just enough to pay their bills each month. Worldwide, a poll found that 85% of people are disengaged at work. I guarantee you that most people work -- even work long hours -- because they have no real choice.
I would add that it's misleading to generalize the experience of tech workers to workers at large.
We're in a weird and fortunate spot because we work as in a well capitalized industry as highly specialized skilled artisans. So often we get autonomy, leverage, and a good paycheck. This is not the experience for workers in general.
Being generous, OP might have been referring to plain survival.
You can buy actual homes for $10-20k in the US, youtube has told me, with enough land to grow enough food to sustain yourself. It's certainly not impossible to survive on a very small amount of money (until you die of a horribly expensive health problem).
That might not be the path most of us choose, but it's still there.
> In 2020, 50-78% of Americans earned just enough to pay their bills each month
It is questionable what the signal of that statement is. I know people earning top tier salaries who can "just pay their bills". Truth is that their bills cover their mortgages on which savings they plan to retire -- If one count in adding money to you savings account, the I reckon 100% person of all people earn just enough to cover their bills.
Isn't the number of people living paycheck to paycheck more a measure of how few people save money vs how many people work more than they need to? I imagine plenty of people fall into both categories.
My take is that a highly productive globalized industrial society necessitates high abstraction of work and supply chains.
Buying a chair on an e-commerce site has many layers, each with its own sublayers (shipping <- fulfillment <- e-commerce site <- payments <- warehousing <- distribution <- manufacturing <- supply chain <- design <- product research <- market research — I'm skipping a bunch). Each layer and sublayer has its own bureaucracy to keep things running and to interface with other layers.
A pair of pants will be touched by fashion consumer researchers, fashion designers, textile designers, product managers, supply chain managers, marketing managers, analysts, social media managers, advertisers, merchandisers, software engineers, accountants, data scientists (clothing companies are turning to ML to assess fashion trends and demand), and many, many more. All to make it possible for you discover and buy a cheap pair of pants and have it delivered in 2 days.
Because of its efficiencies, the high abstraction economy outcompeted and replaced the old low abstraction economy. The driving force is the fact that it's easy for people to indirectly 'vote' for a high abstraction economy by overwhelmingly preferring to buy cheaper and more stuff; but it's very difficult for people to 'vote' for a low abstraction economy, even if people will occasionally buy something handmade.
I think that this force will endlessly drive the economy to become ever more abstract. Consumers want cheaper, better stuff. The economy will become more abstract, evolving ever narrower niche roles in order to serve consumer wants.
People will find themselves in those ever narrowing roles in order to afford the good life. And there is no low abstraction economy to flee to for the simple life because it has been outcompeted and replaced.
I think you've just illustrated the problem with laissez faire economics. It rewards only efficiency (and short term efficiency at that - resilience is often not accounted for), even if that's not what people might choose (they can choose otherwise, but not for long becauss those other modalities will be outcompeted out of existence).
We could have a way out of this if we restructured our economy so that decision making power didn't solely rest with owners of capital, and taxed companies ina more strongly progessive manner to prevent winner-takes-all situations. That would enable companies to make decisions that were not solely for financial reasons and allow for more diversity in business models and practices.
I'll go on the record predicting the opposite. Higher abstraction societies have higher co-ordination costs, something we're seeing now in ever growing administrative overhead. Much of what people are complaining about upthread is the higher percentage of resources going towards nonproductive, bureaucratic managerial tasks. We're probably going to get a reprieve in the short term as more of these are automated, but once the really profitable co-ordination jobs are replaced the overall administrative overhead will increase again. And it's nonlinear - co-ordination costs probably rise with the number of connections within a network, so every additional node adds more of these costs when joining a larger network than a smaller.
I actually expect we'll have two broad classes of society which value more or less abstraction. A few enclaves like Singapore surrounded by a lot of Amish country.
> It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before.
Sure we have, serfdom. Serfs were not only expected to provide labour to their “employers”, but to fight for them, believe what they believe, and pledge their fealty.
Like serfs, and unlike the period from the industrial revolution to the postwar years, it’s becoming less common for people to change careers, an occupation being more than a job and becoming an identity. Sure we might change employers frequently, but it is not often (and is in fact a spectacle) when someone makes a drastic change of occupation.
Not changing careers is an inevitable result of specialization and the state of the art getting more and more demanding. I think it’s a net positive though as this evolution also provides many opportunities.
Occupation being an identity is a very long tradition though (going all the way to surnames). If anything, social media allowed ordinary people to express themselves outside of - and in disconnection from - their professional environment. Maybe this is part of why people are disassociating from their employers to some extent.
> Serfs were not only expected to provide labour to their “employers”, but to fight for them
That was never expected. It was never going to be expected. Fighting was much too prestigious for serfs to be doing it.
> believe what they believe
This changed over time. Mostly serfs were too unimportant for their non-Christian beliefs to matter. But it was always a formal expectation, and as the centuries went by it did develop into an actual expectation.
> and pledge their fealty.
Indeed. This is the difference between a W2 worker and a contractor; it escapes me why so much public rhetoric focuses on W2 status as if getting it were a victory for the employee.
> It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before.
I think the industrial world would love to disagree. Working at a factory my grandma would have carefully regulated break times, food times, etc. All controlled by a central clock for everyone on shift.
It makes sense when you consider factory line workers as part of the machine, but it's also kinda bullshit from a human perspective.
And that was after the big wins of the labor movement in the early 1900's. Imagine how bad it was in the late 1800's.
The new innovation our generation introduced is that because everyone is supposed to be following their dream and passion, you not only have to be a good worker, you also have to love it. If you don't, you are expected to perform the part of someone who does.
> Most people work but most dont necessarily have to
I see this quite a bit on HN (the other day someone was saying to no fanfair that he doesn't work because he doesn't like the corporate setting) and other parts of the internet, enough so to assume it must be true, but this notion really confuses me, as it's certainly never been a choice for myself.
Genuinely interested, maybe I'm missing a trick in life, how would you pay for rent, food, electricity, ect... I do genuinely think when I read things like this or see things casually mentioned in the news that there's some alternative route in life nobodies ever told me about
There's a big gap between young single people's perception of the options available, and the view that comes with age and a family of dependents. I don't think anyone with kids thinks that it would be ok to not have a job for a protracted period, but if I was single I'd be able to quit work in six months.
People have to pay for basic needs. But there is a wild difference from living in shared accommodation, consuming the non-branded products, biking, vacationing as a backpacker in hostels etc. to living in a private apartment, eating out, having a car, vacationing in hotels / resorts etc.
As a person who spend most of my life studying on just a little income my expenses are only slowly increasing. Much slower than my earnings.
My guess is if one got a permanent job early on it might be hard to imaging how to live frugally.
I think what people just learned over the last year is that half the population can stay home,
and a third can work less or just not work at all, and the world didn’t collapse. There was enough money to go around. In many cases people got paid more to sit home than to work. Some things were more difficult, but it was a good trade off for minimum wage workers or people doing mindless office work.
It is very possible to have a room in an apartment and food and heat and a cell phone and used clothes and access to public busses for less than 14k/year in many towns and cities
There are plenty of people who feel like they have to live in a high cost of living city. And plenty of people who feel like they have to drive a new car and live in a 4 bedroom house and take their family to Disney World. But those are all choices people make in how they want to live.
Everyone has an opinion on that matter, but if you’re making software engineer money then this might be a viable option: mrmoneymustache.com
Maybe you’ve already heard of tha blog, maybe not. In a nutshell: rethink your life and your expenses so you’re able to save 50+% of your income. Put it into low cost ETFs (which particular one depends on what’s available where you live), and after a while (13 years at 50%, much less at more saving), you’ll have the option to not work anymore and still cover all your life expenses etc.
Not selling anything, not looking to start a debate, just mentioning it because parent might be interested or curious.
As a developer, who suffered from sudden back issues that meant i could not sit down for 1+yrs.... i came to the conclusion early in my career that my time was worth much more then the prospect of success or early retirement. I quit my job in my late 20s, sold everything, and went off to the Amazon to aim my dev skills at the study of the boto dolphins in an effort to live and work in different ways.
That journey i took 10yrs ago took me all over the world eventually, and reinforced my pre-trip skeptism of what success in life was. To me, climbing the corporate ladder simply meant trading my time for more money and more stress.
So while others looked at me and skoffed at the 80$k i spent travelling the world for 2 years in a search for meaning... I now look at a post-covid world and take solace that i did it. I did it, just before the world changed, forever. I saw the world, the coral reefs, the rivers, the rainforests, before climate change, people destroyed them. No matter how much money you eventually get, or how many peers you impress, you cannot get that experience that I had.
And thats really what you are doing by chasing the startup dream. Your trading your life for status and money amoung your peers.
I came to the realisation that what drives me in life not my peers. it was love.... as i travelled around the world and saw poor families with not much nestled into natural environments that provided for them i saw satisfaction. They had a balance. They were poor, but balanced. They took joy in the love that they could give eachother and sharing that time with eachother reinforced that.
So fast forward 10 yrs since that trip. What did i learn? Money cannot by love. No matter how popular you are with your peers, without love, you go home from that recognisition into an abyss of loneliness. You are rish, respected, but alone.
Eventually I came back to life and attempted one last startup venture before figuring that its time i start working Remotely and start living everyday the way i wanted. I love to code, and finding a company that is stimulating and open to this relationship means i will give them the best everyday, day or night.
I thank covid for giving others that shake they all needed. Remote working is much more accessible now. Covid hasnt changed my life at all. I literly have not felt a single day in lockdown, even while the majority of people around me snarl in fear (i also gave up TV, so havnt even seen a covid-news-cast yet). I sit here watching my peers panic buy, while i never go a day without something i desire. I gave away more toilet paper then i bought.
To all those who have those doubt. Dont ignore them. The risks are worth the rewards. You will be calmer inside.
That's the traditional experience vs. money trade-off. It seems people at a larger stage in life are happier about experiences they've had rather than money or status per se.
Though if you really want to travel or raise a happy family, you're also going to need some of the latter. And for most, that means being part of the rat race to some extent, once beyond your early twenties.
> I did it, just before the world changed, forever. I saw the world, the coral reefs, the rivers, the rainforests, before climate change, people destroyed them.
This made me melancholic. I never thought the changes that we saw last two years would be so drastic. I hope we didn’t run out of time as a species yet.
> Most people work but most dont necessarily have to, at least as much as we do. People enter the "rat race" because it gives them something, not just a source of money but other achievement and identity stuff.
You also have less incentive to be in the race if you do not have kids/spouse, which fewer people have.
I'm wondering... people who don't have kids/commitments outside of work could - theoretically - give more effort for their work (e.g. time to commute wouldn't be seen as quite as bad). But they also probably expect more returns from work to make it worthwhile. So if the last part is not given, they will seek out alternatives (other work or other fulfilling roles outside of work).
Another problem is that the gap between the rank-and-file worker and the top tier is ballooning out of proportion. 50 years ago you would bust your ass at work and your CEO would be driving a fancy car with the profits you made him. Today you have a slightly nicer car and your CEO has a private island.
I have a meeting today today to negotiate with another audit team that my TPS reports can be proven to be accurate. I only did this 2 months ago with external audit. Shoot me now.
> work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs
> Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality, or as one says sometimes, our "personality package", for something. Now, this is not so true for the manual workers. The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile. But what you might call the "symbolpushers" , that is to say, all the people who deal with figures, with paper, with men, who manipulate - to use a better, or nicer, word - manipulate men and signs and words, all those today have not only to sell their service but in the bargain they're to sell their personality, more or less. There are exceptions.
I think you're partially on the right track but the replies disputing whether work is now easier or harder suggests worker dissatisfaction has changed for a different reason. I'd say that work is generally easier but people (anecdotally from people I talk to) are less interested.
I wonder if part of it is exposure to alternatives. Once upon a time, your awareness of an alternate life was a movie, or newspaper article, or a friend showing you their travel photos. Now, if you are ever on social media, you face a bombardment of peers or randoms having long lunches during work hours, travelling around, in the sun, at the beach, etc - or maybe it's just my feed. Hard to feel like you have your work mix right if your daily vibe doesn't compare to the aggregated freedom.
Moral entrepreneurs have flooded workplaces with memes that enable petty tyrants to bully people in a way that is difficult and unrewarding to fight back against.
For the reasons you enlist, I think we'll see a big shift towards working for DAOs or other forms of value creating decentralized and distributed organizations.
They allow more independence, you only work on stuff you like and the interests are more aligned.
Large corporation really didn't do anything lately to improve their image.
I opted for smaller monetary rewards for working in a smaller company with extensive freedom. Stress is mostly positive when projects get released. I have paid vacations and sick days, industry is secure that I can probably work until I get my pension if I wanted to. You also get much more invested in the company and other employees.
I still recommend doing a corp run for a year or two to get to know this world. It also help to negotiate your rates. But I don't see how you would not get a dislike about how things are done. It also seem to attract a certain kind of person.
I highly suggest you dig into Marx and economic leftist thought (Richard Wolff is a very clear modern source and a well respected Marxist economist) because this kind of exploitation has long been identified by those critical of capitalism as endemic to capitalism. Roughly, a key line of Marxist thought suggests that Capitalism is designed to alienate the worker so that they are more easily exploited by the capital owning class. People now want to live “outside society” because capitalist incentives necessarily eliminate the ability of people to even build a community or society in their own interest because nearly everything they must do to subsist robs them of the opportunity (long working hours, long commutes, a distinct lack of agency in life under exploitative management, and so on).
I could never do it justice here, but you might find it valuable knowing how and when people have very legitimately been making the same point (roughly) that you’re saying here for generations.
Most people work but most dont necessarily have to, at least as much as we do.
You need to spend your time doing something. If you aren't spending a good chunk of it making money, you may be spending too much of it blowing through money out of boredom.
I hypothesize that this is a significant part of why 2/3 of lottery winners are bankrupt within 5 years: They quit their job and start spending like there's no tomorrow. And then, oops, the money shockingly doesn't go very far when all you do every minute of every day is spend money like a drunken sailor.
Another part might be the people who play the lottery a lot are more prone to win than those who play rarely. Those who play the lottery a lot are probably not the most financially/mathematically savvy to start with, so if they win, they’re not likely to suddenly turn into Mr Money Mustache.
Exactly. It might be hard to find peace and a sense of meaning in life without having some sort of responsibility, even if one thinks ultimate freedom is the lack of responsibility.
In some ways, I imagine being rich (without that being the almost coincidental side effect of a strong passion) and especially winning the lottery is for many going to be like throwing money into a bottomless pit.
Though that doesn't necessarily mean I would mind giving it a try...
The "society" created around the routines of most corporate jobs is artificial, inauthentic, and provides material comforts. Having death staring you down during a pandemic for this long is a good motivator for letting go of baggage, including said jobs, especially if material comforts were the main reason to stay in it.
I used to work in US and Europe and in last decade work life balance is basically shot there.
As a result I took my savings and move back to India. Now I've a small farm here, since the market is soo inefficient in India specially for farm produce and labor abundant I am able to work only 1 hour a day and enjoy rest of my day on things I like.
In US and Europe proportion of smart people with access to resources is vastly more compared to India where either smart people lack resources or the ones with resources aren't smart enough.
Hasn't work always sucked . The difference now is ppl have more ways of making money that does not involve traditional employment. Also, there is more wealth than ever flowing around., so pplcan live off inheritances or with relatives or friends who have money. Wealth is growing at 20 percent per year since 2010 in terms of stock market gains but population growth just 1 percent. Even if the gains are dispropprante to the top, that is still a lot of wealth sloshing around.
>I bet most Uber Eats drivers make less than fast food employees, but I also bet they have less non work corporate BS to deal with, and outside whatever algorithmic unfairness can work as they want.
From my experience of seeing grumpy Deliveroo and Uber Eats drivers mouth off at poor fast food and restaurant employees when the food isn't ready yet, and the general way they drive on the streets, I don't agree with that sentiment at all.
>>>> Most people work but most dont necessarily have to, at least as much as we do.
I work as much as I do because I don't know what's going to happen next. Someone in my family could get sick. The economy could go into the crapper. I could live longer than normal (my parents are 90).
Probably the worst corporate BS I could imagine would be commuting an hour or more, and I'm lucky that my commute is less than 1/2 hour by bike.
by the fact they make less than minimum wage in many cases, I think gig workers are struggling even more than corporate minimum wage workers to get back. not having a "corporate environment" isn't worth 60+ hours a week just to make rent and food
Just raise wages. We seem to always get this "worker shortage" marketing campaign every few years from our fat cat leaders. There is no shortage. If I want a wagyu steak but only want to spend $5.00, does that mean there's a food shortage? Labor, goods and services are all subject to supply and demand. Let it work itself out. No special government subsides for people whining about shortages.
I want a trip on one of these orbital space ships. Is there a space ship shortage?
I’ve been trying to coach my partner (who works in retail) that companies could hire more workers tomorrow if they wanted to participate competitively in the labor market. She’s constantly stressed at work to the point of it physically affecting her wellbeing because her store is under staffed. It’s not some act of god that the store is not staffed. People didn't just disappear. It’s on her company and its management to create a successful business. It’s not on her to go the extra mile and literally harm herself to keep the store running. It’s really hard to convince people stand up for themselves when they’re used to being exploited by their employer over and over (in different ways) their entire career.
Maybe I'm repeating what you've already said, but it is really harder to stand up for yourself when you're used to being exploited, and your employer is likely to take your very reasonable boundaries as contempt when they are accustomed to exploiting you.
We really need to empower all kinds of front-line workers to enforce reasonable boundaries with both customers and management.
I'd propose a somewhat opposite explanation: worker shortage is an illusion created by a sort of accounting which decided to keep positions open and not fill them, even when qualified candidates come.
So, not only there is no space ship shortage :) there is actually much bigger worker shortage, as I keep a billion positions open (I want slaves, of all kinds, especially with Wall Street experience) and can't fill them (I don't bother to try).
And the other side is to raise supply by making immigration easier. Maybe the pandemic is a good excuse to not consider this right now (I don't think it is, but it's an argument I'm at least willing to listen to), but there are a lot of people willing to work that get turned away at the border.
Businesses have no right to exist. If you can't pay the prevailing wage, then you don't belong in business.
I know that sounds harsh but that's the reality that workers live with every day. Can't pay the prevailing rent? You have to sleep in the streets. Can't pay for medical insurance? You get to die from a treatable disease. Why should there be more consideration for businesses than there is for human beings?
Well, right now companies have to compete with government benefits in many states. Benefits that exceed the free market wage by a significant margin in most cases.
Why would companies raise wages now when they can wait a few months to see if the situation changes?
People seem upset by this, but if you have a free market economy, you should anticipate that actors will work in their own best interest.
Changing regulations around compensation will be much more effective versus hoping that a company will act on a specific moral principle.
It's possible that we're simply in a new world with less and more expensive stuff to buy than there was in 2019. It's still an interesting question how that came to be and whether it will last, which is what's actually explored in TFA. There is no call for subsidies.
Fine, there is a shortage of cheap/affordable labor. These corps don't want wagyu...they want chicken fingers. They can't afford wagyu. Wagyu wouldn't even fit the occasion! They're not hosting a dinner party man; they're drunk in an Uber on the way home from the club.
Raising wages doesn’t create more workers, though. It will just convince them to leave other jobs for the higher paid alternatives. This creates new job openings that still need to be backfilled.
I don’t think it’s obvious that large numbers of people are choosing to stay home and earn $0/hour instead of getting a job working $10/hour because they really wanted $15/hour. The worker shortage is a real phenomenon of more jobs existing than people in the workforce.
On the other hand, raising wages would produce inflationary pressure on everything from housing prices to food prices, which would force more people to get jobs just to survive. Not exactly what you meant, I know.
> Raising wages doesn’t create more workers, though.
Of course it does. My wife doesn't work because there's nothing that particularly motivates her to work rather than doing her hobbies. If you offered her more money, it might motivate her to re-enter the work force.
And if you can get 100k without a degree people who would be in college will be in the work force instead.
Taking your scenario a bit further all, pay is limited by productivity. As wages rise, the least productive uses of time won't be able to keep up and will either fall out of the economy entirely, find a way to improve productivity, find a workforce that they did not consider previously or find consumers who are willing to pay more.
I don't really see how any of this is a bad thing. This has to happen from time to time for the economy to remain efficient. This is the phase in the cycle where the capital owners take their lumps and workers make big career making moves.
If I create a job that pays $100,000 per hour for making me a coffee whenever I ask, I assure you that plenty of people will come off the sidelines and apply for that job.
> Raising wages doesn’t create more workers, though. It will just convince them to leave other jobs for the higher paid alternatives. This creates new job openings that still need to be backfilled.
Others have correctly pointed out that the supply curve is not flat. But even if it were, well, economics is about the allocation of scarce resources that have alternate uses (Thomas Sowell's definition). If people are scarce, and they go where they produce the most value, and places where they would produce less value don't get filled, is that a problem? Isn't that exactly what you would want to happen?
So this is 95% just employers being unwilling to raise wages which will fix most shortages pretty quickly. In the longer term there may indeed be worker shortages as more countries face a demographic shift towards older people. In pretty much every developed economy the % of the population that's retired grows every year. Japan is now over 28% 65+, the US is 16% and growing, even China is facing the same issue. Long-term it's a smaller portion of the population supporting the economy. I'm sure it will stop at some point, but it isn't for now.
It's trailing off, but remember that employers are competing with government unemployment benefits.
There's something called the backward bending supply curve of labor. At some point, people work fewer hours because they make enough money that more money won't affect their quality of life. Various closures, and, interestingly, labor shortages, have given people fewer ways to spend their money, lowering the inflection point of the curve.
I was talking with the head of HR at a medium sized company. We were talking about worker shortages and she said they had raised their wages and still had vacancies. I offered to just raise them more and her response was you can only pay someone so much to manufacture a 100 dollar product. It kinda opened my eyes that there was a cap and that we will likely see prices of goods rise in response to this. Wage growth is well overdue but it will come with inflation.
You shouldn't have that kind of conversation without speaking also about profits.
If there is real competitiveness, a company that suffers shortages of an input (workers in this case), would see an increase in price and a fall in profits. Did your friend mentioned profits in the conversation?
Because I'm seeing a lot of this discussions where not even profits is mentioned. Including the article we are discussing by the way, where the word 'profits' doesn't appear.
Prices may possibly rise, very true. We as a society/economy have gotten hooked on cheap goods. Perhaps too cheap in some cases.
It's also possible that certain businesses and products we've grown accustomed to, at the prices we are used to, are simply not viable anymore as the market changes.
The market giveth and the market taketh away. A lot of business owners complaining about a "labor shortage" love being pro free market when it works in their favor, but whine when it turns around on them.
And this is why raising minimum wage can lead to opposite effect than expected. Person making that 100 dollar product may be already at the limit of profitability for that specific product for the company. Raising minimum wage can cause them to become unprofitable, which means that the worker is let go.
For those with low skills, this can mean unemployment, even permanent one.
I think that a lot of the "worker shortage" is in fact companies being unwilling to understand that they are being outcompeted in the market, someone is able to make that 100 dollar product less costly and thus can attract more workers, or alternatively workers/resources cost less abroad.
> So this is 95% just employers being unwilling to raise wages which will fix most shortages pretty quickly.
Don't be so quick to think this. Society can't just poof into existence more qualified skilled workers. It takes years to train nurses and a decade or more to do so with M.Ds/O.Ds.
Right now, traveling nurses are being offered pretty insane salaries, up to and including low five figures a week. It hasn't helped bring more people in, or fixed the burnout. People are just traveling to work for the highest bidder. I suspect most are planning to leave the game after they've saved up enough money.
Sure, these reports tend to lump nurses and fast food workers together, which is of course nonsensical. Indeed shortages of skilled workers in the US have to do with the unaffordability of higher education in the US.
That said, in theory the US could raise wages enough to attract skilled professionals in from other countries. Except that the US also has extremely restrictive immigration laws and a housing shortage making it extremely difficult to pay people enough to live where they're needed.
A 1 bedroom place where I live costs $1400-1600 (it’s an unusually expensive tourist town) and things are closing down once in a while because of worker shortages (Eg, lifeguard shortage was the most recent I saw). Where are these workers supposed to live? I know other places aren’t nearly this bad. I just can’t believe anyone is able to work in retail or food here
This is hitting the nail dead center: the mock surprise at worker shortages is missing the fact that every metric pointed to this happening pre-COVID as well - the US a whole was in a march towards pricing all it's workers out of their homes at their current wages. COVID has just accelerated the trend.
Ding ding ding, we have the answer. I was in Lake Tahoe recently and my relatives there were saying how I should move there because there’s so many well paying jobs available… but the cheapest rent was like 1600!! This used to be an issue only in tourist towns but now that houses are priced based on how much they can make on Airbnb, versus the traditional model of how much a worker in the area could afford over 30 years, we’re absolutely screwed. Legislation needs to start with vacation rentals.
This is definitely evident in the UK: job shortages in parts of the country with low housing costs worker shortages in parts of th country with high housing costs.
Wage should be calibrated according to local cost of living. If average rent is $1400, wages after taxes should be $4200 - $5600 a month (3x / 4x rent) minimum. A $15 / hour minimum wage at a reasonable 40 hours / week only gets you $2400 a month, not even considering taxes.
And keep in mind, if you get paid minimum wage, your employer is telling you they'd pay you less if they could.
Reminds me of Wendy's in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii years ago. They were so desperate for workers they put application forms on the tray when you bought food. Unsurprisingly, they closed down not long after.
> A 1 bedroom place where I live costs $1400-1600 (it’s an unusually expensive tourist town) and things are closing down once in a while because of worker shortages (Eg, lifeguard shortage was the most recent I saw). Where are these workers supposed to live? I know other places aren’t nearly this bad. I just can’t believe anyone is able to work in retail or food here
This is the crux, because what's happening is that housing is highly inflationary (especially in desirable locations) and wages are failing to match inflation, so entry level workers are being pushed further out to the boonies. Why would they commute all the way into the city centers if they don't actually pay better?
An interesting side effect of all the rampant real estate speculation and bidding wars is that cities are becoming dramatically more expensive to live in than the exurbs. I feel like eventually this will result in a much higher cost of living across the board as employers need to account for this difference in their pay scales. The entry level / service industry jobs in these places with insane housing prices will need to pay much better to attract workers, thus making these already expensive-to-live places even more expensive.
Perhaps it will eventually create some kind of equilibrium where new towns can provide some of the same quality of life benefits at a fraction of the cost since their real estate isn't so astronomical.
roommates are a critical social developmental step in your life.
They teach you how to negotiate boundaries without a direct authority figure.
They teach you how to live in a common space with somebody else.
roommates teach you that you must be responsible for your actions which affect the other people who live with you.
roommates teach you the importance of financial responsibility because when the rent is due you both need to pay up.
You may be lazy You may not want to do the dishes, but you know if you take that messy ass plate and you just throw it in the sink it will become a mountain of dirty ass shit and you owe it to somebody else to do your part.
If both of you hold up your end of the bargain and perform 3 seconds of work to place that dish in the dishwasher it avoids this tragedy of the commons.
roommates teach you that self-discipline is critical for a tolerable society.
? In a comparison between having a roommate and living alone, i think living alone is more responsibility. There's nobody to call you on your BS when you live alone, just yourself.
E.g. Forget to pay your share of the rent when you live with a roommate? Room-mate yells at you. When you live alone you get an eviction notice.
Self-discipline is about the self after all. If you need another person there to be disciplined, then you are clearly not self-disciplined.
(That said, nothing wrong with roommates, it often makes financial sense and some people like having them, i just dont see the connection to responsibility)
How many people are not working because they suddenly no longer have a reliable place for child care? Lots of jurisdiction's protocols will shut down day cares or in-person schooling for a week or more after a single case. In that environment, who are you going to get to take care of your child that may have been exposed?
> How many people are not working because they suddenly no longer have a reliable place for child care?
This was the first potential explanation TFA examined. It said that this effect was "negligible":
> It is commonly believed that school closures have made it impossible for parents, particularly mothers, to take a job. The evidence for this is mixed, though. Analysis by Jason Furman, Melissa Kearney and Wilson Powell III concludes that extra joblessness among mothers of young children accounts for a “negligible” share of America’s employment deficit. Despite talk of a “shecession” early in the pandemic, in most rich countries the worker deficit for men remains larger.
The demand-side of the labor market simply isn't willing to pay what the supply-side expects, and is childishly throwing a tantrum that for once they have to compromise to market forces.
The so called "worker deficit" only exists below ~15-20/h. Above that there's no issue whatsoever.
There was never a worker shortage. What there has been is a re-evaluation by workers of the value of their own work.
Even without Covid this would have happened as low-income workers in many areas were either rapidly approaching being unequivocally priced out of living anywhere remotely near their work, or already were.
Covid just forced the issue sooner and faster, rather than letting it fester.
Why would anyone continue working for subsistence wages that can't even pay rent where they live and work? Their only sensible options are demanding more pay or leaving.
In major cities, with current rents, it simply isn't feasible to pay janitors, garbage collectors, fast-food workers, restaurant employees, etc as little as they've been paid, for the very simple reason that they can't afford to live there on those wages.
Unless we're willing to give up sanitation, garbage collection, fast food, and cheap restaurants in those cities, there is no reasonable solution except increasing wages. (There are of course unreasonable solutions such as exploiting immigrants, wage theft, and prison labor).
1) People getting government assistance so they are able to survive without their current employer enabling them to quit
2) People re evaluating the risk reward ratio of their jobs, perhaps due to COVID bringing risks into view that previously were not focused on, and also comparing themselves to all the people they see working remotely getting paid more for not taking risks
3) People have time to research other work options since they were able to quit (or lost their job)
4) Demographic changes becoming more apparent as fewer children mean more and more of the working population ages out every year, and if not replaced by immigrants, then there are objectively fewer people competing to sell their labor
i heard (from a recruiter) many companies put on hiring freeze during covid... now that it looks like we are coming out of it, backlogged hiring is now being worked on...
If someone dies, thereby leaving a job without applying for unemployment benefit, and someone on benefits replaces them, thereby leaving the unemployment stats, does that count as a job being "created"?
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I think a lot of those incentives are changing. My take on work is that it's getting more exploitive, more administrative, less fun and less satisfying. Between politics and policies and management, work is asking much more, not physically but in terms of behaviors and beliefs. It's a new kind of exploitation we haven't really faced before. And it's my theory anyway that a lot of people have had enough.
A simpler way to say it is that more people would rather exist outside society, in a sense, and do their own thing, than put up with all the BS that comes with working for someone else. Even if the pay is worse. I bet most Uber Eats drivers make less than fast food employees, but I also bet they have less non work corporate BS to deal with, and outside whatever algorithmic unfairness can work as they want. In corporate jobs, the situation is magnified because the requirements of conformity are much greater, but so generally are the options.
Maybe I’m showing my age, but I have to disagree hard with this idea that working conditions are worse in 2021 than they were in the past.
Modern jobs are quite comfortable and flexible relative to what was expected a few decades ago. Companies today bend over backwards to retain employees. I’m not exactly old, but I’m old enough to have experienced a significant shift toward better treatment of workers.
At the upper end (e.g. us engineers earning above-average wages), the level of employee pampering we get at modern tech companies feels unreal, even outside of the stereotypical FAANG offices. The amount of flexibility, respect, and attention showered on us (meaning tech workers) now is miles ahead of working conditions decades ago.
Just ask anyone who worked through past recessions what it’s like to work in a crowded job market with far more workers than jobs and where everyone is trying to outperform each other to avoid the next round of layoffs. It’s nothing like our job market today where you can walk out of one company and into another in a matter of weeks or days.
For the white collar, everything has gotten better.
For the blue and especially pink collar, worse.
I understand your perspective as it's one that I shared, nearly 20 years ago. I was a minimum wage laborer for a few years, and when getting my first desk job, I couldn't believe how easy it was, and yet how so many complained. And it's only gotten more surreal since. When your back hurts from shoveling all day, it's really hard to sympathize with someone in an office who complains they didn't get a perfect review. The one thing it did teach me is that people just like to grieve, whether it's from black lung or a small monitor.
It definitely gave me humility, and perspective. Service workers are treated as disposable trash, to this day, by both their employer and customers. I'm beyond excited they're quitting.
It is not a good position to be in if you wanted to treat an employee like shit. There is far less leverage.
Or having to bring your wife to job interviews...
Or having to wear a suit and tie :-P
or ...
or ...
It really does seem better then I remember it 'last century' :-D
Some modern jobs.
On the other end of the spectrum you have Amazon drivers pissing in bottles--something that a steel mill laborer would never have had to do.
Multiple comments have pointed out how this is wrong, but I have one more to add to the list.
Look up Henry Ford's Sociological Department. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class, but in order to qualify for his $5 per day wage you had to subject yourself to random inspections by the company's Sociological Department. This meant your employer would routinely check up on all aspects of your personal life. Your pay was docked if you weren't married, your home was too dirty, you didn't save enough of your wages, you didn't speak English well enough, your kids weren't regularly attending school, and if you got drunk after work. Nothing employers do today comes close to that.
Employers can demand you give them urine, blood or hair samples to prove that you haven't smoked a joint sometime within the last 30 days. They can give you psychological assessments, and personal value assessments, and deny you employment based on the results. Sometimes they assess the level of your conformity, by assessing how well you'll fit into their culture.
They can deny employment based on your credit score, or via private background checking companies that don't have to give them accurate information about you. They can use your biometrics to track you, and they can hand those biometrics to private companies like Clearview AI[1] to track you outside of work. While you're at work, they can point several cameras at you, recording everything you do and say from multiple angles, and storing it indefinitely. Some companies will spy on you with monitoring apps on your phones and computers, a risk that goes up exponentially if you need certain apps to do your job, or if you're using company equipment. If they don't like what you're doing, they'll fire you.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681207
Today's employers do similar things in subtler ways. After all, it's been 100+ years, things have changed. Lots of things have changed including the average quality of life, and the Sociological Department has kept up and changed with the times too.
You pointed some of this out yourself. Ford gets championed a lot today for his support of his workers and helping to build the middle class. I bet upwards of 90% of corporate workers today would agree with a statement that Ford was such a champion. This convincing by way of constant Ford-praising literate is a first step in itself.
Sociological Departmentalism now manifests itself in subtler ways, like superiors throwing out casual questions about your personal lives, "team dinners" where people bring their spouses, and the ever so lightly dropped "see you early in the office tomorrow!" at the end (never "you must be tired – don't come to the office tomorrow, take some time off!").
I would invite you to consider the possibility that the intents of such practices have not changed since Ford's time, the methods have.
And now we have ideological inspections.
What? In 2020, 50-78% of Americans earned just enough to pay their bills each month. Worldwide, a poll found that 85% of people are disengaged at work. I guarantee you that most people work -- even work long hours -- because they have no real choice.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown...
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/chairman/212045/world-broken...
We're in a weird and fortunate spot because we work as in a well capitalized industry as highly specialized skilled artisans. So often we get autonomy, leverage, and a good paycheck. This is not the experience for workers in general.
You can buy actual homes for $10-20k in the US, youtube has told me, with enough land to grow enough food to sustain yourself. It's certainly not impossible to survive on a very small amount of money (until you die of a horribly expensive health problem).
That might not be the path most of us choose, but it's still there.
It is questionable what the signal of that statement is. I know people earning top tier salaries who can "just pay their bills". Truth is that their bills cover their mortgages on which savings they plan to retire -- If one count in adding money to you savings account, the I reckon 100% person of all people earn just enough to cover their bills.
My take is that a highly productive globalized industrial society necessitates high abstraction of work and supply chains.
Buying a chair on an e-commerce site has many layers, each with its own sublayers (shipping <- fulfillment <- e-commerce site <- payments <- warehousing <- distribution <- manufacturing <- supply chain <- design <- product research <- market research — I'm skipping a bunch). Each layer and sublayer has its own bureaucracy to keep things running and to interface with other layers.
A pair of pants will be touched by fashion consumer researchers, fashion designers, textile designers, product managers, supply chain managers, marketing managers, analysts, social media managers, advertisers, merchandisers, software engineers, accountants, data scientists (clothing companies are turning to ML to assess fashion trends and demand), and many, many more. All to make it possible for you discover and buy a cheap pair of pants and have it delivered in 2 days.
Because of its efficiencies, the high abstraction economy outcompeted and replaced the old low abstraction economy. The driving force is the fact that it's easy for people to indirectly 'vote' for a high abstraction economy by overwhelmingly preferring to buy cheaper and more stuff; but it's very difficult for people to 'vote' for a low abstraction economy, even if people will occasionally buy something handmade.
I think that this force will endlessly drive the economy to become ever more abstract. Consumers want cheaper, better stuff. The economy will become more abstract, evolving ever narrower niche roles in order to serve consumer wants.
People will find themselves in those ever narrowing roles in order to afford the good life. And there is no low abstraction economy to flee to for the simple life because it has been outcompeted and replaced.
We could have a way out of this if we restructured our economy so that decision making power didn't solely rest with owners of capital, and taxed companies ina more strongly progessive manner to prevent winner-takes-all situations. That would enable companies to make decisions that were not solely for financial reasons and allow for more diversity in business models and practices.
I actually expect we'll have two broad classes of society which value more or less abstraction. A few enclaves like Singapore surrounded by a lot of Amish country.
Sure we have, serfdom. Serfs were not only expected to provide labour to their “employers”, but to fight for them, believe what they believe, and pledge their fealty.
Like serfs, and unlike the period from the industrial revolution to the postwar years, it’s becoming less common for people to change careers, an occupation being more than a job and becoming an identity. Sure we might change employers frequently, but it is not often (and is in fact a spectacle) when someone makes a drastic change of occupation.
Occupation being an identity is a very long tradition though (going all the way to surnames). If anything, social media allowed ordinary people to express themselves outside of - and in disconnection from - their professional environment. Maybe this is part of why people are disassociating from their employers to some extent.
That was never expected. It was never going to be expected. Fighting was much too prestigious for serfs to be doing it.
> believe what they believe
This changed over time. Mostly serfs were too unimportant for their non-Christian beliefs to matter. But it was always a formal expectation, and as the centuries went by it did develop into an actual expectation.
> and pledge their fealty.
Indeed. This is the difference between a W2 worker and a contractor; it escapes me why so much public rhetoric focuses on W2 status as if getting it were a victory for the employee.
I think the industrial world would love to disagree. Working at a factory my grandma would have carefully regulated break times, food times, etc. All controlled by a central clock for everyone on shift.
It makes sense when you consider factory line workers as part of the machine, but it's also kinda bullshit from a human perspective.
And that was after the big wins of the labor movement in the early 1900's. Imagine how bad it was in the late 1800's.
The new innovation our generation introduced is that because everyone is supposed to be following their dream and passion, you not only have to be a good worker, you also have to love it. If you don't, you are expected to perform the part of someone who does.
Charlie Chaplin satirized this in his 1936 film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)
I see this quite a bit on HN (the other day someone was saying to no fanfair that he doesn't work because he doesn't like the corporate setting) and other parts of the internet, enough so to assume it must be true, but this notion really confuses me, as it's certainly never been a choice for myself.
Genuinely interested, maybe I'm missing a trick in life, how would you pay for rent, food, electricity, ect... I do genuinely think when I read things like this or see things casually mentioned in the news that there's some alternative route in life nobodies ever told me about
As a person who spend most of my life studying on just a little income my expenses are only slowly increasing. Much slower than my earnings.
My guess is if one got a permanent job early on it might be hard to imaging how to live frugally.
If you look at median net worth of individuals. You'll see that over 50% of people have enough money to live for years without working. Hence, the "most people" phrase. https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-ame....
There are plenty of people who feel like they have to live in a high cost of living city. And plenty of people who feel like they have to drive a new car and live in a 4 bedroom house and take their family to Disney World. But those are all choices people make in how they want to live.
Maybe you’ve already heard of tha blog, maybe not. In a nutshell: rethink your life and your expenses so you’re able to save 50+% of your income. Put it into low cost ETFs (which particular one depends on what’s available where you live), and after a while (13 years at 50%, much less at more saving), you’ll have the option to not work anymore and still cover all your life expenses etc.
Not selling anything, not looking to start a debate, just mentioning it because parent might be interested or curious.
That journey i took 10yrs ago took me all over the world eventually, and reinforced my pre-trip skeptism of what success in life was. To me, climbing the corporate ladder simply meant trading my time for more money and more stress.
So while others looked at me and skoffed at the 80$k i spent travelling the world for 2 years in a search for meaning... I now look at a post-covid world and take solace that i did it. I did it, just before the world changed, forever. I saw the world, the coral reefs, the rivers, the rainforests, before climate change, people destroyed them. No matter how much money you eventually get, or how many peers you impress, you cannot get that experience that I had.
And thats really what you are doing by chasing the startup dream. Your trading your life for status and money amoung your peers.
I came to the realisation that what drives me in life not my peers. it was love.... as i travelled around the world and saw poor families with not much nestled into natural environments that provided for them i saw satisfaction. They had a balance. They were poor, but balanced. They took joy in the love that they could give eachother and sharing that time with eachother reinforced that.
So fast forward 10 yrs since that trip. What did i learn? Money cannot by love. No matter how popular you are with your peers, without love, you go home from that recognisition into an abyss of loneliness. You are rish, respected, but alone.
Eventually I came back to life and attempted one last startup venture before figuring that its time i start working Remotely and start living everyday the way i wanted. I love to code, and finding a company that is stimulating and open to this relationship means i will give them the best everyday, day or night.
I thank covid for giving others that shake they all needed. Remote working is much more accessible now. Covid hasnt changed my life at all. I literly have not felt a single day in lockdown, even while the majority of people around me snarl in fear (i also gave up TV, so havnt even seen a covid-news-cast yet). I sit here watching my peers panic buy, while i never go a day without something i desire. I gave away more toilet paper then i bought.
To all those who have those doubt. Dont ignore them. The risks are worth the rewards. You will be calmer inside.
Though if you really want to travel or raise a happy family, you're also going to need some of the latter. And for most, that means being part of the rat race to some extent, once beyond your early twenties.
This made me melancholic. I never thought the changes that we saw last two years would be so drastic. I hope we didn’t run out of time as a species yet.
You also have less incentive to be in the race if you do not have kids/spouse, which fewer people have.
> Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality, or as one says sometimes, our "personality package", for something. Now, this is not so true for the manual workers. The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile. But what you might call the "symbolpushers" , that is to say, all the people who deal with figures, with paper, with men, who manipulate - to use a better, or nicer, word - manipulate men and signs and words, all those today have not only to sell their service but in the bargain they're to sell their personality, more or less. There are exceptions.
-- Erich Fromm, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu-7UDT0Xe4&t=94s
I wonder if part of it is exposure to alternatives. Once upon a time, your awareness of an alternate life was a movie, or newspaper article, or a friend showing you their travel photos. Now, if you are ever on social media, you face a bombardment of peers or randoms having long lunches during work hours, travelling around, in the sun, at the beach, etc - or maybe it's just my feed. Hard to feel like you have your work mix right if your daily vibe doesn't compare to the aggregated freedom.
I opted for smaller monetary rewards for working in a smaller company with extensive freedom. Stress is mostly positive when projects get released. I have paid vacations and sick days, industry is secure that I can probably work until I get my pension if I wanted to. You also get much more invested in the company and other employees.
I still recommend doing a corp run for a year or two to get to know this world. It also help to negotiate your rates. But I don't see how you would not get a dislike about how things are done. It also seem to attract a certain kind of person.
I could never do it justice here, but you might find it valuable knowing how and when people have very legitimately been making the same point (roughly) that you’re saying here for generations.
You need to spend your time doing something. If you aren't spending a good chunk of it making money, you may be spending too much of it blowing through money out of boredom.
I hypothesize that this is a significant part of why 2/3 of lottery winners are bankrupt within 5 years: They quit their job and start spending like there's no tomorrow. And then, oops, the money shockingly doesn't go very far when all you do every minute of every day is spend money like a drunken sailor.
Exactly. It might be hard to find peace and a sense of meaning in life without having some sort of responsibility, even if one thinks ultimate freedom is the lack of responsibility.
In some ways, I imagine being rich (without that being the almost coincidental side effect of a strong passion) and especially winning the lottery is for many going to be like throwing money into a bottomless pit.
Though that doesn't necessarily mean I would mind giving it a try...
The "society" created around the routines of most corporate jobs is artificial, inauthentic, and provides material comforts. Having death staring you down during a pandemic for this long is a good motivator for letting go of baggage, including said jobs, especially if material comforts were the main reason to stay in it.
As a result I took my savings and move back to India. Now I've a small farm here, since the market is soo inefficient in India specially for farm produce and labor abundant I am able to work only 1 hour a day and enjoy rest of my day on things I like.
In US and Europe proportion of smart people with access to resources is vastly more compared to India where either smart people lack resources or the ones with resources aren't smart enough.
wealth, or just money?
From my experience of seeing grumpy Deliveroo and Uber Eats drivers mouth off at poor fast food and restaurant employees when the food isn't ready yet, and the general way they drive on the streets, I don't agree with that sentiment at all.
I work as much as I do because I don't know what's going to happen next. Someone in my family could get sick. The economy could go into the crapper. I could live longer than normal (my parents are 90).
Probably the worst corporate BS I could imagine would be commuting an hour or more, and I'm lucky that my commute is less than 1/2 hour by bike.
I want a trip on one of these orbital space ships. Is there a space ship shortage?
We really need to empower all kinds of front-line workers to enforce reasonable boundaries with both customers and management.
So, not only there is no space ship shortage :) there is actually much bigger worker shortage, as I keep a billion positions open (I want slaves, of all kinds, especially with Wall Street experience) and can't fill them (I don't bother to try).
I know that sounds harsh but that's the reality that workers live with every day. Can't pay the prevailing rent? You have to sleep in the streets. Can't pay for medical insurance? You get to die from a treatable disease. Why should there be more consideration for businesses than there is for human beings?
https://cafexapp.com/
https://misorobotics.com/
Why would companies raise wages now when they can wait a few months to see if the situation changes?
People seem upset by this, but if you have a free market economy, you should anticipate that actors will work in their own best interest.
Changing regulations around compensation will be much more effective versus hoping that a company will act on a specific moral principle.
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I don’t think it’s obvious that large numbers of people are choosing to stay home and earn $0/hour instead of getting a job working $10/hour because they really wanted $15/hour. The worker shortage is a real phenomenon of more jobs existing than people in the workforce.
On the other hand, raising wages would produce inflationary pressure on everything from housing prices to food prices, which would force more people to get jobs just to survive. Not exactly what you meant, I know.
Of course it does. My wife doesn't work because there's nothing that particularly motivates her to work rather than doing her hobbies. If you offered her more money, it might motivate her to re-enter the work force.
And if you can get 100k without a degree people who would be in college will be in the work force instead.
I don't really see how any of this is a bad thing. This has to happen from time to time for the economy to remain efficient. This is the phase in the cycle where the capital owners take their lumps and workers make big career making moves.
If I create a job that pays $100,000 per hour for making me a coffee whenever I ask, I assure you that plenty of people will come off the sidelines and apply for that job.
Others have correctly pointed out that the supply curve is not flat. But even if it were, well, economics is about the allocation of scarce resources that have alternate uses (Thomas Sowell's definition). If people are scarce, and they go where they produce the most value, and places where they would produce less value don't get filled, is that a problem? Isn't that exactly what you would want to happen?
There's something called the backward bending supply curve of labor. At some point, people work fewer hours because they make enough money that more money won't affect their quality of life. Various closures, and, interestingly, labor shortages, have given people fewer ways to spend their money, lowering the inflection point of the curve.
[1]: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_totaldeaths
Do you have an example of this?
If there is real competitiveness, a company that suffers shortages of an input (workers in this case), would see an increase in price and a fall in profits. Did your friend mentioned profits in the conversation?
Because I'm seeing a lot of this discussions where not even profits is mentioned. Including the article we are discussing by the way, where the word 'profits' doesn't appear.
It's also possible that certain businesses and products we've grown accustomed to, at the prices we are used to, are simply not viable anymore as the market changes.
The market giveth and the market taketh away. A lot of business owners complaining about a "labor shortage" love being pro free market when it works in their favor, but whine when it turns around on them.
For those with low skills, this can mean unemployment, even permanent one.
I think that a lot of the "worker shortage" is in fact companies being unwilling to understand that they are being outcompeted in the market, someone is able to make that 100 dollar product less costly and thus can attract more workers, or alternatively workers/resources cost less abroad.
Don't be so quick to think this. Society can't just poof into existence more qualified skilled workers. It takes years to train nurses and a decade or more to do so with M.Ds/O.Ds.
Right now, traveling nurses are being offered pretty insane salaries, up to and including low five figures a week. It hasn't helped bring more people in, or fixed the burnout. People are just traveling to work for the highest bidder. I suspect most are planning to leave the game after they've saved up enough money.
That said, in theory the US could raise wages enough to attract skilled professionals in from other countries. Except that the US also has extremely restrictive immigration laws and a housing shortage making it extremely difficult to pay people enough to live where they're needed.
And keep in mind, if you get paid minimum wage, your employer is telling you they'd pay you less if they could.
This is the crux, because what's happening is that housing is highly inflationary (especially in desirable locations) and wages are failing to match inflation, so entry level workers are being pushed further out to the boonies. Why would they commute all the way into the city centers if they don't actually pay better?
An interesting side effect of all the rampant real estate speculation and bidding wars is that cities are becoming dramatically more expensive to live in than the exurbs. I feel like eventually this will result in a much higher cost of living across the board as employers need to account for this difference in their pay scales. The entry level / service industry jobs in these places with insane housing prices will need to pay much better to attract workers, thus making these already expensive-to-live places even more expensive.
Perhaps it will eventually create some kind of equilibrium where new towns can provide some of the same quality of life benefits at a fraction of the cost since their real estate isn't so astronomical.
roommates are a critical social developmental step in your life.
They teach you how to negotiate boundaries without a direct authority figure.
They teach you how to live in a common space with somebody else.
roommates teach you that you must be responsible for your actions which affect the other people who live with you.
roommates teach you the importance of financial responsibility because when the rent is due you both need to pay up.
You may be lazy You may not want to do the dishes, but you know if you take that messy ass plate and you just throw it in the sink it will become a mountain of dirty ass shit and you owe it to somebody else to do your part.
If both of you hold up your end of the bargain and perform 3 seconds of work to place that dish in the dishwasher it avoids this tragedy of the commons.
roommates teach you that self-discipline is critical for a tolerable society.
E.g. Forget to pay your share of the rent when you live with a roommate? Room-mate yells at you. When you live alone you get an eviction notice.
Self-discipline is about the self after all. If you need another person there to be disciplined, then you are clearly not self-disciplined.
(That said, nothing wrong with roommates, it often makes financial sense and some people like having them, i just dont see the connection to responsibility)
But when housing costs are such that you have people in their late 20's and early 30's still living with roommates it seems like a societal problem.
This was the first potential explanation TFA examined. It said that this effect was "negligible":
> It is commonly believed that school closures have made it impossible for parents, particularly mothers, to take a job. The evidence for this is mixed, though. Analysis by Jason Furman, Melissa Kearney and Wilson Powell III concludes that extra joblessness among mothers of young children accounts for a “negligible” share of America’s employment deficit. Despite talk of a “shecession” early in the pandemic, in most rich countries the worker deficit for men remains larger.
Dead Comment
The demand-side of the labor market simply isn't willing to pay what the supply-side expects, and is childishly throwing a tantrum that for once they have to compromise to market forces.
The so called "worker deficit" only exists below ~15-20/h. Above that there's no issue whatsoever.
It's a seller's market. Suck it up.
What are the market forces that led to this, when there wasn't a worker shortage just a little over a year ago?
Even without Covid this would have happened as low-income workers in many areas were either rapidly approaching being unequivocally priced out of living anywhere remotely near their work, or already were.
Covid just forced the issue sooner and faster, rather than letting it fester.
Why would anyone continue working for subsistence wages that can't even pay rent where they live and work? Their only sensible options are demanding more pay or leaving.
In major cities, with current rents, it simply isn't feasible to pay janitors, garbage collectors, fast-food workers, restaurant employees, etc as little as they've been paid, for the very simple reason that they can't afford to live there on those wages.
Unless we're willing to give up sanitation, garbage collection, fast food, and cheap restaurants in those cities, there is no reasonable solution except increasing wages. (There are of course unreasonable solutions such as exploiting immigrants, wage theft, and prison labor).
1) People getting government assistance so they are able to survive without their current employer enabling them to quit
2) People re evaluating the risk reward ratio of their jobs, perhaps due to COVID bringing risks into view that previously were not focused on, and also comparing themselves to all the people they see working remotely getting paid more for not taking risks
3) People have time to research other work options since they were able to quit (or lost their job)
4) Demographic changes becoming more apparent as fewer children mean more and more of the working population ages out every year, and if not replaced by immigrants, then there are objectively fewer people competing to sell their labor
https://youtu.be/NBHHFnUqo5o?t=119
(You can wind back to the start to see the underlying cause of unemployment as well)