I saw this when I arrived in America, and it's the reason I left. I take the bus and seeing literally every day that there were people with families who worried and laughed and were kind who spent 2 hours a day transporting themselves to service or manufacturing industry job when I sat in an air conditioned office making 3x their wages was making me feel terribly guilty. I eventually went back to a country with a social safety net where the working class people on my bus talk about their vacations.
Maybe if the "favored class" Americans took the bus or went to the laundromat like I did for years they'd want poor people to do well too.
I work in tech. My wife does not. We came to the EU and I noticed that I make a good deal less, but she makes more. Even more important, though, instead of me getting lots of vacation time and her getting almost nothing, we both get a month off a year, protected by law (no bullshit "unlimited vacation" policy can take it away). We can finally take proper holidays together.
> protected by law (no bullshit "unlimited vacation" policy can take it away).
I've worked at two places who had this policy and it was remarkable how many people just burned themselves out by NOT taking a single day of vacation. There was always pressure from management to NOT take vacation, then you add in pressure from your co-workers to continually work late, push to get projects done on time, all at the cost of your sanity and physical well being.
My thought has always been if you're going to join a company who has an "unlimited vacation" policy, it's probably a good indication there's an expectation you're going to work yourself into the ground, then burn out and will need an extended amount of time to get yourself right.
If a company champions this policy during an interview, it's a huge red flag for me.
I viewed this as a red flag too until I landed at a company where the unlimited vacation policy was sincere. It was actually a great experience.
At risk of sounding like a management consultant, it was very much a matter of corporate culture. People at upper levels took vacation regularly and actively encouraged their reports to do so. One-on-ones often included asking about recent and planned time off, and "none, none" produced real pressure to use the policy. The lack of set days did save money when people left, which probably helped it stick around, but I think the initial adoption of 'unlimited' instead of some generous allowance was basically just a matter of not wanting to formally track vacation time. (One other significant point, especially for tech: there wasn't an expectation of having grand plans, and people who weren't taking time off would even be reminded that they didn't need any "good reason" to do so. I've definitely heard of places where taking a month off to hike the Andes is fine, but taking two days to catch up on sleep and errands is frowned on.)
I still don't take "unlimited vacation" seriously when I see companies advertise it; I'd want an account of the real policy, minimally from Glassdoor reviews or preferably from an employee I knew. But I almost never see US companies advertise 20+ days of paid vacation as a starting allowance, so if the goal is to maximize time off I suspect searching for 'real' unlimited might still be the best bet.
This is weird to me, because I work at a UPTO company and most of my co-workers take at least 3-4 weeks off a year of vacation time and they don't have to worry about it cutting into their sick leave. Whereas, I've worked at other companies and you may start at 15 days PTO and it's one bucket for sick time and vacation.
I've definitely heard horror stories about UPTO meaning "no time off", especially in crunch-happy industries where requests are simply denied. But people criticizing UPTO seem to describe it as an all around bad deal compared to allotted PTO.
Meanwhile, I mostly see companies (even successful, generous-benefits ones) offering extremely restrictive PTO. "Two weeks PTO for all uses, and you gain one extra day every few years" isn't an appealing offer in the slightest. I've definitely watched friends with graduate degrees and many years at one company try to decide whether to work sick or give up pay.
That doesn't make UPTO a reliable offering, but I'm not convinced that it's worse on average than the levels of set PTO on offer in the US.
To add alternate experience to the children of this post, I worked for a company w/ unlimited vacation, and while I took very little vacation, there was no pressure from outside to limit it. Other people tended to work less than I did and took vacation more or less in line with what they would have done elsewhere.
I wouldn't take unlimited vacation as a sign of anything other than "we expect you to be reasonable and we don't want to micro-manage everything." Although if my experience had been different, I might think different.
I currently work for a multinational with an unlimited vacation policy and it's pretty obvious people in places where PTO is protected by law (i.e. not the US) take far more.
It's also yet another way to ensure people who know they can just walk into another job (or that they won't get fired/laid off/never promoted) take loads of vacation, while people who _really_ need to be sure they stay employed or who might be having a harder time at work are always afraid to ask for it.
Buddy of mine worked for a company with unlimited PTO until recently. He would take 2, 3 months off because, as he put it, "I had them over a barrel" (he is extremely good at what he does). His colleagues, for the most part, did not.
> I wouldn't take unlimited vacation as a sign of anything other than "we expect you to be reasonable and we don't want to micro-manage everything."
In truth, though, the sole reason companies use unlimited vacation policy is that, in the US at least, it means unused vacation time does not accrue as a liability on the balance sheet, and companies aren't required to pay out for it if you leave.
It also alleviates the company from ever having to pay out unused vacation time. That is a disadvantage for the employee, but with a tremendous upside.
I also have unlimited PTO and I definitely prefer it. No more worrying about hours, rollover limits, accumulation rate, how far I can go negative, etc. No more wading through vacation schedules wondering if the office is open on New Years Eve.
Same thing with free lunches - yeah, of course it keeps people in the office and possibly causes them to subconsciously work longer. But also...I get a free freaking lunch and I don't have to worry about it.
Perhaps we're just completely opposite. When I have free lunch I just get fat. I also like to squeeze in a workout on my lunch break, and the quiet pressure to stay in the office and have your free lunch opposes that.
Good for you! Where in the EU? There is quite a bit of variation in work regulations and norms (e.g. minimum wage and salary variance) depending on the member states.
Ireland - which is a mixed bag in some senses (if nothing else, work culture in tech here is HEAVILY influenced by the US) but still far better than California. Also, I don't mean to toot my horn but I may start a company in a year or two and even though I wouldn't necessarily have picked Ireland in the first place, their comparatively welcoming immigration policy (they have working holiday visas!) means it's where I've built my life.
Western European countries hardly take immigrants. When you live in a homogenous, solely middle-class country like Sweden/Denmark/Norway, of course everything seems nice and comfortable.
But America accepts some very poor immigrants and allows them to make money and be lifted up. Those are many of the people you saw on the bus.
This is wildly incorrect. Angela Merkel got in trouble precisely because she accepted so many Syrian refugees. Germany absorbed almost a million refugees in one year, which is an incredible number. On a per capital basis, that would be like the USA accepting 4 million refugees in one year, when in fact net immigration to the USA, of all forms, tends to run at about 10% to 15% of that level.
That is the point isn't it? European countries finally start catching up to the US in the size of their immigrant population, and all of a sudden you're seeing massive social upheaval and populist movements popping up everywhere.
Those stats count an immigrant from any neighboring Western European country as foreign born. That makes them highly misleading compared to the US. In the US, a person from a different state does not count as an immigrant.
Of course not, but a state is not a country. Germany has 16 states, for example, and the statistics don't count people from different states as immigrants.
However, a person from a neighbouring country (e.g. Mexico) would count as an immigrant in the US.
Just because states are massive in the US doesn't make them equivalent to different countries in Europe, which all have their own language, ethnic background, and culture. A German person moving 350 miles to Italy (from Munich to Venice) is definitely an immigrant, with a completely different background, even though the distance itself isn't even enough to go between Austin and Houston in Texas.
... yeah, I don't think those Syrian refugees are vacationing on the Rhine with OP. He doesn't see them on the bus because they can't even afford the bus he takes...
It was, I think, correct until relatively recently. Certainly, the countries of Western Europe of the 80s were, for the most part, each very homogeneous.
It's no longer the case (I read today that 1 in 4 Swedish schoolchidren wasn't born in Sweden!), and I wonder very much what that will mean for the future of Europe. The mass influx of Germans, Irish, Scandinavians & Italians in the 19th century radically changed what it meant to be an American, and it seems to me that Europe is about to go through an even larger-scale change.
I think you may only be looking at immigrant based visas in the US. Whereas you need to look at permenant residents (ie green card holders = 13.2M of which 8.9M are eligible for citizenship).
Isn't it possible that the reason their middle-class is so large is due in some part on political decisions they've made?
I think it is at least worth exploring before we jump to the ethnic breakdown of the country. Political choices are something we can change relatively quickly compared to demographics. The US has a higher GDP per capita than Sweden and Denmark which implies that there is more money to spread around even with a comparatively large immigrant population.
Yes however the demographic diversity in the US makes it less likely for people to want to "spread it" around.
If your entire country is the population of one large US metro and everyone is the same ethnicity and culture, there are fewer cognitive impediments to being empathetic at scale.
My contention is that median variability of cultural attributes between those cities is signifcantly less than median variability of cultural attributes in US cities.
That is a fair observation. To clarify, you think that makes it harder to find political solutions because people don't feel they are "in it together"?
Exactly. The easier it is to find differences in your group and another group under the same organization, especially with a weak overarching culture, the less likely those groups will coordinate politically and economically.
Ok great. Now segment that further into cultural and lingusitic differences.
The 250,000 "white non-Hispanic" people in Louisiana speaking Creole Patois can't communicate easily with the 200,000 or so "white non-Hispanic" people who speak Appalachian English.
"Race" is a starting point, within which there are so many variances in the US. I've traveled a lot of places, but I've yet to find anywhere in the world as diverse at such a wide scale as that in the US. It's messy, violent, uncertain and magnificent.
Not only is this contention wrong [1], it is completely arbitrary. Ethnicity isn't just how you want to draw lines to prove some point. Sweden has multiple ethnicities within what you call "Swedish white, non-Hispanic". This is observed, most obviously, through different dialects and cultures. Swedes that border Norway are different than Swedes that border Finland.
And white people in the U.S. are also not homogeneous. So what?
The U.S. has multiple metropolitan areas that each has a larger population and more ethnic diversity than the smaller European countries. And that's before you even consider the country as a whole.
==The U.S. has multiple metropolitan areas that each has a larger population and more ethnic diversity than the smaller European countries.==
Yes, but that was true when the US had a robust middle class (roughly 1940-2000). I haven't seen any evidence presented that proves demographic diversity is the reason for increased inequality.
Meanwhile, we can observe political decisions over the past 40 years which have had an impact on how worker productivity turns into wages. Examples are a lower the top income tax rate, a stagnant minimum wage, the explosion of stock-based compensation, weakening the estate tax, the weakening of unions, high healthcare costs, etc.
> Yes, but that was true when the US had a robust middle class (roughly 1940-2000).
Not really. Non-hispanic whites + blacks made up 95% of the population as recently as 1970. As of 2010, those two groups combined make up only 75% of the population. There have been radical changes in the demography of the U.S. in the last 50-80 years.
I actually agree with you that changing demographics are not the whole story, but the fact that the U.S. has gone from one (black Americans) to two (added Latin American immigrants — now 16% of the population) racially delineated underclasses does a lot to undermine social cohesion.
==Non-hispanic whites + blacks made up 95% of the population as recently as 1970==
The large immigrant communities from Italy, Germany and Ireland were not considered "white" when they first came to the US. Only later did that occur as definitions of race have changed over time, usually to serve a political purpose.
==the fact that the U.S. has gone from one (black Americans) to two (added Latin American immigrants — now 16% of the population) racially delineated underclasses does a lot to undermine social cohesion.==
Have you explored the possibility that people's obsession with this is what has actually undermined social cohesion? It has happened before in American history with the Know-Nothing Party.
==Source for U.S. demographics==
Your own source shows "whites" (72.4%) and "blacks" (12.6%) as making up 85% of the population as of 2010. You have decided to further delineate that into "non-hispanic white" which is not an actual race. Also notable that you don't split out the differences of Southern Italians and Northern Irish. Do immigrants from Spain count as white or Hispanic?
Personally, I believe that rich people will find a way to justify being more rich. If not they'll hire some economists from Harvard to come up with some good excuses.
"Members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots." -- Richard Rorty [1997]
"Isn't it possible that the reason their middle-class is so large is due in some part on political decisions they've made?"
The USA previously decided three times to explicitly create its middle class. The New Deal, the Homestead Act, etc. Policy choices which were hard fought and narrowly won.
Wealth and Democracy: How Great Fortunes and Government Created America's Aristocracy by Kevin Phillips
Easily disproven statement by looking at real stats [1], where most western european countries are ahead of the US. If you're suggesting those immigrants are not "poor", consider the Syrian crisis, Germany and Sweden were by far the largest takers of syrian refugees in the west, while the US hardly took any syrians at all. In fact, I read somewhere that Sweden in 2015 was the largest taker of refugees per capita from non-neighboring countries EVER.
That link shows that the US took in twice as many immigrants as the entire EU. Per capita doesn't mean much at this scale- the 5 million the US took the year before don't magically become middle class taxpayers just because a year has passed.
An extraordinary 190,000 refugees are now expected to arrive in Sweden this year - double what the agency expected at the start of the year, and more people than live in Uppsala, the country's fourth largest city.
If the predictions are correct, Sweden will take 20,000 asylum applications per million people in 2015, double the rate even of Germany.
The strain is beginning to show everywhere from politics - where the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats are, according to two of the country's eight main polls, now the party with the most support - to finance, where both the central government and municipalities are struggling to find savings to cover the costs.
I don't know about Sweden/Denmark/Norway but this is not true of the Western European country Germany. I'm an American living in Germany. It's shockingly easy to immigrate to here. It takes 5 years to get permanent residency. The process is humane and reasonable. More than half the people I work with are immigrants from all over the world. No one I've asked even considers moving to America because of the nearly non-existent social safety net, the expense of having children, the unwelcoming rhetoric about immigrants, and universally toxic experiences with American government officials (TSA, customs, etc.). That story about things are better in Europe because Europe is culturally homogeneous is not true in Germany. It's also true that there is new conflict/friction within German society because of the heterogeneity. But the presence of immigrants has not in any way made the country less "nice and comfortable". These qualities are the product of the society's belief that everyone should have a reasonable quality of life. People here make a choice to pay more taxes towards that aim and they do this because they believe in it.
I thought that was interesting, so I just checked - the EU as a whole has about 52.5 million people living in countries they were not born in (including other EU countries) and a total population of about 512 million. So that's about 10%. The US has about 44.5 million foreign born in it, with a total population of about 328 million. So that's about 13.5%.
So no, the EU does not have more immigrants than the US per capita. If you remove European citizens moving to other European countries, they don't have as many immigrants by sheer number, either.
There is also a sliding scale in EU. Western European countries like Germany, France, Sweden, Netherlands, take in far more immigrants than Poland, Hungary etc. The point that triggered this whole thread was immigration is the reason America doesn't have the same quality of life as EU. Which is clearly not true, considering Germany and NL takes in very high % of immigrants. Even with your 13 vs 10% is negligible for any meaningful policy differences. US is different not because of immigration, but due to its political bent.
I'm having trouble finding a more recent source, but as of 2012 that wasn't close to true. It's actually a larger gap than I expected. I'm going to keep researching to see if I can find more recent numbers. Do you happen to have a more recent source?
And if everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, what’s the incentive to work harder? Seeing your neighbor put in a third of the effort and produce the same economic result is demoralizing.
Trust me, I don't work 3x harder than most of the people I make 3x of. My wife is a teacher and I am in tech, I make 3x her salary. She works way more and spends more of both her physical and emotional labor on her job. I work hard and I do good work, but what she does is not even in the same stratosphere as what I do. I'm not innovating anything, I'm just writing decent code. She's finding new ways to help kids learn. Which sounds more demoralizing?
It's not about how hard you work. It's about how many people can do what you do.
Don't sell yourself short, in tech you have skills that only a small percentage of the population are capable of doing. We might all say "Programming is easy" or "I really only work half the day" but for many people Programming is seen as witchcraft, and for many what would take a skilled developer an hour would take a whole day (or worse, they might just do the task manually).
If your not satisfied with programming you can of course go into teaching, if that's what you think is truly fulfilling.
It doesn't make it fair that in theory 'everyone' could get into it or that it takes probably much longer for someone to do my job than the other way around (like yes i think i would be able to sell things).
I don't know how we should incentive instead but it doesn't make it fair.
You're just basing your view of what's fair on time spent working/physical labor. If you base your view of what's fair on skillsets, and what one person can do, and what one person can not, it makes more sense.
It's worth asking why your wife doesn't switch to your job, to make 3x the salary. Either
a) she couldn't do it, in which case by extension it boils down to supply and demand, or
b) she doesn't want to do it, because she gets a whole bunch of joy from the job which is invisibly priced into compensation (and which indirectly goes back to supply and demand.)
I don't see the discrepancy as any kind of market failure.
I think there's a big problem with this whole comparison here. You're comparing a career which is almost entirely private-sector (programming) to one which is almost entirely public-sector (teaching). Teachers are mostly employed by local governments, after all, so that profession isn't subject to the market forces which affect private-sector jobs.
The reason teachers aren't paid well isn't because there isn't much demand for them, it's because the local governments choose to pay them poorly, and then they wonder why they can't find enough good teachers.
Companies that don't pay programmers handsomely will soon find themselves without programmers (or with really lousy ones), and then they'll go out of business. This doesn't happen with public schools.
> I don't see the discrepancy as any kind of market failure.
What his story underlines is that teaching young human beings about navigating life is rewarded 3x less than churing out code that fits some business objective.
The market doesn't care about people, it cares about profit. In that system, human life is only important to the degree that it helps market dynamics.
The main problem with teaching is that there's many people who can do it. If you compound the issue with paying teachers $150k a year, not only would the cost of education skyrocket, you would be running into more and more people unemployed but with a degree specifically meant for teaching.
I'm not saying everyone can teach equally. I'm saying most everyone can become qualified to teach. Please don't accuse me of saying teaching is easy. At the very least, a much larger subset can learn to teach than can learn to code.
Many people can learn to program and companies that pay poorly will only be able to hire people who aren't very good and they will go out of business. Finding good teachers is very hard as well but the government will only pay terrible salaries and mostly hire poor teachers. The difference is when the teachers suck and students do poorly, the school doesn't go out of business, they just reduce the budget and it gets worse.
>The difference is when the teachers suck and students do poorly, the school doesn't go out of business, they just reduce the budget and it gets worse.
This is true, but it's become a partisan issue, at least in the U.S, to talk about testing teachers in some way.
I believe a huge problem is finding a way to differentiate a good teacher from a bad teacher if you're not allowed to look at grades/some kind of standardized test. If you can take those into account, as long as a teacher comes into work on time I'm not sure how you could differentiate the good from bad.
An example I like to use is my AP Calc teacher from highschool, who had an average score of 4.7 for her students on the AP test. The average in 2012 was a 2.9 (the year I took it, it seems to be higher now, I can't say to as if they made it easier or if people got better though) [1]. In many school systems though, if your teacher has an average score below the national average, you can't do anything about it.
Part of the problem with doing that, especially in younger grades, is that so much of it depends on variables outside of a teacher's control. A lot of reading at a young age comes from life experiences. For instance, someone who has never been outside of an inner city is going to have more trouble reading a story about someone sailing on the ocean because they are so far removed from even the most basic plot elements that the things in the story that are actually meant to challenge are not ever gotten to. Additionally, time spent outside of classroom compounds the effectiveness of time spent inside of classroom, but the teacher has no control over that. A teacher can't even control if a student shows up for school or not. Student's performance, especially cross-school comparisons, are nearly worthless and would unfairly punish those that teach at low schools.
I would say you'd have to compare them to similar schools in the area or similar areas in the U.S. Between income range in the surround neighborhoods and population density you should be able to come up with a decent comparison, I would think.
I don't disagree with the letter of your comment, but I take issue with the spirit. Markets are about exchange, and the pricing signal is the aggregate expression of what people value and how scarce it is. Far from being cold and impersonal, they are fully and completely about human values.
OP's wife may place a high intrinsic value on teaching, which serves as a kind of internal subsidy. In that case you'd expect the job to pay less, because more people are being 'subsidized' by their desire to do it.
On the other hand, nobody is burning with desire to be a garbageman. Nobody is a volunteer garbageman, and garbagemen make more money than you might expect (or at least, they did when I was graduating from high school.)
There's a reason glamorous and fun jobs generally don't pay very much. It's not that complicated, and it's not sinister.
How so? Many people (women even moreso than men in my experience) prioritize fulfilling work over higher paying work. This is observable in, for example, people pursuing careers in saturated industries like journalism, art, or acting, as well as going for "more meaningful" startup jobs instead of FANG jobs.
I personally switched from rocket science to tech and then to a FANG so I could get increased compensation and have a chance of catching up to Bay Area housing prices. My compensation increased 3x in the process. Most of my peers wouldn't do that.
It's probably >3x more difficult to find someone with your skills to employ. It may be easy to you but to someone who doesn't know how to program, your work is unimaginably difficult.
I would also argue that writing code is a grind. I would enjoy writing code maybe 2-4 hours a day tops but when you want to get something done and code for 7 hours straight it is really tough to do.
Learning new concepts all the time, emotional waves, errors that can impact companies on a large scale. Programming is really difficult and requires constant engagement in the industry.
You're not taking into account the thousands of hours people have to put in to learning how to program. That's real work and sacrifice. It's not unfair that that investment pays off.
The teachers' situation is more demoralizing for sure.
Capitalism would explain the difference between a tech worker's pay and a teacher's pay as based on skill and worker scarcity, not on who works the hardest.
Teaching is a straw man. Teachers get paid poorly because (1) Americans don’t actually care about education, as evidenced by the amount teachers make, and (2) it’s a government-based monopoly that prioritizes “benefits” and graft (tenure, etc) over salary
> (1) Americans don’t actually care about education, as evidenced by the amount teachers make
Americans care very much about education but the system we're in doesn't. Kids have no value in a market economy until they have purchase power (or influence on purchase power). In a highly inequal society that means very fancy private schools, for those who can pay. And neglected public schools for the rest. The outlook of a market economy is not 18 years, it's 1 year (and often quarter-to-quarter).
Kids have massive purchasing power, a fact which was discovered by marketers in the 50s and cultivated extensively since then. Marketers back to then discovered they could actually market directly to kids, which wasn’t a thing before and something people take for granted now. In American households kids drive massive percentages of household spending, not just indirectly but directly as well.
> Kids have no value in a market economy until they have purchase power
Market economies are based entirely on investment. Market economies value investment and therefore kids. If people aren’t investing in kids, it’s because of market economy? as a matter of fact Americans invest tons of money in early childhood education and their children at an early age. It’s an American obsession. The problem is that outcomes have little to do with dollars invested. American culture at this point has devolved into pseudo fascist corporation and leisure identity worship, so people don’t even know what education is. Being a “geek” in America now means you watch tv and play video games. Buying your kid a tablet and plopping then down with some STEM edutainment software isn’t education. It’s just unfortunate, miguided ignorance, and we get what we pay for.
>Kids have massive purchasing power, a fact which was discovered by marketers in the 50s and cultivated extensively since then. Marketers back to then discovered they could actually market directly to kids, which wasn’t a thing before and something people take for granted now.
I dunno about "discovered", the 1950s were one of the most radical shifts in American life. Average Children were not running around with "purchasing power" prior to WWII they were working with their parents more than likely in some capacity, the war completely altered the economic landscape of America for a ceiling of better never before seen for the common man since we were the only ones left with infrastructure not bombed to fuck all. My grandparents are poor blacks from the south, that statistically puts them in the demographic set for worst possible outcomes, but they and most of their peers were able to raise large families and buy a house on factory jobs with middle-class wages in the 50s. That kind of wealth distribution opens up a lock of sectors.
>Americans care very much about education but the system we're in doesn't.
This is demonstrably false. If Americans cared about education, they would demand their local governments do a better job of providing it. But they don't. Those governments pay teachers poorly, which doesn't attract quality people to the profession, and the taxpayers just complain about their taxes being too high.
The ones who care about their kids' education enough to pay for it themselves—not just lobby to make others pay for it—and have the resources to do something about it tend to put their kids in private schools. That leaves only those who either lack sufficient resources to pay more or simply don't care.
In any case, we actually spend quite a bit on education, despite arguably worse outcomes than some other countries that spend less. Throwing more money at the problem isn't going to improve anything. The focus needs to be on spending the significant resources already allocated to education more effectively.
The attempts to equalize outcomes regardless of the amount of effort students (and parents) put into their education certainly don't help. Assuming they get their way and everyone is assured of equal pay for equal "effort"—why bother studying if cashiering at a fast-food joint offers about the same quality-of-life as managing a successful company, or performing leading-edge research and development?
But you use her in logic based arguments and then appeal to emotion so.... which is it?
Your gripe shouldn’t be with rich people, it should be with Americans en masse, who yelled and screamed all Sunday night in my apartment building about grown men running into each other on TV with such a passion you’d think they were educating their children. And then they’re poor? Boo hoo.
Maybe if Americans cared about education, showed passion for it like they do about Football, I would understand. You get paid 3x your wife because Americans care about what you produce, and they don't care about what she produces.
It’s easy to soak the rich but take a look around you, people prioritize everything except the one thing that matters: education.
> But you use her in logic based arguments and then appeal to emotion so.... which is it?
My appeal was to the amount of effort required between jobs.
> And then they’re poor? Boo hoo.
Poor people are allowed to have hobbies and interests just as well as the rich. This sentiment is disgusting and you should be ashamed.
> You get paid 3x your wife because Americans care about what you produce, and they don't care about what she produces.
Trust me, I have worked jobs where I have been paid very, very well where nobody has cared about what I produced except the couple of people who were paying me.
You won’t shame me. You can’t make me feel ashamed of my father, who got my family out of poverty and didn’t even know how to order a beer or a meal at a restaurant until he was 55 because that’s just not how we spent money. Your perspective is rooted in the heights of privilege and entitlement, wherein first world people can live cozy secure lives, entitled to leisure and “hobbies” on the backs of second and third worlders who facelessly supply us cheap goods that our rich should provision for us just because we live in a country that enslaves the world’s poor. That “hobbies” and “leisure” as a human right doesn’t give you pause is disturbing, because if you don’t earn your hobbies and leisure and expect them anyway, you’re a piece of work given what goes on in the world to make our leisure possible. Americans live in a Disney fairyland created by Ronald Reagan and the 1980s. Why should poor people in America be entitled to 50,000 USD when people who work and create the things these poor people say they absolutely need to consume make 5,000 USD. What haught, what arrogance. What willful ignorance. That’s what’s disgusting.
> You can’t make me feel ashamed of my father, who got my family out of poverty and didn’t even know how to order a beer or a meal at a restaurant until he was 55 because that’s just not how we spent money.
I never asked you to feel ashamed for that. I'm asking that you don't require everyone go though the same struggles as revenge.
Get this... I also think the people who are working to create the things that you are talking about should be able to have hobbies. I also think the people making the things that get consumed should be able to make enough to consume them. You are trying to turn my argument in to what you want it to be, not what it clearly is.
You are saying that, because I think people should be able to have better lives, I am saying some people should not have better lives? That doesn't even make sense.
Basic premise: it is undignified and immoral to buy things from people who labor tremendously and still live at a different standard of living, and to give those things for free to people here, at our standard of living. That just strikes me as incredibly twisted and immoral.
Imagine the look of those people in China who have to work to produce Tracfones, if they saw their Tracfone just given out to someone here for free, who didn't do anything to earn it? Imagine how they would feel? That feeling is not about revenge, it's about you denying them basic dignity. You're saying to him or her: you're a Chinaman, you have to do work, but we just take your work and give it to people for free. They must be better than you! They don't have to do anything because they're American. But you, you're just an inferior person from China so you have to work.
No I’m saying that things don’t fall from the sky. People make everything, and basic human dignity and justice demands that no one is just entitled to the fruits of someone else’s labor.
The revenge tack you take is also misguided. This is all about basic human dignity and people feeling like they deserve all this stuff from workers the world over, just because they live in a first world country. Or just because they live period. Being alive doesn’t entitle you to anything, and that’s probably where we disagree, because my guess is you think being alive entitles you to health care, and food and housing. But if that was true, and everyone took that entitlement, then where would all the actual stuff come from? Where? As I said, it’s the height of privilege to act like these things are human rights, because in doing so, you deny the workers who actually produce things common, basic dignity and equality.
I agree with you when it comes to "no one is just entitled to the fruits of someone else's labor". Certainly there is no inherent right to health care, food, housing, or anything else produced and paid for at others' expense. However, you're really confusing the issue by throwing in "on the backs of second and third worlders". It is not their labor which is being taken in order to provide these "entitled" residents of first-world countries their free stuff. They are getting paid for their labor, at rates better than what they could otherwise obtain, and would be strictly worse off if the first-world countries insisted on buying only from those with first-world standards of living. That would eliminate their comparative advantage, and take away what is currently their best option to earn a living and improve their situation. The workers in countries with second- and third-world standards of living are actually the main beneficiaries of this middle-class sense of entitlement; it transfers money from consumers and taxpayers in first-world countries directly into their wallets. If anyone is in a position to complain about having the fruits of their labor stolen away it's the net taxpayers in the first world, the ones actually paying for this "free" food, housing, and health care out of their own earnings.
I just think people who come in late at the party because their kid was sick and they're mentally ill and they live way out in the middle of the country and there's no pie left should at least get a couple apples or something.
My kid is disabled and I have severe anxiety and suffered depression. I live right in the middle of the US. I didn’t start my tech career until 28 because of all that, but I’m doing ok. I live in a big house with good schools.
From what I’ve gathered of non-US (European) tech jobs, I’d never have gotten an opportunity to work as a programmer because I never got a bachelors degree. Maybe it isn’t like that everywhere, but it feels good that a high school dropout can make 6 figures and live in a 2000 square foot house and easily support two kids and a stay at home wife.
I’d also likely never have learned to control my issues and gotten proper treatment if I hadn’t been left almost homeless when my family kicked me out for dropping out of college. As long as things were “good enough”, I poured my heart and soul into noble ventures like my World of Warcraft career (300 days played)! and League of Legends. I know I’m not everyone, in fact I’m likely an exceptional case, none of my friends who grew up similarly to me ended up achieving what I have, but if the safety net was too comfortable I doubt I’d have ever felt the need to climb out of it once I fell into it. I’m personally glad to live in the USA despite its flaws.
It's great that you were able to do that, and I've been to Europe (not where the country I was referring to is located) and I agree with you about the degree.
That said, it's just emotional on my part like I said in the OP. Yeah I knew people who were poor and who probably spent their entire life since that time doing drugs and collecting their assistance checks. (And to be fair I knew people who were rich and probably spent their entire life since that time doing drugs and collecting their monthly allowance. Both are far from the norm of the rich/poor people. They're just specific examples of not caring much about your life beyond it going on.)
I prefer to live in a world where five hundred thousand people are sitting on their asses doing nothing passing the seconds till their death through their own choices than in a world where fifty thousand people are running ragged feeling their bodies waste away not knowing where their time goes through the choices of people who just wanted a nicer lawn. The first world seems like it has more happiness per capita plus the outcome of each is a result of things like effort. The second world seems like it belongs in a SF story about the unchosen ones.
At least people can overcome abuse and thrive off of it. I don't know a single person who had an extremely cushy childhood who is 'on fire' for anything or striving for greatness.
You need adversity to be great. Not all adversity is abuse. The American dream is about overcoming and flourishing to the limits of your will power, taxing people who have succeeded to provide succor to people who don't care about themselves is corrosive to the national spirit. Come visit some time, I'll show you around.
>I don't know a single person who had an extremely cushy childhood who is 'on fire' for anything or striving for greatness.
You could argue our current president had a pretty cushy childhood. Not sure if he's 'on fire' or 'striving for greatness' though.
Social mobility is heavily determined by a combination of race, IQ, gender, social-class, where you were born, and physical / mental health. All of that is dictated by luck when you are born. Our ego tries to convince us that we're "self made" but for the most part life is determined by "luck of the draw".
>You could argue our current president had a pretty cushy childhood.
I think this kind of proves my point, people with cushy childhoods seem to turn out not great. I'd imagine he'd be a more effective leader if he spent more time overcoming adversity.
I went back in 09 and it was effectively equivalent in my mind to a big swap meet or a hippie craft faire. Light years of difference between that an firebombing riots.
I think that is a very weird conclusion. In Europe, because there is a safety net, there is mostly nothing to "climb out of". Working a menial job and/or playing video games before going on to university or getting a career is mostly ordinary. At least half the people I work with don't have bachelors degrees. The US actually has as high, and often higher, amounts of degrees per capita compared to European countries. Also none of my friends who were into computers growing up are doing badly relatively speaking. Which is largely a factor of the tech industry and not society.
Perhaps you wouldn't have had the same opportunities without a degree in Europe but have you considered the possibility that had you been in Europe it also would have been significantly more affordable and easier to get a degree given your situation?
Universal healthcare, for example, might have allowed your mental health issues to be addressed sooner. And even if they were addressed some people just need more time to complete their education. My sister really struggled with college due to her anxiety and depression and a four-year plan just wasn't going to work for her situation. Unfortunately, college is so expensive there is a lot of pressure to finish as soon as possible. Like you, she dropped out. Now she's in the most difficult situation: the burden of the student loans without the benefit of the piece of paper.
That doesn't happen in Europe. The affordability of university in Europe allows people who need a bit more time to figure things out or to work through their own personal struggles to actually complete the program. And even if someone drops out they aren't left with an unmanageable amount of debt that will follow them for the rest of their life.
The "safety nets" in Europe allow young 20-somethings the flexibility to figure things out for themselves without completely screwing up their future financially. I think we really underestimate the value of that flexibility for a young person in the United States.
I think about this a lot. If I were born in Europe, I would get a degree in mathematics and skate by doing easy work.
I was born American, I saw my chance for greatness, and I'm working on it. I'm currently a few years into my career - I've made a few hundred thousand for myself and at least a few million for my employers/society-writ-large, and I know that if I were European, I'd still be in school.
For me, the American system did a much better job of aligning my interests with society's interest.
The flip side is say, those, who, because there was no safety net, did not or were not able to turn their lives around the way you did and fell on really, really hard times - who didn't make it.
Temper this with the understanding that many workers don't have a good view of what their boss actually does and just assume that their boss puts in a third of the effort, when in fact he might put in much much more and the situation may also be difficult to fathom. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3156692
Seeing your boss do it teaches you to become the boss.
Seeing your neighbor do it teaches you to switch jobs and work 1/3 as hard.
The reason this doesn't work is the same incentives people are discussing. If there are high-paying easy jobs, people will demand them and theoretically the wages will fall until demand for the job tapers off.
All of this is a bit unfair though, because "having a social safety net where poor people can have vacations and a happy life" is a lot different than the myopic, mean-spirited conservative reply of "but my neighbor is a lazy jerk who makes more than me!"
Most people who can take "massive risks" end up, at worst, in the same situation as the average American if they fail. The average American, on the other hand, can't take those risks at all because they could end up homeless or with mountains of medical debt. Reducing how far you can fall would allow for more risks to be taken.
If the worst-case scenario is starting over perhaps the risk isn't so "massive." But when the worst-case scenario is starving then it's certainly a massive risk.
It’s a standard technique to stop the discussion. As soon as someone mentions inequality just shout “socialism” and “incentives “. Never mind that nobody argues that everybody should get exactly the same but the question is how much more of the pie the top should get and whether their share should keep increasing.
Only a couple of minutes ago you were saying that effort was the measure, not resources or risk. Which are entirely different concepts. I don't really see the point of arguing if we don't even have common understanding of different words.
> In the U.S. the class into which you are born determines the class you'll reach more than any other factor. Overwhelmingly. It's not even close.
Interesting...I've always thought of the US as being more of a meritocracy than the UK and Europe in general. I mean that is what the American dream is all about right?
Nope, I think in pretty much all states, property taxes fund schools in that district. So if your parents have an expensive home, it gathers lots of property tax, which goes mostly to the school in that neighborhood.
> American Dream
The so-called American Dream of social mobility does not exist anymore. It's a relic from the 50s, where a single income from a modest job could support an entire family, with a summer vacation every year.
The more modern examples of rags-to-riches bootstrapping-my-own-widget business are atypical.
The middle class is disappearing and it's not because they are upward bound.
> ...in pretty much all states, property taxes fund schools in that district...
Not in California. Public schools in CA get an essentially-uniform fee (from the state) based on attendance - about $40/day/child.
This helps make things more equal, and it is laudable.
Richer districts, however, have the ability to raise special property taxes, and use gifts from their wealthy residents, to supply extra services for their schools (like music/arts teachers, equipment, and facilities). So, even with a basically "equal" public system, rich districts end up with more.
This is a bit of a strawman argument: the parent post does not claim that everyone should have the same share of the pie, but that one should get a minimal share rather than nothing.
But does that incentive need to be so huge? Would innovation not happen anymore when the incentive was reduced to say 1%, 10% or 25% etc?
My motivation for doing what I do (which I'd classify as innovative) is not (just) the money. The money is nice too, but I don't think I could work in e.g. finance because I like technology and developing new stuff.
>but I don't think I could work in e.g. finance because I like technology and developing new stuff.
Right, most people don't want to work in finance. They do so because of the money. And generally financial CEOs/CFOs are smart enough to only pay workers what they have to. So the incentives are probably priced appropriately.
"Innovation" always takes a ton of muck work that has very little glory. I work at a chip company. For every engineer doing cutting edge work, you have 10 people doing very unsexy support tasks that are 100% necessary. These are roles people do because they pay well, not because they are interesting.
If I didn't get paid I would still be writing code, and a good deal more complicated, but I probably wouldn't care to make the output something users needed.
As for reducing the incentives, that is already done quite heavily: the US income tax about 1/3. With that you should be able to create a very effective safety line, it is not the successfuls fault it is pissed away on political corruption and a wasteful war on drugs/minorities.
Do you think that in the US that your effort put in is always reflected in your economic result? That those with lower economic results are only those who put in less effort than their neighbor?
I don't think anyone's suggesting everyone get the same portion. I just think that if you work 40 hours (or 35, or whatever we determine is "fulltime"), you should be able to support you and your dependents without going bankrupt if you get cancer.
> Seeing your neighbor put in a third of the effort and produce the same economic result is demoralizing.
Sorry to hear you are neighbors with a hedge fund manager. Do you have someone who inherited wealth on the other side of you too? That would be hell. ;)
As others have said, tons of people work harder than me but make less than me. My wife works at least as hard as I do for less pay.
It's less about how hard you work and more about what you know. But sometimes it's even less than that -- it's about perceived value rather than actual value. You could lose an important secretary and the business might lose a lot of money but often that isn't perceived like that.
I think you're creating a false dichotomy: either you accept a large gulf between those who have/have not and innovation or you create a society with a more even distribution and no innovation. As I read comments to socio-economic posts from people in various parts of Europe, it seems as though Germany, France, etc. are developing a middle way.
As a native to the US, I think we really need to pay more attention to the middle way. We could use a little more social harmony.
Why does every conversation about social safety nets or a more equitable distribution of wealth involve a rebuttal by one group that goes directly to fulminant communism, the likes of which has never existed?
And, how does that same group--that is supposedly so concerned about fairness--see as fair, a status quo which favors capital over labor to an untenable degree?
Because of internalized anti-Russia propaganda. If the person is young enough to have not been around during the Cold War, they just internalized it from their parents instead of the Government.
I think the idea that free-market capitalism drives innovation is not something you can take for granted at all. How many companies making copycat apps that serve no purpose or complete bullshit like Juicero get millions in funding?
The market rejecting a product has nothing to do with innovation. It's people saying I can't afford this or I don't value this at the price you're selling it at, or even I don't like the politics of someone that works for you. But it says nothing about if a product is innovative or not.
Innovation includes factors like actually being able to manufacture the product at a price people are willing to pay. If something is worth at most $10, coming up with a novel way to do it for less than $10 is innovative; coming up with a way to do it for $1000 is just wasting time.
It's easy to come up with crazy, impractical ideas. The essence of innovation is turning those ideas into sustainable, marketable, and thus profitable products.
> And if everyone is entitled to the same portion of the pie, what’s the incentive to work harder?
Huge strawman. Who's arguing for total and absolute equality of our outcomes?
I live in one of those "safety net" countries. We aren't all entitled to the same share of the pie, it's just that hard-working people don't have to go hungry or work 2 jobs just to get by, or at least not that often. People can get a very good and valued education without going into debt, and cancer doesn't make you go poor.
I get a greater share of the pie than most of my friends, because I was wise at choosing degree, and worked harder at it, and also I was lucky enough to be born with some mild gifts. But when friend's parents get sick, the families don't have to go into debt to get a great treatment.
I can't be expected to know how the economy and society will change, and whether they will leave me stranded after a bubble bursts or something. We can't all be great economists; not that they get it right either. I'll work my ass off to avoid that, but I'm glad to know my compatriots have my back (to some extent), as I have theirs now.
This is becoming more common, but has been true for a long time.
I remember working at the mall as a student in mid-90s, you could see that the key to being moderately successful in that environment was maintaining a car. Without a car, you couldn't move up to a management role (as you'd often have to come in early/late when bus transit was least effective), couldn't get a second job that paid more and you couldn't go to school to gtfo of retail.
If I put in my time, if I learn valuable skills, if I make smart choices, if I choose to do something complex over something menial, then I would want to see myself doing better than people who did not choose to do those things, no matter how nice and kind they may be.
Anything else, would be unfair and make me question the point of my efforts.
This assumes that poor people don't put in time, have valuable skills, make smart choices, or do complex work.
It also assumes that they had the choices better than the position they have.
There's also another assumption that the protections social safety nets completely eliminate incentive to put in effort. GP didn't say they moved to a nonexistant land where everyone is paid the exact same.
My choices were nothing special: Pay attention in school, do my homework, get good grades, pick a meaningful hobby, don't drink or do drugs, don't beat up other kids for fun, read books, work in a retail store, stay away from drama, get into a decent college and choose a good major, do internships, network, pick up recommendations, get interviews at tech companies, get tech job, start paying debts, save and invest money, move and get better tech job, save and invest more money, pay more debts, keep learning new skills, get even better tech job, pay off debt, save and invest even MORE money, get promotion, save and invest TONS of money... by now you can see compounding effects are kicking in and not much can stop me. All this from a poor boy born in Raleigh.
> My choices were nothing special: Pay attention in school, do my homework, get good grades, pick a meaningful hobby, don't drink or do drugs, don't beat up other kids for fun, read books, work in a retail store, stay away from drama
I concede that the rest of this list is choices you made, but I wonder how much of the part I quoted can be attributed to actual, conscious choice on your part.
Me personally, I'm in tech by pure luck. Because my mother let me watch Star Trek as a kid, because my father arranged for a PC in our house, because they gave me essentially unlimited and unsupervised time in front of it, and because I lucked out with education reform that transferred me out of the worst class in primary school to the best one in secondary school - only because of that, I picked up programming as a hobby. My job, my knowledge and my material situation are pretty much directly attributable to this. It wasn't my choice.
A lot of people think that their success was entirely by their own efforts. I'm with you, there was a lot of luck involved.
Things that contributed to my success that I had nothing to do with:
I'm white.
I was born in the US.
I'm male.
I have a reasonably high IQ.
My parents were middle class.
I was raised in a medium sized town on the west coast.
I was interested in computers and an early adopter.
I stumbled into jobs that let me use that interest and make a successful career out of it.
Certainly I made some good decisions along the way, but in different circumstances I could have turned out completely differently.
A lot of those things are conscious choices... I suppose getting good grades is tough if you are not intelligent and were born with a bad brain, or paying attention might be tough if you had ADD.
Some of it may just be a result of having decent parents that instill good values in you, like warning you about hanging with the wrong crowds or teaching you right from wrong or showing you interesting stuff.
I guess if one is looking for an excuse for their shitty upbringing, your parents are the first place to start, not society. Maybe if someone is a shitty parent we should be more aggressive about taking their kids away, instead of letting them reach maturity in their sorry state where it becomes increasingly harder and more expensive to get them back on their feet. Maybe people shouldn't be entitled to raising their kids automatically if they can't demonstrate they'll be a good parent. It may be the only way to solve the problem of poor and underemployed people breeding out of control and creating more poor and underemployed.
> A lot of those things are conscious choices... I suppose getting good grades is tough if you are not intelligent and were born with a bad brain, or paying attention might be tough if you had ADD.
Or you were surrounded by such people, or the teachers and your parents didn't successfully convince you that school is important. Or the teachers were plain bad. Or you had too much resistance to bullshit.
> I guess if one is looking for an excuse for their shitty upbringing, your parents are the first place to start, not society.
Yeah, probably, and they could recursively pawn off half of the blame to their parents. My point here wasn't to assign blame, though, but to point out that the factors most impactful in one's economic prosperity are essentially beyond one's control. Blaming people born into poverty, or set on a course for poverty early in their childhood, or thrown into poverty by totally random factors, is not fair.
I believe that society has a duty to reduce this variance that's beyond individual control. To an extent, it does already, but we need to do more. It's in our own best interests - happy society is a stable society, and the more opportunities people have, the more productive and innovative the whole. There will be poor people and rich people for as long as you can rank and sort people by some attribute - i.e. forever. But that doesn't mean the poor must suffer.
> Maybe people shouldn't be entitled to raising their kids automatically if they can't demonstrate they'll be a good parent.
That's... hard. Right now, I think it would lead to much more suffering than it would help.
> It may be the only way to solve the problem of poor and underemployed people breeding out of control and creating more poor and underemployed.
That's not how it happens, though. It's not the individuals, and especially not poor people, that create underemployment, it's the market that does. Gainfully employed people end up unemployed, because the job market moved in some direction, raising some people to prosperity nearly by accident (like me and tech; I learned to program out of my own intrinsic drives, I didn't even consider profitability of this until way into my university years), and grounding others.
Also, if we want to create a society of people successful in the market, then there's a whole disconnect between choices they need to make, and the choices society teaches them. What society teaches is: be helpful, be hardworking, conscientious, moral. What to do to succeed on the market: always look for reward, cut corners, be comfortable about scamming people and making the world worse, be amoral. The question is, if we're blaming people for making poor economic choices, are we really willing to entertain a society in which people make right economic choices?
When I came to America I had nothing: no social network, no college degree, no money!
But America is a place full of opportunity and so after 10 years here and a lot of work I can look back and say that am much happier than I ever was in Europe since the day I got here! The deal is simple: work hard and the sky is the limit.
I started a family, have worked at Fortune 20 companies in management positions, bought a house a couple years ago. I am gonna retire at 50.
I hated living in Europe, the socialism makes people dead on the inside and there is no upward mobility for people that weren’t born into the right circumstances with the right degree’s and relationships :(
America has been excellent to me and I have done my best to do my part of the deal!
It’s not for everyone of course, there is some nice things about Europe and their socialism too...but overall I hated it simple because of what it does to people’s spirits.
America sure has its own problems...but IMO Europe is off much worse
Statistically speaking, you're wrong; class mobility in Western Europe is equal to or better than in the US.
Good thing you found a country where the culture might have helped you do things you didn't feel like doing back home, but don talk about it as though your personal experience is universal to all, because the numbers tell otherwise.
The issue with most of the studies that say this is how they measure mobility. If the focus is on the ability to move up in income percentiles, then it's an unfair comparison.
Why? Because while it sounds nice to say "avg german child moves from top 50% to top 65% while avg american only moves from top 50% to top 55%", American salaries are much higher, and cost of housing is on par or lower than Europe, so top 55% is a much higher financial increase for the American.
Now that you say it, I see a lot of these comparisons talking about odds of a person born in one quartile/quintile ending up in a different bucket as an adult. Often, it's specifically cited as the chance of a person moving between the highest and lowest buckets. Which on reflection is actually a composite measure of income variability, inequality, and societal wealth.
Running those stats alongside a Gini coefficient would help somewhat, since lower coefficients imply more similar gaps between adjacent buckets. But even that's not enough on several levels. It wouldn't distinguish where inequality falls, particularly patterns like the US and Singapore with large variation inside the outer buckets, so a Lorenz curve would be more useful. It also doesn't clarify the raw size of the changes - position in society matters, but it also matters whether a ten-percentile jump is a 10% gain in purchasing power or a 100% gain.
I'm a bit embarrassed, really. That's a massive gap in the utility of those stats, and I never even considered how many different things the same numbers could mean.
It's something I didn't realize until recently myself. There are several things Europe does better than the US in, but earning power is not one of them.
> If only people had free mobility...maybe everybody could just love in a place that works for them
It would be nice to have free mobility + something like a low-level UBI, for people who really need to be helped and not fall through the cracks. A rather low UBI that focused on just ensuring the basic necessities of life would most likely be quite affordable (e.g. in terms of overall tax burden, or fraction of GDP), and probably wouldn't even be perceived as "socialism". Then we'd probably see places like Europe lose a lot of their former attractiveness as they'd be left trying to manage their unwieldly, dinosaur-socialist states, as anyone with even the tiniest shred of ambition and initiative left would immediately flee for the more open parts of the world.
I know HN loves politics but I made my original post in the spirit of seeing replies like yours where it's less about ascertaining which side is "best" and more speaking about your lived experience and things you liked and didn't. It's great that you've been there so long and are defending the values the US has because (I suppose) they match those that have always been yours.
I think that's exactly the discussion we should have re: this tech/non-tech divide. Whether what we want is to help our neighbors, or live near only people who can (and choose to) help themselves. And there's definitely people in both camps and you know where you are because you live through both, like you and I did, and get an uncomfortable or bleak feeling at some point, not because of watching election talk or economic lectures.
Also I'm actually Canadian so I don't know where the thread's obsession with communism and Sweden or wherever has come from. The poor people on the bus from my OP see the same sky you guys do ;-)
I don't know, I upvoted it... I think it's good other immigrants are giving their perspective. Personally I was a cultural mismatch and that's why I left... that doesn't mean nobody has these particular values or that everybody shares mine.
Probably due to the strong political and moral statement in the middle. "in Europe, the socialism makes people dead on the inside" definitely requires some justification. Without that digression it's a great comment about the potential upside that exists in America.
Thanks for the feedback...let me elaborate on that a bit more then:
I was born and raised in Europe and lived there 30 years.
What I will share here is from personal expierence and will be a generalization (because there is of course always exceptions).
What I meant by dead inside is that people there don’t do anything with the safety and freedom socialism provides. They don’t spend more time with their kids or follow the arts. People had no dreams or ambitions :(
There first thing that struck me coming to America was that not only did everyone have a dream, but they were actively pursuing it.
Examples:
1. the barber where I got my first haircut was playing in a rock band and about to head out for a 4 month tour.
2. A friends girlfriend went from being waitress to becoming CEO of a organization everybody here knows
3. Lots of friend of mine are active as mentor for local underprivileged kids on the weekends
I come from a small town where you’d think there is a community and people support each other...but socialism erodes those ties. I have never seen anyone do something good for their neighbors in Europe...it’s the governments job to do so...which leads to nobody lifting a finger.
In Europe people actively try to prevent you from raising from the middle class by talking you down and being unsupportive. Additionally the government doesn’t waste a day to put another bump on the road to keep you where you are.
But to their defense they do a decent job of helping people at the bottom to get closer to the middle class
Because it sounds like anti-socialist pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps propaganda. It's not wholesome because it's not how things work for most people. The commenter could be very lucky or (more likely) very blind to real privileges they benefited from in their story. But their story fits a narrative that allows people to feel comfortable with their wealth while poverty is rampant around them, so such people find it "wholesome".
That seems like an extreme reaction. I don't think you're supposed to downvote someone's lived experience just because it doesn't apply to everyone. (Those few personal stories that do apply to everyone are pretty boring, usually involving bodily functions.)
It would be nice if more people could experience such things. That makes the story good, not bad. It is something we want to maximize, not minimize.
Personal stories are fine, bit they should limit their conclusions to themselves and not project or over generalize upon others, at least not without pointing to data or a well tested model that backs up their assertions. Statements like "socialism makes people dead inside" are as vaccuous as the same assertion would be if applied to capitalism.
> I eventually went back to a country with a social safety net where the working class people on my bus talk about their vacations.
I sincerely wish that everyone who wanted socialism just went to a socialist country instead of trying to import it here, and I really appreciate that you did. Thank you! We can admire and appreciate each other from afar. (100% genuine, well intended comment here). My family came to the US from a socialist country, seeking freedom and capitalism. I have no idea what to do now that socialism is arriving here.
This is the United States sentiment of "you should make your own way" when 99% of the time it's all luck.
It's luck based on what race you were born as, gender, social class, geography, family situation, and mental / physical health you end up with. If you're a middle-class white guy from the suburbs of a major metro your "social mobility" into a "tech job in SV" is a bit higher than most people.
Our egos like to think we're responsible for all of our success when most of the time it's luck.
Ah yes, poor because they are not smart. Because the US is a perfect meritocracy. This is ludicrously off the mark and shows how out of touch people really are about how the world works for others.
Having grown up poor I'd say it's not that poor people are not as smart, it's that they are extremely anti-intellectual. I tried my hardest to get family/friends/community into computers (or really any intellectual pursuit). Resistance was extreme to say the least. Reading a book is looked down upon. Computers are for "nerds". I used too many "five dollar words"...
If you want a real view of the situation you have to place some blame on the people making choices holding themselves back. It's not that easy to see if you didn't grow up in that environment though.
Intellectuals can be poor and/or make bad choices too. I know plenty of smart people who are struggling to make ends meet (me included, to a certain extent, and I make 2-3x more than a lot of these people).
But you're right that there is a culture of anti-intellectualism amongst a certain segment of poor people.
But that means that most kids who grow up in that culture are going to absorb those same influences. It doesn't seem fair to then blame them for the society they came from.
I'm definitely not blaming them for anything, if anything that's the parent comment. I would love to find a way to encourage people in those environments. I think some things have been successful at improving that. Sesame Street, as one example (at least according to some documentaries I've watched).
I will say, though, that I went to an average public school and did my best not to draw too much attention to myself because I was one of the smarter kids and would sometimes be picked on. Not usually too bad, but enough that I went through periods of depression during my high school years.
It probably stunted my trajectory (along with some other choices I made) in my career, but I'm doing well enough. It helps that I was naturally interested in computers, which ended up being a route to well-paying jobs, but if I was naturally interested in art more (and I sure doodled my fair share and have released games with art that I've made in the past), I might be one of those poor people that people such as the parent assume to be anti-intellectual today.
Hell, I know a super talented artist and animator that ended up taking a programmer boot camp years later in order to get a better paying job, and it just makes me feel sad, because he deserves to be paid well for following his passion for being as talented as he is, but this world is not set up for that, unfortunately.
You shouldn't blame them, but the exit from poverty is clearly marked STEM and it's really up to the individual to take it. Having come from this culture, the best advice I can give is that focusing on individual responsibility is most helpful. There's general a lot of self-pity and "us vs them" mentality when really the problem is more "us vs us". If you haven't heard of it, check out crab bucket mentality. It's very real and the only way I can see to escape it is to put all of your faith into yourself and your own plans.
It's remarkable this isn't the subject of discussion ever. I'm not saying this would lead to anything productive, but at the same time, it's at the absolute core of the problem.
Maybe if the "favored class" Americans took the bus or went to the laundromat like I did for years they'd want poor people to do well too.
You're making two assumptions: (1) There's a favored class, and (2) The favored class does not want poor people to do well. Both assumptions are wrong.
Yeah, it's not as if America is like some episode of 'Star Trek' where one group of a planet's inhabitants consider themselves superior because their skin is of one particular hue, and historically have used that as an excuse to exploit and oppress the other groups.
In places like Amsterdam the poor get a free car (Canta) and a free washing machine (Miele) from the city. It's good that they don't endure hardship, but it also doesn't give them the perspective that you experienced and they may never have enough incentive to make their life better. If people in Amsterdam had to go to the laundromat that could give them the push to find a good job so that they can earn a nice washing machine.
> In places like Amsterdam the poor get a free car (Canta)
What? A Canta isn't a 'free car' for poor people. It's a mobility vehicle, which you apply for if you're eligible.
As for the washing machine thing: the only thing I found with 5 minutes of google-fu was that there's a on-loan system for people who are already dependent on government grants to be given one if their old one fails (and a few additional requirements). Furthermore: there are barely any laundromats in the Netherlands; it's not part of our culture at all. Hell, I'd be surprised if there are more than 50 in the entirety of Amsterdam (population 800K-900K), and those that are present would probably be near the centre where the hostels are, rather than in the suburbs where the poorer people live.
I don't know if that really makes sense. By that logic, the more miserable we make life for poor people, the more motivation they will have to get out of that life.
A good social safety net means that poor people are not so busy trying to survive that they actually have the opportunity to improve their lot in life if they so choose. If you're not burning up 4 hours a day commuting and several hours a week washing clothes, you have more time to read to your children, or take some community college classes.
There will be people who decide that a life relying on the safety net is fine for them. Is that a worse thing than there being no safety net and people who have to drive to succeed are largely prevented from doing so? Or people who are working hard getting their lives destroyed due to one streak of bad luck?
Sure, you don't want to design a system that lays benefits on so thick that it creates a strong disincentive to work. But any worthwhile safety net is going to have some level of abuse, which is a tradeoff that has to be managed with rules/enforcement/management. On the flip side, any system that allows unfettered capitalism will be abused by the unethical. So you create a system of regulations to ensure a fair market, while knowing that some people/companies are going to find ways to abuse the system anyway.
The point of the safety net in my opinion is to ensure equality of opportunity, not equality of ends. So you want to strive to ensure that children have an opportunity to learn and become productive members of society, in spite of the circumstances of their parents. You want to make sure that people who experience bad luck such as unplanned illness, economic downturns, natural disasters, etc. are not left totally destitute.
If "hammock" means a place you just comfortably rest in, then why should it?
Or, turn it around: Why should you take the results of my work and give them to someone who won't (not can't) work? Why should someone who deliberately chooses not to try be considered entitled to me supporting them?
Someone who needs help? Sure, let's help them. Someone who just wants to be lazy? It's really unclear why they are more entitled to my money than I am.
The problem is that as a society we believe that people need to work 40 hours a week to survive.
We replace people with robots and retain the same output. We are more productive than ever before, yet work the same amount. Physical and uneducated work is being replaced by automation, yet we expect these people replaced by robots to find jobs to survive where there are now none.
I don't believe in Universal Basic Income though, we live in a society and it is our duty to contribute to that society. I think the answer is that we need to move towards a shorter workday. Raise wages and shorten work hours. People used to work 12 hours a day, now we work 8, why not move to a 6 hour workday? Eventually we may move into a post-scarcity society where all our basic needs are automated and work becomes an optional extra, but we're not at that point yet.
> I don't believe in Universal Basic Income though, we live in a society and it is our duty to contribute to that society.
There are plenty of things people do that are valuable to society yet are not captured in the GDP, and are thus not highly valued by contemporary society. They range from visiting and looking after elder parents, playing with your children, writing poetry etc. Then there are undervalued activities which, due to being undervalued, are often rejected by people who would be good at them but can't afford a sacrifice (e.g. teaching, various kinds of social work, etc).
As the marginal cost of production asymptotes towards nil, peoples' sense of self worth from work (which is largely a modern belief anyway dating from the middle of the industrial revolution) can be sloughed off.
> I think the answer is that we need to move towards a shorter workday. Raise wages and shorten work hours.
I agree that we should do this urgently, but beware a belief in the "lump of labor fallacy".
Also, because people currently do develop a sense of self worth from their work, we should be investing heavily in helping people readjust to the loss of economic value in their work. For example governments offer retraining programs, but while a 20 year old coal miner may be able to find a job repairing trucks or writing reactive web apps, a 60 year old coal miner, who after two years of training becomes a 62 year old auto mechanic or web developer, will struggle to find employment. These people (both at 20 and 60) need assistance that also preserves their dignity.
I knew a guy who worked 6 months a year doing contract work and then spent the other 6 months on hobbies and personal projects.
I remember asking him if he gets bored during those 6 months not working and he said to me "I don't base my life enjoyment off of making someone else money". That advice has really stuck to me and its really cool to see the electronics projects he builds in those 6 months.
My father had a co-worker who did this. 8 months in the DC office doing construction cost management consulting, 4 months in Montana hunting (he was into falconry, archery, and conservation of all the natural resources needed to sustain his hobbies).
He also used to raise his birds in the office (when they were newly hatched) - that was pretty darn cool as a 1st grader.
I have done similar things and it generally isn't. Or it is getting very hard to make it so.
Western society has become much more hierarchical in recent years. It is harder and harder to find any "cracks in system" on a fundamental level. Even if you would consider leisure to be neutral, and not in need of meaning, most people aren't even starting from a neutral point. So if you do something else you end up being underprivileged rather than in leisure.
Not unlikely, which is why I wrote somewhat vaguely. Ironically I don't have time to read your resources at the moment. My point is that there just isn't that much room for other things these days. So many things, from a $5 coffee to housing, is based on the idea that everyone is working all the time. You can of course quit working, pay the same rent and lock yourself in a room trying to forget the outside world until you can't. But I am not sure that is a road to happiness either. I mean, many people can barely achieve "weekend glory" these days.
I think I get what you're saying, now. Sounds like more of a critique of North American/protestant work ethic coupled with our acclimating to convenience.
I think that's probably a whole other subject to be tackled.
Aristotle's core point above would be along the lines of:
Relaxation (in order to) -> Work (in order to) -> Leisure (the goal, for its own sake)
Leisure and relaxation being entirely different activities, or lack thereof.
Maybe think of leisure in this case being the activity of passion/deep interest or communal good or else that might not come in returns that pay for any other aspect of your life directly. Work being the activity (that you may well enjoy enough, or have interest in) that pays for everything and allows you time and/or resources for leisure. Relaxation is what helps you essentially stay sane and healthy in order to follow through with the rest.
So it seems like you aren't taking on peoples' ability for leisure, but NA society's values that prevent it [for most people].
Right. I am saying that if you take time off you end up being at odds with much of society. You realize that many things, even leisure activities, now only exists in relation to work. And after not working for a while few of these things are exciting anymore.
So I am not saying it isn't a good idea. Just that it is hard from a practical perspective. Which is why younger people who take sabbaticals often end up in e.g. Asia.
I don't think it needs to be that grand of a scale to fulfill the reasoning.
OP's example was a fellow taking time off and exercising his other interests in electronics by learning and experimenting.
Another example might be a hobby. A hobby is a great example of a leisure activity as its [usually] done completely for its own sake. For instance, a sheet metal worker who spends much of their time off work playing in an amateur cricket league [however unlikely and obscure an image that might be].
I don't think I understand, though, how you mean it puts anyone at odds with society. Could you elaborate?
To take the example at hand, for many young(ish) people taking time off work to learn electronics wouldn't necessary be a nice experience. Because their lives exist to a large extent in relation to work. They have moved to a new city, because of work. Where the live in a small apartment, to be close to work. They have friends, from work. And they have coffee on their way to work, to talk about work or even to do work.
They couldn't just take time off and have a similar life. By leaving work they would lose a lot of the connection to their de facto lives. It wouldn't be worth living in an expensive city, in a small apartment and have expensive coffee "just" to learn electronics. Increasingly the things in people's lives aren't "neutral". Their small apartments are made for going to work from, not necessarily for doing things in. But you can't necessarily move either without losing context.
On the other hand if you are already established. You have a house, a family, friends outside work and whatever else you need, it isn't necessarily that hard to go down in the basement and learn electronics instead of going to work for six months out of the year. Because your environment is "neutral" and exists whether you go to work short-term or not. A lot of people aren't really established like that though.
To me, your example sounds more like a lifestyle choice, my friend.
My advice to the person in question would be to pull your head out of work and sample a little more of that big city while you're paying so much to be there.
There's no reason why every moment of time that isn't paid for by work to be spent on work, outside of that being a choice (given our current example, which sounds like a well-enough-to-do tech worker).
Personally, I couldn't live that way, and I'm probably filling out a few of your checkboxes above. I like the people I work with, but I value [and fear] time too much to give it all into my job—be it tasks, networking, socializing, whatever.
The example you extended sounds more like a problem of agency than one of [a lack of] leisure.
> The example you extended sounds more like a problem of agency than one of [a lack of] leisure.
It is. But you can't just take time of work, not replace it with anything and expect to be able to have some sort of leisure. At least not in my experience. I don't live in a big city anymore, but that doesn't really fix things. The equation is as hard as in a city, just in a different way. That is why people like 'bunnie' who do electronics as a passion end up in Asia. There are just so much easier to live and so many more things to do. People who stay e.g. in the US end up moving around different small to medium size cities instead looking for something that makes sense.
I think you're misunderstanding what I've been saying about leisure, then. I've not suggested you take time off work, nor to fill your time with nothing.
Work is additive, "free" time is not subtractive.
I don't understand any else of what you're saying. Electronics is something you can do anywhere, and I'd argue there's a gaping need in much of the spaces in between towns and cities in North America...
I think you're just discussing personal preferences at the end there.
I guess it is hard to explain if you haven't experienced it.
It is just that doing electronics on the weekend when you are tired from work, you don't have enough time to finish even part of something, in a place where parts are expensive or you have to wait weeks for delivery isn't that enjoyable.
Doing electronics in a place where you don't have to worry about rent, you have plenty of time, there are plenty of other things to do, parts are cheap and there is a community is a totally different thing.
Far more people are going to enjoy the second scenario.
Here is an article about Shenzhen [0]. The middle part is about people doing electronics for fun. This is probably around a year before Scotty, in the article, started Strange Parts on youtube.
Does this guy have a family and kids? I worked with a guy who does a similar thing. In fact his contract just ended. The only reason he said he’s able to is because he’s older, single, and doesn’t have kids.
I have an old college classmate who does this with a twist: he has a number, and when he hits that number he stops for the rest of the year. Last time I spoke with him that was about six months.
It was just stuff like building power supplies and little Tesla coils. Every few weeks I'd get sent cool videos like a lightbulb being wirelessly lit up by the coil.
Seems like everyone "knows a guy" that does that but when I attempted the same thing it failed miserably. I took a paltry three months off and then every recruiter and hiring manager was immediately suspicious of me when I started going on interviews again. They all suspected I was in jail or something. Meanwhile, I literally just took three months to catch up on my life.
In my current role, I could probably work 3 days a week and meet my same obligations. Our scrum master could be fired and nobody would even notice.
Higher wages with shorter work hours would be a great step in the right direction. I believe Keynes even suggested it.
But, a post-scarcity society, where labor is nearly valueless, still requires everyone have their needs met regardless of what they "own". But in that future as through all the past, most people are born owning little more than their labor.
So a post-scarcity society does not just require the technology we are approaching. It also requires a radically different perception of ownership. This is the harder problem.
In the language of today, it means a person without property and whose labor will always be essentially valueless, gets the produce of someone else's robots, ownership of which will be passed down though generations. Changing this is close to unthinkable in current society.
But unless this massive social shift emerges, it appears that larger and larger portions of society will be converted into a euphemistically renamed servant class where their labor has not intrinsic value except prestige or amusement value to the person hiring.
Pardon the following if it's upsetting, but I notice our current path is to add more and more store clerks, waiters, maids, sign spinners etc. Not because machines/systems can't do theses things (amazon, self serve restaurants, billboards) but because the customer enjoys/gets a kick out of them.
On the current path, what would have become a post-scarcity society will instead have vast numbers of such people earning their minimum requirements at such jobs. Plus perhaps homeless people permanently converted into a prison workforce.
> Higher wages with shorter work hours would be a great step in the right direction. I believe Keynes even suggested it.
No he didn’t. He suggested we’d have chosen to work fewer hours and have more leisure because we could afford both greater consumption and greater leisure than were possible when he wrote. Higher wages than now, with shorter work hours than now is possible only with growth in economic productivity so we can produce more (goods, services) with less (material input, labour). We can’t just decide to work 20 hours a week and maintain our current standard of living by fiat.
Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)
Measured in 1960 US$ the UK’s GDP per capita was 1181[1]. In 2016 US$ U.K. GDP per capita was 40,341[2]. Even if we assume the 2016 dollar is worth half as much as the 1960 one because of inflation the average U.K. resident is 15 times better off. If people wanted to live in 1960s houses with what people in the 1960s would have considered a lavish standard of living they could do it easily by working half the year, or having a part time job. The 1960s were already a hell of a lot better than 1930, when the essay was written.
If you want to live in the paradise Keynes described you can. That’s what the financial independence, retire early subculture is about[3]. Work for 20 years and retire instead of 40 or 50. Or those people who contract half the year and spend half of it in Thailand. If we wanted to take more of our compensation in leisure we absolutely could. People choose not to. They need to keep up with the Jones.
We have made those strides in productivity and they all went to rent seeking and taxation/regulation of small businesses and personal conduct (see also $150 red light cameras and $350,000 school admin salaries)
$150 for going on red light I have no problem with, do it few times and have driver's license revoked temporarily (as in Switzerland, on top of massive fee). That's how innocent people are killed, be it pedestrians or other drivers, by arrogant/DUI folks.
I understand that on empty roads at 3am in the middle of nowhere there are no consequences whatsoever, but generally that's a big infraction. Just watch few car crash compilations, ignoring lights is like 50% of the reason and the results are often very grim
You might be assuming the cameras work as they do in Switzerland.
In the US a common scenario is a private company installs the cameras for free and gets to collect most of the revenue. They adjust the yellow timing downward so that you don't have time to stop between the light turning yellow and it going to red. Then they send tickets in the mail to people who ran the light. Then if you do a study proving that they adjusted the timing downward to unsafe levels as a state sponsored scam, you get arrested and fined for "unlicensed practice of engineering".
Is there really such a thing as a post-scarcity society? Certain things will always be scarce. Beachfront real estate. Penthouses. Apartments next to a park or downtown. Sure we can get arguably get to a point where energy, food, and maybe small to medium sized items are free but if Jill Smith wants 400 cars where is she going to put them? Even if we all beam into cyberspace there will not be unlimited storage nor unlimited computation. There will still need to be a way to either get more from the powers that be for special needs or it will be traded leading back to have and have-nots.
Parent (and the article, although it fails to clearly draw the obvious link) could more accurately be said to be referring to a post-labor scarcity society.
In other words, a society where there is more labor available than we actually need to fulfill demand (caveat: in high-productivity industries).
To illustrate, take the article's example: the shift from an agricultural to industrial economy. Someone walks off a farm, they get employment in a factor. That factory worker can make 10-100 widgets / hr based on their labor.
Now look at the post-industrial economy we live in now. In software and heavily automated industries, the same single laborer can make 10-1,000,000 "copies" of their work product.
It seems fairly obvious there would be a breaking point at which productivity is so high that it disengages from driving demand. One worker can only buy so much, and his or her fellows can't buy anything because they're not employed.
This gets even more "extreme" when we talk about digital artifacts ... once the initial labor of creating a piece of music, or film, or game, or program is expended, the cost of infinitely reproducing copies of those approaches zero in many cases.
Amen to that - more than this, I worry that "we" didn't decide anything, but rather that keeping people in a state of imagined scarcity proved handy for preserving the status quo in terms of concentration of power.
What would a population do if people were able to act freely and do the things they cared about? How many folks would be fighting climate change but are _instead_ doing Dumb Shit That Doesn't Matter (most jobs) because we have to pay bills?
How many people work a job that is at best a net neutral to society, and at worst parasitic, because it personally enriches them, but makes everyone else poorer? How many are doing that only because they decided to buy a house close to work, so now they have a pile of debt, so now they _have_ to spend their time working for the last owner of the house instead of for themselves?
Why do we make it so goddamned hard to live cheap? Want university? That'll be an arm and a leg. Want a house? Expect to pay many, many years of income for it. Decide you're ok with a small home and riding your bike or taking the bus? Screw you, that's illegal, build a damn parking spot and make sure you meet minimum size reqs and oh btw you're not allowed to build in this old neighborhood because the existing homeowners' cartel made it illegal.
You can build a modest home for ~$40,000. It's expensive because we made it (mostly) illegal to build new homes anywhere near jobs. Not only that, instead of putting homes where they're cheap to serve (close to electric, water, etc) we push everyone out to the middle of nowhere where it's massively expensive to provide services. Not to mention that instead of relying on your feet and a $300 bicycle to get around you now need a gigantic money incinerator (a car) for basic mobility.
God help you if you get sick or hurt. A broken wrist could bankrupt plenty of people in the wrong circumstances.
How many people make six figures (yes, that's a lot of money relatively speaking - try leaving SF before sneering) and still manage to somehow worry about money? How the fuck did we decide this was the best way to build a society? Why did we make everything so goddamn expensive?
Building supplies and calories are cheap after all - practically free.
Maybe it's because keeping a population in fear ensures they can't organize to better their situation at the cost of tearing down existing power structures.
Here's another perspective you might not be accounting for. Currently, people who work elite jobs tend to live around people with elite interests. If you're an upper class developer, you'll live in a neighborhood with other developers, lawyers, doctors, white-collar workers.
If somehow housing were made affordable everywhere, how would that pattern be maintained? By definition, there would be nothing stopping "Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel" (from The Simpsons) from moving to Mountain View, CA.
So you end up with a situation where elite software engineers are trying to sleep, because they have work tomorrow, and Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel is keeping them awake by blowing up fireworks or firing his shotgun at 2am. What recourse do you have? You can't kick Cletus out--that would violate all sorts of human rights and so on.
So when you look at it this way, higher price housing is almost inevitable. Before you can have any realistic hope of addressing it, you need to figure out what to do with Cletus!
Thanks for pointing out a motivation for density restrictions that isn't purely cartel-ish. I appreciate the perspective.
I'm not sure what to do about Cletus, to be honest. I'd like to say "enforce the laws about making tons of noise and discharging weapons" but I know that can be a fool's errand in some cases. After all, I was a loud student once.
Ultimately I think that neighborhoods near the core of cities need to grow (densify), as they did for most of history, and the existing homeowners can enjoy the consolation of watching their home become substantially more valuable as a result of somebody wanting to put 10 apartments there instead of one house. It's telling that in many places the most desirable neighbourhoods are the ones built _before_ current laws made them illegal.
'course, I just bought a house in the country, so we'll see how that goes.
Also, Cletus was a caricature... Poor people can be quiet and rich people can be loud.
I've spent a lot of time living in poorer areas and I can tell you from experience, noise ordinances are not effective. It'll take months or years for Cletus to work his way through the court system for noise pollution, and in the meantime, he's not going to be very happy with his neighbors for reporting him. You'd better hope he doesn't do something in retaliation! Oh, and while you're twiddling your thumbs waiting for his eviction, ten more will move in down the street. You know, because you magically made all the houses $40,000.
It's not that simple though - if you read the article it talks about how
1: High paying jobs aren't really increasing in number but are becoming ever better paid
and
2: Low paying jobs are exploding in number but not in wages paid.
So part of the problem is that there aren't many mid level jobs that get people in and help them then increase. Tech doesn't really automate the stuff that's not super low level (like cleaning toilets, or mopping floors), and it doesn't do stuff at the high end (M&A banking, negotiating policy, writing code). But it eats a ton of stuff in the middle.
I think a three day weekend with a "day of service" is a much better solution.
Working 8 hours a day already leaves enough downtime in my schedule to get bored, but not enough to turn that boredom into something productive. 6 hours would be outright hell.
The problem is, the extra two hours don't really provide me with any compelling new opportunities to contribute! That's barely enough time to get at a school and volunteer and get back to work. Barely enough time to get into the flow of things if I'm volunteer programming. Etc.
But an entire additional day off of work would be great. I could commit to do real things. I could bake so much bread for the church's food shelter. I could build an entire web app using the city's open data to help people avoid tickets. I could spend an entire day in a classroom. Etc.
If you distribute service days evenly and treat them like "just another business function" for businesses, then you could pretty much replace the teaching aspect of higher ed with volunteers. 2-3 people prep+lecture+office hours one day a week, 2-3 people are spending all their service hours helping design curriculum, 2-3 people do a day of grading each week. A <10 person team can teach an entire university course @ 1 day per person per week. Multiply across the whole city, every company. Universal 4 year higher education for "free". And there's still tens of millions of volunteer days per week left over for all the other stuff.
I'd prefer the shorter days. A 6 hour day would leave more time for daily exercise and cooking healthy food for dinner and lunch the next day. I would probably also feel more relaxed on the weekend to work on personal programming projects.
People can contribute in many ways, I don't agree that only contributions that furthers someone else's economic goals should be judged worthy.
That said, I don't think we will see shortening of the workday without some sort of incentive for employers. From their point of view, why not simply make more money? Indeed, for many boards of directors profits is the only goal.
IMHO, this is where a basic income would fit in. Perhaps when people are allowed more freedom of movement they will find novel ways to contribute to society.
The problem with moving from 8 hours to 6 hours is that there will always be workers willing to do 10 hours or even 12 hours. These workers end up producing 50-100% more with about the same overhead. If you have a worker that will work 12 hours, you only need to pay for one health insurance plan as opposed to having to pay for two insurance plans if you need to get two 6-hour employees.
On top of that, the 12-hour employee is accruing experience at twice the speed of the 6-hour employee. For some fields, putting in the additional hours can make the employee willing to work more hours more productive on a per hour basis. Obviously this doesn't apply to all professions, but for many professions it does apply to some degree.
You'd basically have to outlaw working more than 6 hours to keep overachievers from taking all the good jobs.
Our productivity has indeed grown immensely, but, for good or for bad, instead of making things cheaper we're directing all our free resources to making them better.
Instead of cheaper cars we're making safer cars, instead of cheaper houses we're building bigger houses, and so on.
A very large percentage of free resources are being hoarded in wealth and cash piles, would you actually claim a company like Apple is directing all of it's free resources to making better products? Why the stock buybacks and 200 billion pile?
It's a mistake to think of money as resources--as if money is something we dig out of the ground and need in order to make our machines run. No-one eats cash. Whatever could be done if Apple spent its cash, could be done if Apple didn't spend its cash. Money's only purpose is to incentivize people to do things, so you're basically asking Apple to play king and start directing society. I'd prefer they just sit on their money rather than that!
That's capital. It gets given back to investors, who invest it elsewhere. They don't just stick it under the mattress. It is moved from Apple to a place where it can be put to use. With a buyback (or dividend) apple is saying "we ran out of productive ways to spend this money"
Even if they did just keep a few billion dollars of physical cash in a vault somewhere, that would just increase the purchasing power of the remainder. The total value of all currency in circulation (all forms combined) tends toward the total value of all of the goods available for purchase.
Taking money out of circulation is a bit like making a loan to everyone in proportion to the amount of currency they hold; when you do decide to put it back into circulation, that increase in value (deflation) represents the interest you receive on the loan.
But I DON'T work just 40 hours a week. I work more like 50-55 hours most weeks. I LIKE my work, and I don't want to do less.
I agree that the belief that we must work 40 hours a week in order to be a good person lies at the root of many of society's problems. And I do think that people ought to contribute to society. But somehow that does not lead me away from the idea of a Universal Basic Income, but instead leads me to believe that something roughly that shape is what we need to save society.
I guess the key difference is who defines "contribute to society". If it is employers, then we need a system where as many people as possible must report to an employer who controls how they spend their time. (Requiring people to get paid a salary seems to do that quite effectively.) If it is the government that defines how one ought to "contribute to society" then we get mandated work programs. But if you believe that each individual is the best judge of how they ought to "contribute to society" then it leads to the belief that we should order society such that as many individuals as possible have a choice about how they spend their time. Some variant of UBI seems to me like a good way to achieve that goal in a society no longer tightly constrained by scarcity.
> Well, with a sufficiently progressive tax, you might choose to stop volunteering your time for what will be diminishing returns in income.
A solution that incentivizes successful people to hold themselves back from fulfilling their potential is going to make society poorer overall. If you want to redistribute wealth, you should incentivize the creation of wealth so you have enough to move around.
Just because you don’t have to work doesn’t mean you wouldn’t want to anyway - perhaps money is not the only motivation for working when your basic needs are met.
But this theoretical Elon Musk would need to raise capital, correct? Would people who provide the capital still be taxed so much they don't find it worthwhile?
If not, you've just created a class who is going to be making a ton more money than anyone else.
> We replace people with robots and retain the same output
That's not how manufacturing works. Most manufacturing still requires human input because robots aren't very flexible. You have to build an entire line around a robot which means you adapt slowly to changes in the market.
What is your evidence that UBI reduces people’s contribution to society? If you’re referring to people not “working” in the traditional sense, not all contributions map nicely to economic output.
Exactly, the UBI would enable people to be paid for often non paying contributions like open source contributions, keeping park lands clean, creating educational content online and lots of other things. If I was paid a UBI I would still spend most of my time contributing but I would just do the things I see value in without having to worry about how will I make someone pay for this.
I'm curious how you plan to have a less-than-40-hour workweek while still having living wages? It's going to be hard enough to get the capitalists on board with just paying people who do work they find inferior enough to live.
I don't see how this tracks. Particularly in relation to many of the jobs going away, productivity isn't inversely related to hours worked. People working 6 hours instead of 8 will get three quarters as much done. How would their wages go up?
If you are proposing the government cover the difference, then you're effectively proposing a bastardized version of UBI with an employment requirement, and payout that is proportional to current economic advantage. I'm not even sure it wouldn't cost more than current UBI proposals given that proportionality.
I don't understand why you would be in favor of this, but think UBI was bad. Or how it could possibly work, if it wasn't the government paying for it.
I think the argument is that most people are truly only attaining maximum productivity for 5-6 hours in a day, so why are they even there for the extra 2-3? If you make $100/hr for 8 hours but are only productive for 5 of those hours, your employer is really paying you $160/hr. Why are we wasting employees time and employers money?
This is very IT-centric point of view, where mostly creative work can be done in various speeds, depending on effectivity and motivation in given time. I know its definitely valid for me and colleagues.
Imagine tons of other jobs where this simply doesn't apply - doctors, teachers, bureaucrats, farmers, drivers, shop/restaurant crew, people working in tourism, many factory jobs and probably tons of other types of jobs. Yes, I just mentioned more than 90% of the world population.
We can gradually improve efficiency of probably every single job out there, but simply slashing 30% will have very direct negative consequences on output for most people, in many cases directly proportional. Now who wants to take 30% pay cut?
There are two solutions: Part one, a more educated populace. Education will help those that can work in the "good jobs" get the good jobs. Part two, tax policy. Wealth needs to be redistributed so that there are masses to buy the products that the wealthy are creating.
Edit: I just watched this post go up to 10 points, down to 3 and then back to 5. Clearly this is controversial. I find it interesting that wealth redistribution is this controversial. I'm curious as to why people would be against it. Is it really just "I worked hard for it why should I give it away" or something deeper?
I highly doubt that education reform will come by any time soon. Studying STEM is not natural to many kids, yet the reality is that people in the US have been living comfortably for so long that they would rather give up teaching tough subjects for so-called children's happiness, or shit like no kids left behind.
As a result, it is the ordinary kids, which is the majority middle, who will hurt -- they think they learn something in high school and college, but they really don't.
Unnatural in the sense of "Young man, in mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them". Or in the general sense of science, you work hard to get intuition that is against what you get from your daily experience, such as feather and iron ball fall at the speed in vacuum, electrons interact with electronic field, there exist functions that are continuous everywhere but not derivative anywhere, light of spped is constant in all reference frames, or simply high school algebra is really simple (and has been watered down for years) and most of kids should have no excuse not to excel at it.
"For the past year, 18-year-old Zhang Hao has been studying for 12 hours a day. He spends a minimum of nine hours in class taking practice papers, then continues to study at home. His parents worry that he sometimes crams up to 17 hours work in to a single day. "
"LIN MING, a ten-year-old who has two years left at his primary school in Beijing, does not remember the last time he returned home before 6pm on a weekday during term. As soon as school is out, his mother, Yang Mei, shuttles him around the city, dropping him off at tutoring agencies where he studies advanced maths and English grammar. Ms Yang accepts that she is “maybe putting a bit too much stress” on her son. But she has no choice. “Around 90% of my son’s classmates attend after-school lessons. It’s a competition I can’t lose.” "
"Chinese officials worry that pupils’ achievements may exact too heavy a mental and physical price"
"As long as admission to senior-high schools is based on results from the gruelling zhongkao exam, parents are likely to exploit every loophole to give their children an edge."
So, if you think that pushing kids beyond their limits with something like 16h work days in ways that negatively impacts their mental and physical health is a demonstration of "naturalness", then I just have to concede the point that this is all natural.
But then you have to also claim that schoolchildren killing themselves is also somehow "natural"
"In the last few years, several studies have shown that adolescents and young people in China, Japan and other Asian countries have a large number of psychological problems that may lead them to commit to suicide."
"There are several causes for adolescent suicides. In many cases, suicides relate to fear of performing badly in exams."
"South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world for children ages 10-19 and extremely high elderly (60+) suicide rates. For children, most suicides are caused by stress relating to education. Korean children have a school year of 11 months and often spend over 16 hours a day at school and at afterschool programs called hagwons."
India: India has an average income of $2134 per person. Not per month, per year. It has 872 million people living below the poverty line. One quarter of the population lives on less than 60¢ per day.
So I'd respectfully suggest that there might be good, ahem, motivation to try your best to get good at STEM even if you don't find it particularly natural.
Ya, all east asian countries, you're right. China is interesting especially to me though because, just anecdotally, there seem to be an unusually high number of Chinese female STEM graduates. Not sure what's going on there, but they seem to have solved the gender gap in STEM somehow. Could just be i've encountered an unusual sample too, though.
Easy, just tell everyone that anyone can study STEM as long as they work hard. Do you know Noether, Marie Curie, Grace Hopper, Chien-Shiung Wu, and many more female scientists and engineers are household names? They are featured in mass media, in text books, and in our bedtime stories.
Gender bias in STEM? That's a god damn first-world problem.
Yep. Reduce wealth and increase economic pressure enough so that survival is dependent on a finding a good job, and suddenly, magically, "bias" disappears.
"Most of the girls we talked to from other countries had a slightly playful approach to Stem, whereas in Russia, even the very youngest were extremely focused on the fact that their future employment opportunities were more likely to be rooted in Stem subjects."
Then, when wealth (and all other measures of gender equality) dramatically increase and people become free to choose to do whatever they want, largely free from economic survival pressure, suddenly, magically and inexplicably, "bias" pops up again.
> Not sure what's going on there, but they seem to have solved the gender gap in STEM somehow
That's because you're not familiar with the actual data. Iran also has gender parity in STEM. The nordic countries have equal or worse gender ratios than America. It's called the gender equality paradox: the more gender equal a country, the less women choose STEM paths.
I don't think there's any intrinsic reason that studying STEM isn't natural. It could be hard to some kids while totally enjoyable to some others. I've seen kids enjoying building stuff and really engaged in their preliminary lessons for coding.
Fortunately, there are lots and lots of "technology" jobs that do not fit people's preconceived notions of what it means to be working in "STEM".
Think, things like being a designer, product manager, analyst, ect, ect, ect.
Even the job I do today, working as a web developer, is something that the "hardcore" programmers of 40 years ago, would likely look down on, as I do not fit into their traditional opinion, from 40 years ago, of what it means to work in STEM.
There will likely be more jobs like that in the future
And to further expand this metaphor, I am sure that in another 40 years, there will be significantly more tools that will allow people to more easily develop things.
>> Is it really just "I worked hard for it why should I give it away"
No it's more "I worked hard for it why should it be taken from me by force or fiat". I've found most folks who are well off (not living hand to mouth) are willing, and do give to charity. It's when some other group of people start demanding this behavior through governmental force when attitudes change.
I give to charity too, so what? They live and got lucky in the country they are then refusing to assist proportionally with their means. Most of them are not Bill Gates, while they toss their pocket change to some charities, they lobby to Congress for favorable laws and live an insular existence that doesn't go near the common man.
If you study world history you’ll quickly realize that it’s ultimately the choice of the mob with the torches and pitchforks. You’d be amazed at how disinterested they are in moral relativism or a chat about Atlas Shrugged. Personally I’d prefer a more equitable redistribution based on planning, rather than a redistribution based on plutocrats being put up against a wall.
What if we start to create better technologies that augment the economic usefulness of the lowest IQ people?
They definitely won’t be amused at the cries of “But wait, I want my tech to add economic value to you, low IQ person! sound of a gun cocking Waaait! Haven’t you even heard of a meritocra- BANG”
I mean, you can solve that problem with robots and technology, too. Revolting mobs of socialists can be dealt with pretty easily.
(If you’re going to start threatening murder as the premise of your theory of justice, you’d best make sure your side would actually be the one doing the killing.)
I mean, you can solve that problem with robots and technology, too. Revolting mobs of socialists can be dealt with pretty easily.
(If you’re going to start threatening murder as the premise of your theory of justice, you’d best make sure your side would actually be the one doing the killing.)
Yeah, that that could never go wrong and backfire horribly. How about we win a war before we decide to design, mass produce, and deploy enough robots to pacify a few hundred million people with guns. Oh, and don’t forget to make it the first hack-proof device ever, or you might find yourself on the wrong end of the robot.
Besides, I’m not threatening murder, I’m literally just describing a repeating and predictable cycle throughout history. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll be up against the wall too.
Another repeating and predictable cycle throughout history is that improvements in technology do not take away jobs. If the revolting mob is suddenly incapable of doing productive work due to some sort of AI revolution, it's fallacious to assume that they would be capable of putting anyone against the wall, either.
They do though. Not all the people skilled in the old technology will find a job in the new one, especially if they're older. Some people will fall through the gaps, even if the total amount of jobs is not affected.
If you study history, you also quickly learn that there were orders of magnitude more poor people killed by the rich and powerful than the other way around.
Are mobs always morally in the right? Absolutely not. But neither the opposite is true.
If you study history, you also quickly learn that there were orders of magnitude more poor people killed by the rich and powerful than the other way around.
Yes, but considering that there have always been orders of magnitude more poor people than rich and powerful people, your statement is effectively empty. More telling is that the rich and powerful get away with it, until they don’t. In France during the Revolution, in England during the civil war, in Russia when the czar system was torn down.
Push people far enough and they don’t break, they lash out and take their society down with them. It can be hard to predict when that will happen, but if circumstances don’t change it seems that it always does. Ghaddafi could have been forgiven for believing that after decades, he wouldn’t be hunted and killed by his own people. Hosni Mubarak clearly thought he was untouchable, as did Ben Ali in Tunisia.
I’ll say it again, I’d prefer an orderly and plannned redistribution rather than it all being burned to the ground because a handful of elites can’t finish their goddamned history education and ascribe to the “this time it will be different,” school of what could charitably be called “thought.”
>Yes, but considering that there have always been orders of magnitude more poor people than rich and powerful people, your statement is effectively empty.
What are you even talking about? The vast majority of minorities don't hold any power (especially not the power to kill the majority) precisely because there are so few of them and that's exactly the reason why they are oppressed. Rich people are an extremely special minority where this situation is reversed and they have power over the majority.
I've had many a discussion about Atlas Shrugged, and in fact used to be an adherent to its philosophy. Until I realized something. For a pure Libertarian society to work, those who cannot work must die. If there is absolutely no social safety net, then if you are too sick to work, you can't make money and therefore can't get care and die. Sure, some will live through charity, but there would be far too many people who just can't make a net positive monetary contribution to society. What do those people do?
Or they riot and rebel. The surest way to see how violent people can be is to offer them no choice in the matter. This is a country with a lot of guns, tons of space, and a poorly paid police and military. It’s not hard to imagine how the prospect of a quiet, ignominious death would go over. There are already militias and preppers, and I for one want those movements to do something other than flourish and expand.
If they rebel, then either there is a use for some of them for guards, or those we can hire for guards are better (and will win).
The US indeed have a large amount of land and many guns, but that land is already termed "fly-over" country, do you think most people on the coasts care if somebody runs around up in the Apalachian mountains with a gun shouting down with the rich?
If (which I do not believe) those persons will have no value at all, we will deal with them when/if they riot.
If they rebel, then either there is a use for some of them for guards, or those we can hire for guards are better (and will win).
The US indeed have a large amount of land and many guns, but that land is already termed "fly-over" country, do you think most people on the coasts care if somebody runs around up in the Apalachian mountains with a gun shouting down with the rich?
If (which I do not believe) those persons will have no value at all, we will deal with them when/if they riot.
If only we had some proximal lesson from recent history to look to, as a way of explaining just how deveststing insurgencies can be in the modern world. You know, a lesson involving a bunch of mountain men with guns, fighting from their home turf. Oh well, I can’t think of anything, but if it comes up I’m sure that our record stamping them out quickly, effectively, and without catastrophic loss of life and treasure will speak for itself.
There's quite a few poor in the Bay Area, or in the LA Basin, or in the East Coast megapolis. Some of them are within a day's march of Silicon Valley, or Beverly Hills, or Downtown Manhattan (though it might be more defensible against those not already on the island).
Just being "not in flyover country" isn't going to save the elites if the poor seriously rise.
There are some indications that the bottom 15% of IQs will not become the STEM man's burden. Instead, AI will hit the fat underbelly of knowledge work, first, where people get paid more than the bottom 15%, to do the things that can be automated without interacting with real-world objects.
The problem won't be robot shopping cart fetchers or grocery baggers, but that knowledge work, which is the last refuge of human usefulness in the workforce will get hollowed out from the lower-middle. There is no "next thing" after knowledge work.
Optimistic characterizations like "post scarcity" don't seem like they will be applicable before mass disemployment hits. Instead of having to implement redistributive policies for the 15% outside the knowledge economy, we will be faced with a bigger, more educated cohort that can't be retrained to other knowledge work faster than AI will automate those categories.
Shorter work-weeks will help. Perhaps for long enough to figure out a solution. Better start soon, though.
The good news is that we know some adjustments to make to education that would reduce that number. For example:
> More children taking MVM [multivitamin with mineral] supplements (44) than placebo (25) showed increases in nonverbal IQ scores of 15 or more points (35% compared with 21%; P<.01). The authors speculate that this result may be attributable to the fact that one in 7 schoolchildren was undernourished.[0]
The bad news is we won't do it. Implementing effective policy is the hard part.[1]
AR and VR. So many people love to talk about an augmented world, well, this would be the perfect place for it. You would use AR/VR to help lower IQ people be more productive and still be able to earn themselves a decent wage.
I'm still not convinced that it's possible to successfully tax the rich enough to ensure that the poor isn't poor. The redistribution (and taxation) always comes up as "the solution" to inequality. I think that's overestimating how rich the rich are, and underestimating the number of poor people.
It's easier to make the rich poorer, and close the wealth cap that way, compared to making the poor richer. Sadly that's not going to help anyone.
Is this backed up by any stats? Last I saw the stats on America showed the top % is unimaginably rich and the inequality is massively worse than other countries like Australia where the average person is much better off.
No, and I might very well be completely wrong. My reasoning is that some one like Jeff Bezos is worth $150 billion, if we take all his money (which we can't do, because most of his wealth isn't exactly in cash), then each American could receive something like $500. That's not really helpful, and we can only do that once, if we take ALL his money.
Maybe I'm underestimating how many rich people the world has, and how much money they have. It just doesn't seem like did have enough to make much of a difference.
The $150 billion sitting in bezos bank account does very little for everyone. If it was distributed among the population of America, most of it would be spent very quickly and there would be huge benefits for everyone. Preventing hoarding would do a lot of good for society.
On the contrary. Most of that money is the capital that makes up Amazon and its subsidiaries, which has consistently grown faster (created more wealth/benefit) than almost any other entity in our society.
That's your neoliberal take. Personally, I'm a little dubious that wealth created is 1:1 with social benefit created. But to say that his bank account benefits nobody would be a misrepresentation.
For society, by making the distribution of goods/services more efficient. Amazon enriches our lives (compared to no Amazon) every time anyone uses it. The resources we all save, the delta, go partially to Mr. Bezos and owners of Amazon stock in the form of profit. They are rewarded for having allocated their capital efficiently. They can spend the money on whatever they want, but it is mostly allocated back into making Amazon more efficient -- not locked away as the gp suggests.
Bear in mind this is the extremely idealistic neoliberal take.
Fine, 30b in his bank account and 120b in his portfolio. All of that money was at one point in a consumers pocket and now sits removed from the wider economy in one of Jeff Bezos accounts for the sole purpose of furthering future growth of these accounts by further extraction of money out of the wider economy.
How would the accounts grow if they weren't doing something that created wealth, i.e. generated value for the economy? They're re-invested in other companies, to be put to good use.
Generated value for whom? The size of amazon? To be put to good use figuring out more ways to eavesdrop information for advertising? They aren't going to pay their workers who piss in bottles any more if they beat earnings, although the shareholders might have some big ticket purchases in mind. It is still money removed from consumers pockets and used to inflate the company, and only very few people in the company benefit from that ballooning.
I'm sure amazon does provide value to it's customers, but it was at the expense of consuming and destroying local small business economies where the profit would have stayed and been spent there, not in Seattle, not on exotic mansions and watercraft, not on the latest Echo endeavor that may or may not ever come to fruition. Just as Nestle bottles water from local aquifers and sells that water elsewhere outside of that watershed, eventually depleting the aquifer, Amazon takes local wages away from the economy and either sits on this pile of cash or on lavish compensation for the few at the top of the company.
If people choose to purchase through Amazon, it's generally because they provide a better experience (i.e. more value per dollar spent) than their competitors.
Sitting on cash is expensive, due to inflation and taxes. It's generally better to re-invest. People are generally compensated as a function of the value they add to the company. If someone else can do a better job for less money, it would be in the board's best interests to hire them.
I do agree, though, that unwise expenditure of resources (mansions and watercraft, et all) should be criticized, though not high net-worth per-say. The problem, though, is that the common man is also guilty of unwise expenditure of resources. E.g. taking a vacation instead of providing life saving vaccines.
If you think rich peoples wealth is in a form that can be redistributed to the poor (ie cash), then yiu are seriously deluded. The wealth of someone like jeff bezos is essentially the amount us poor people are willing to pay to be in charge of Amazon. It does not refer to any kind of cash which he can give away. Moreover, giving away his shares would simply lower the value of Amazon since the reason why those shares have any value is the business bezos runs
If the average IQ of a STEM graduate is a standard deviation or more above average [0][1], then how does a more educated populace result in something besides the stratification we see today? STEM education can help a person get on the right side of the tech split, but the STEM education itself is already prohibitively difficult.
You don't need to be special to do STEM work, but it's possible the attitude that you do is keeping us from learning how to better train the average person in it.
I'm a software developer who comes from a non-STEM (music) background, but before I went into tech I thought there was no way I would be "smart enough" to do what I do now for a living.
Turns out you don't need 4-years of heavy maths/physics/CS education to write React components, but most of my friends (and a surprising number of recruiters) still think you do.
Average person with less intelligence is capable of doing the same thinking, just slower. I believe that the problem is that STEM classes aren't separated by the speed of thinking. Also easier for a person to accept that he/she just doesn't get math, instead of the fact that he/she is thinking slower than other people.
I found myself thinking slower as I get older (and having more health problems), but so far I was able to counteract the disadvantages with better life decisions, so actually I have a happier life.
I'm pretty sure this whole intelligence is merely thinking faster idea is non sense. From my own personal experience, I think quite slowly, I'm bad at mental arithmetic, but I have a very high IQ. Look at IQ tests, our best measure for intelligence: getting the questions right is not about speed, it's about insight. The harder questions do not require more time, it is not simply a matter of enumerating through the different options. One has to "see" the patterns and then apply the rules.
> Average person with less intelligence is capable of doing the same thinking, just slower
Intelligence is not just about the speed of thought. It's also about the depth of memory, the number of associations one has in one's internal model, and numerous other factors.
Consider a computer's memory that's halved. Suddenly it can run significantly fewer programs despite the fact that it rjnd at exactly the same speed.
It sounds interesting, it' s more likely the number of associations than working memory, as I always had very bad working and long term memory compared to other people, still I was the best in elementary class in math without any studying (of course this changed after I went to a school specialized in math).
Because providing a better base eduction lets those who are in that 1 SD above category actually use it. There are probably a lot of people right now who are 1 SD above but can't get the education they need to make use of it.
Everything will be fine when everybody is above average...
Historically, the economic promise has been that everyone who CAN get a job will just get a Different job when new technologies make their current jobs obsolete. Plow-pushers will become welders, for example.
And the usual futurist's question is whether instead the low-skill workers are more like horses in the 1930's, soon to be completely useless. The interesting argument in the article is that, well, even if the low-skill workers aren't completely unemployed, they'll be pushed forever into low-productivity industries that are happy enough paying them serf's wages... Perhaps keeping them just busy enough to avoid open revolt. (perhaps.)
1) if you exclude everybody less than 1 standard deviation above the mean in a normally distributed population, you're left with approximately 16% of the population. The tech sector currently employs approximately 4% of the US population, so at most it's employing 1 in 4 people whose IQ is >1 std deviation above mean. Plenty of room to grow.
2) The idea that STEM education is simply beyond the capabilities of people who aren't in that lucky 16% needs support. The correlation of success in STEM to IQ does not mean causation runs from 'having a high IQ' leads to 'capable of being educated in STEM'. It seems equally possible that 'pursuing education in STEM' leads to 'having a high IQ', and that if we push more people through STEM-oriented education, more people will develop high IQs (of course, that would move the average, which isn't how IQ works, but... you get the idea).
Human minds are incredibly capable and flexible, and acting that the current state of practice of the STEM field and IQ is some sort of limiting factor in human capability seems, well, incredibly unimaginative. The standards of education changes over time. If you go back through the decades, the mix of "average" skills is different and arguably lesser in many ways. In other ways though, today we have a wealth of formal analytical thinking, but suffer a poverty of philosophical and creative exploration.
Perhaps the thing that AI may unleash is the power to access STEM techniques, without the same kind of need for formally thinking or operating in them so closely.
Where do you think causality lies here? Maybe being trained to think in ways that IQ tests prefer would raise peoples' scores? An IQ test isn't some sort of measure of inherent capacity, just a measure of how well someone takes an IQ test. People read too much into them.
> Maybe being trained to think in ways that IQ tests prefer would raise peoples' scores?
That question has been tested repeatedly by the scientific community, and the answer seems to be 'no'.
> An IQ test isn't some sort of measure of inherent capacity, just a measure of how well someone takes an IQ test.
That's just not the case. IQ correlates with many interesting phenomena.
Of course, IQ doesn't come close to explaining everything about life outcomes, but compared to virtually every other measure in psychology (or the social sciences more broadly) nothing else comes close to the empirical validity or explanatory power of IQ.
You don't need to be a STEM graduate to grok tech. There's a difference between the science of technology, the engineering of technology and the implementation of technology. You can be productive without being able to pass calculus.
When I started working for a .gov years ago, about 40% of the technical staff where former administrative people (clerks, typists, etc) who were trained and transitioned into technology related jobs ranging from programmers to sysadmins to project managers. They were great.
On another thread, I help with a school club at my son's school where 8-year olds are building Raspberry Pi based gadgetry. They are average kids, and they do very well.
What is your evidence? IQ tests undoubtedly measure something, and that something correlates with things like academic performance and certain types of job performance. What’s flawed about that?
The quickest Google search for "flaws of IQ tests" comes back with so many studies showing that IQ is not correlated to intelligence that at this point the burden of proof is on anyone who says IQ is relevant. Even if IQ does measure something, it's not an indicator of anything other than the ability to pass a standardized test. It certainly is not an indicator of intelligence.
In other words: what is your evidence that IQ measures anything actually relevant?
I never said anything about IQ tests measuring intelligence. No doubt the “something” that is measured is, at least in part, “intelligence,” at least as it applies in an academic setting. However, for you to dismiss them outright is simply not supported by the literature. For example:
> Kids who score higher on IQ tests will, on average, go on to do better in conventional measures of success in life: academic achievement, economic success, even greater health, and longevity.[0]
Yes, you can improve your performance on IQ tests with practice and motivation, but that does not make them “scientifically invalid” in any way. The fact is that so many things are correlated to IQ that it’s a useful theoretical construct, even if it’s misnamed and has little to do with what you’d call “intelligence.”
If IQ can be improved through education, then you cannot use it to argue that lower IQ people cannot be educated to be better at STEM jobs as the parent was arguing.
Sure, I'll give you that IQ measures something. The question is, is that something relevant to the argument that you can only be competitive in STEM with a higher IQ and therefore many people cannot be educated into STEM careers? Does IQ make you better suited for those jobs, or does the training for those jobs cause you to score higher on IQ tests?
It's no shock that richer and healthier people do better in school. If you want to call that "IQ" then fine, but saying the correlation goes the other way is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof. Without proof that a higher IQ makes you richer and healthier rather than the other way around, then yes, it is entirely scientifically invalid. Especially if you're not exactly sure what IQ is actually measuring.
If the parent wants to argue that some people can never be trained in STEM careers because STEM careers require too high of IQ, I demand proof that this psuedo-science malarky is defined and that it is proven to be inherent and cannot be trained during the course of STEM education.
If IQ isn't relevant to the parent's comment, then it shouldn't have been brought up. If it is relevant, then there should exist some proof that IQ actually matters.
The parent is making the claim that, because of IQ, certain segments of the population are at a fundamental disadvantage when it comes to STEM careers. For this to be anything more than pure poppycock, there needs to be proof that IQ measures anything actually relevant to the success of those jobs. And not only relevant, but measures something that cannot be trained, cannot be explained by differences in education of astronomy majors vs home economics majors, something that fundamentally bars elementary education majors from succeeding in electrical engineering.
Prove that IQ measures anything that says an accountant could not have been otherwise trained to practice chemistry because they're 10 IQ points short. If IQ measures anything relevant to the job you perform, there has to be some proof.
There doesn't have to be absolute proof, just decent evidence. While it's absolutely true that IQ tests aren't perfect (the very idea that intelligence can be measured on a single axis is suspect), there is plenty of evidence that shows correlation between IQ and success in certain fields.
If all good accountants or chemists have relatively high IQs, it doesn't prove that a good IQ is necessary, but it certainly provides some evidence. It's classic causation/correlation, but in this case, there are mountains of evidence of correlation.
The biggest argument against that is the question of "is that IQ score inherent or trained"? Yes, it seems some professions have higher IQ scores. But is that because they're actually smarter? Or is it that they're better educated in the things that score well on an IQ test? It's no coincidence that the professions where people have higher IQs are also professions that are monumentally harder than the ones further down the list. If IQ correlation means STEM causation, we could just as easily flip that around and say that STEM education means IQ increases.
If we are making the statement that certain sections of the population cannot be trained for STEM careers because they don't have the IQ to be competitive, then we'd better be damn sure that IQ isn't something that can be taught. And there is mounds of evidence showing that intelligence is not assigned at birth.
Does IQ measure intelligence, or education? And are either of those static throughout a person's life?
there is another solution, get government off the backs of the poor and middle class. from costs of simple government services to the the fees associated with occupational licensing it is not cheap being poor and trying to work.
then throw in the ever fun new ways cities try to make money by trumping up trivial issues like declaring someone's home needs repair, a stack of firewood done "wrong", or a crack in a drive way, and fining them hundreds if not thousands of dollars. all fines against people who cannot afford to dispute the charge and may not even be able to pay it. Traffic fines starting over two hundred dollars for even the most minor infraction.
or school systems where the number of non teaching positions are inflated all the while at the same time politicians are raising taxes to under the guise of improving education but its merely to pay for non teaching jobs.
The idea that the "wealthy" are not paying sufficient taxes ignores the reality of how much taxes everyone is already paying. People tend to just focus in on the "income tax" and ignore all the fees and embedded taxes in every day living. the US has one of the most progressive tax systems in the world and when you look at who pays the bulk of the taxes its not even close. As a percentage the "wealthy" already pay many times percentage wise than other classes. The US governments own figures on taxes at federal, city, and state, levels shows this- it is not even disputable.
Yet, when Congress recently passed a law to limit state and city deductions from the Federal taxes to TEN THOUSAND dollars who complained? The same supposed champions of the poor and why ? because their OWN wealthy people were having to pay more taxes.
Simple truth, you could confiscate every billionaires fortune and not pay for our government or the proposals in the offing. however where you will find that wealth is the investments backing pensions and 401ks. you think that once they "nip" the wealthy they will stop? After all its already been stated by many in one party about the unfairness of 401K programs you can damn well bet they will get their wish.
I support both of those ideas, but I'm not sure I see how those solve the underlying problems highlighted by the article.
We're going to continue to introduce technology to improve quality and enhance productivity. Will jobs continue to fall in industries that introduce technologies to enhance productivity? If so, education and wealth redistribution seem insufficient (albeit still necessary).
(I haven't checked the linked paper to see if this is answered.)
Isn't wealth redistribution via taxes treating the symptom and not the cause? We should look at the structures that allow massive wealth inequality to form in the first place. This could be a lot of things besides tax policy.
This would seem to lead to a Harrison Bergeron sort of outcome, no? I mean, basic variation in genetic factors, geographic and political circumstances of your birthplace, these things directly lead to variation of productivity, which in turn leads to variation of wealth.
I agree with you. I think we will see the Universal Basic Income appearing sooner rather than later. The economy needs a recycling mechanism and if it can't be through wages than it must take another form.
We won’t. Even for retirement schemes, there is not enough money; retirement age is rising, the future is bleak. UBI is basically a lifetime retirement scheme; it requires 10x more resources and completely unsustainable.
If more than half of the population makes at least double what they need to keep themselves from starvation, then you could argue there is enough money.
In short, your disagreement with the GP is probably due to a disagreement about the lifestyle that UBI is supposed to afford its recipients.
Those in power might determine that the bare minimum UBI to avoid violent revolution is something like $5000 per year.
It's absolutely enough for housing if you squeeze in.
Healthcare and education are problems, but I'm not sure they're enough to provoke a revolution when everyone is otherwise well-fed and sheltered from the elements.
What I don't honestly understand is source of money for UBI appearing sooner rather than later.
I mean, US is projected to have one trillion budget deficit for a second straight year - "US Deficit 2019: Treasury to Borrow $1 Trillion for 2nd Year - Bloomberg".
Slap UBI on top of it and this is Greece trajectory.
I've been preaching education to anyone who will listen. It's the skeleton key for every other issue, I dunno how else to put it.
You can trace a direct line from each of the top 10 problems in the world to ignorance. People don't actually suck nearly as much as it seems, people are just missing information. We're not econs, but we'd act a lot more closely to that model if we were, on average, more educated.
We already have wealth distribution: the rich get their lawyers to allow them to dodge taxes and jail time, just furthering their ability to gain more wealth, while the rest of us play by their trickle down rigged tax system.
Once you start redistributing wealth, it turns into a grand 300-million-person argument over who gets what.
Immigration arguments because each immigrant would be entitled to something, often more than they contribute for some period of time.
Childbearing arguments, for essentially the same reasons as immigration.
Arguments about drugs and other vice, becasue everyone would want to make sure you are contributing as much as you can, and many feel drugs prevent that.
Arguments about education and career choices.
There are no absolutes, but as long as people basically believe that they have what they create, then they will focus on creating and not worry about what other people create (or not). When they believe they have what they can get through the political process, they will focus on political fights.
Fundamentally, freedom and large-scale socialism don't mix. In a socialist system, there are just too many other people who have a vested interest in what you do (and don't do). It may work in small countries or on short time scales, but these arguments eventually result in authoritarian policies.
It is not a zero-sum game. It would be more productive to facilitate wealth creation rather than devise new ways to forcibly take-away private property that offends you.
Reducing the countless barriers to entry that stunt human ingenuity is where the real fight is. People can learn, and they are already (e.g Make/Lambda School) when provided with cost-effective training that delivers on investment.
Wanting more of the same (tax + regulations) is not going to cut it now. We are past ridiculous levels (1:3 avg OCDE tax:gdp) and diminishing returns kicked in.
Is basically my point. On one hand we can't expect journalists who I imagine are very Intelligent to get into programming but somehow we are just going to change our education system and everyone will just be coders?
I feel like you have to subscribe to tabula rasa to think this is going to go off without a hitch.
> Is basically my point. On one hand we can't expect journalists who I imagine are very Intelligent to get into programming
Nobody seriously expected this to happen, it was an exercise in turning their own solution "all these laid off coal miners can learn to code" against them when they were laid off. Twitter now considers pointing out this hypocrisy to be harassment. I can see their point, it's kicking a person while they're down, but they were fine with undesirables like coal miners being kicked while they're down.
“Redistribution” is inherently unfair; there is no “redistribution” except by force. Venezuela was the most recent in the vast row of examples of how redistribution works; probably not the last, as the idea keeps being pushed by some people for some reason, completely unimaginable to me.
It's unfair that you were born into a world of people who want your stuff. It's also unfair they were born into a world with no frontier they could homestead to make their own stuff.
The entire world is a frontier. I was born in Siberia; I wouldn’t want to stay there, so when I was old enough, I saved some money and bought one way tickets first to Moscow, then to Europe.
Much less. Wealth without force only provides more options, not takea it away. Wealth is a great force multiplier, though, and force can be used for evil.
This seems like a "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." kind of answer. At what point is circumstance not responsible? How much of our circumstances are we responsible for? Can we change other people's circumstances? By how much, and how does it affect outcome?
It is my wealth that is going to be “redistributed”. I am a relatively well off software engineer; I was born in a poor family on the outskirts of a Siberian town. I learned to program all on my own, by visiting my friends with computers and taking programming books from the local library. It wasn’t a “function of circumstance” — it was a function of my interest and targeted activity. What is unfair here?
Unless you are a multimillionaire, no it will not be your wealth being redistributed. The problem is not well-off people driving their Teslas around and taking two vacations a year, it is the relatively few people hoarding such obscene levels of wealth that their personal holdings dwarf those of entire lower economic classes of people. More than they could possibly need for 1000 lifetimes.
If you expropriate the entire wealth of the top 0.1% (6 trillion dollars), it will last around 2-3 years (social security/medicare/medicaid expenditure of the US is more than 2 trillion dollars per year). The "relatively few people" are of course rich, but they are, as you have said, relatively few. Most of the taxable money are made by the middle class.
Sounds like you landed in the lucky circumstance of having access to a computer and access to a library with programming books. You also got lucky with finding a job that let you save enough money to go somewhere else.
Should we not do our best to afford that "luck" to everyone?
With my own money, I am occasionally donating to libraries and other charities. Of course, you are free to do that and anything else with you own money, too.
It depends on what sort of redistribution you talk about.
Picketty argues that we tax income but not wealth and that's the root of our problems. I would imagine that your income is a way higher percentile than your wealth, income middle-class like you and me get smashed by income taxes (as someone from the working class in the UK it absolutely blew my mind when I learned how much wealth the people all around me had in their families, even just upper-middle class).
If you're hanging around with people whose families live in the nice parts of London/(a major city), assume they're the top 10% ~ 1 million, assume 4% returns above inflation, they make 50k a YEAR from their assets, totally passively.
So their wealth income is way more than some relatives of mine TOTAL household income.
In effect, the upper-middle-classes are born on basic income. If you're trying to make moeny yourself - just attend that university, take that MBA course, spend 5 years on a very risky career path with internships (journalism, media). There's no point you have to worry if you can afford it you can just play a very long low-probability high upside game.
I am in favor of higher taxes, but that does not solve the dignity issue at all.
Taking from the rich to give to the poor only solidifies the division between the two groups. It makes givers and takers, and there will be resentment on both sides.
We as a society need to find a way to not only feed and clothe and house everyone but to give them purpose and a voice. Paying off half the workforce doesn't do it.
This is exactly what is happening right now. I'm a software developer for the Dutch government and I pay about €40.000 per year in income tax.
My neighbor has the same lifestyle as me. Same apartment, type of clothing, food and sports. And she even drives a car, I don't. Yet I am gone for work for about 50 hours per week and she lives on the income tax I pay. She doesn't even try to have a job because she is happy with her lifestyle living on welfare, the same lifestyle I have to work 40 hours a week for.
I don't hate her, we have a great relationship but it does create a separation between the two groups.
New housing projects are mandated to have 35% social housing. So our building of 12 apartments have 4 social housing ones with I believe cost €600 per month in rent. Minus around €200 in rent subsidy for people with low income so you pay around €400.
I pay 2 percent interest of €300.000 so about €1000 per month including paying off the mortgage in 30 years and around €150 in building maintenance cost.
Also yearly healthcare for me is €1000 for insurance plus €2900 in Zwv tax. For her it’s €1000 for insurance only and there is a €900 healthcare subsidy for low income.
So that why we have the same lifestyle even though are income is very different. We call it “nivileren”, which I believe translates to income leveling.
Why don't you quit and work on your own passions and projects for free then? This is what I don't understand about most Europeans. All of my friends in Europe all do exactly what your neighbor is doing, almost all of them just live on welfare and it is great. They have so much money from welfare they can come visit the states and hangout regularly and have endless vacation while getting paid.
All of them use this time to work on interesting personal projects and do really cool work that I love being a part of. I love that they have time to do that and keep working on what they are passionate about without worrying about money.
If I were European I don't think I would do what you do unless I was working at my own personal company. And if I was working for myself at a high enough profit level that taxation would effect me, I would not incorporate my business in Europe at all.
This is just my perspective as a American, but I think this is why this system wouldn't work at all in America, people like me who are completely competent and able to work like me would probably try to get out of working.
Welfare in the Netherlands is ~1200/month. If you live cheaply (e.g. in a 500/month room in a shared house) that leaves more than enough for a transatlantic plane ticket every now and then.
I cannot find the number you report on that website. Please elaborate on where you got it from. I'm 100% sure you are leaving out important additional details, like that one has to have been recently employed.
You can get WW (werkeloosheidswet - unemployment law) for 24 months, like you say you need a sufficient history of employment. This is based on 70% of the minimum (full-time) wage, i.e. 70% of 1615.80 = 1131 euros/month.
Minimum wage is on the top of the linked pdf (download link here [1]).
Sorry if I was unclear, just looking for some ballpark numbers for the sake of the argument.
> Why don't you quit and work on your own passions and projects for free then?
Eventually, he will, just like everybody else will - which is why socialism fails ever time it's tried. Unfortunately, starting it is bloodless but ending it never is.
I'm beginning to think increasing minimum wage will help. You don't need to tax the rich, just make them pay their people better. But that's still at odds with two thing. 1) it will increase incentive for more automation - but that's already happening as fast as the engineers can do it. 2) it will increase the incentive to use undocumented workers who can be paid under the table below minimum wage. Before we can talk about increasing the minimum wage I think we need to make sure everyone who works is actually getting it.
I don't think minimum wage increases work. There are some unintended consequences. Let's say you pay people $15/hour to flip burgers. They have a higher wage but companies generally pass this cost increase on to consumers. All companies that raised these prices tend to be the ones that the poor people shop at. In the end you don't get the increase in buying power that you might think just by raising wages.
Additionally, what about the EMT that went to school for 2 years and makes $36K ($18/hour)? You have now totally destroyed the value of their education investment and made this job undesirable. Over time, people won't choose this job without wage increases. This may not happen instantly but eventually this ripples higher and higher. As it does so, the wage increase cause higher prices. Eventually at equilibrium it doesn't seem likely to me that anyone's buying power is really improved.
I still think the only solution is to tax the "rich" more and move to almost no taxes for those that are poorer. There is no reason at all to tax someone who is making minimum wage. Given the wage gap, the tax doesn't even need to increase very much to do this.
No, you need to enforce the immigration laws in this case. Increasing the 'incentive' to use illegal immigrants is increasing the incentive to break the law. Typical thinking I suppose. Don't go after the people that break the law, let them break it and create another law to penalize them. This makes no sense to me. And don't say "they're doing it anyway" - that's bullshit. Fine these businesses and arrest the owners for that.
There is no need to tax the rich more even tho this is the penalty du jour. This will do nothing to fix any of this. People need to stop taxing the rich and work to getting rich themselves (taboo here on HN of course).
Your flipping burgers job or grocery bagging job or ditch digging job should not be a career. Because of the fact that those are not careers firstly, and secondly, because they will be automated away. You need to use that as a stepping stone to something better. It is not easy to get rich - it is a long road. But it is one that you should use to better yourself so you can achieve.
There is no incentive with universal income. None with welfare. Sure, let the government provide a minimum safety net, but (as I have learned the hard way) your family and close friends are the ones that should be helping you out. Not the state. Minimum wage is a state imposed artificial penalty pushed on businesses. As a business owner, costs are my enemy and while I offer to provide fair wages for those I employ, having the state impose an artificial cost make business harder. If it continues to get harder, it cannot be maintained.
So, if your goal is to put businesses out of business (who employs you then?), then min wage and tax increases along with cost increases will keep doing that. I'm not talking about mega corps, I'm talking about real businesses. More people need to start their own businesses to see how clear cut all this is. There's a reason companies flee states like California - because the costs to run a business there along with the high taxes make it a difficult place to live. And that's the truth. Just ask anyone who has left..
If an employee can only provide $10 of value to a business per hour, let's say, then employers have no incentive to hire them if the have to pay > $10/h. $8-10/h is better than no pay.
Import tariffs - standard solution to that. The folks yelling "free trade" don't acknowledge that we don't actually have free trade in the first place. All these things need to be kept in balance. It's hard, but that's what governing is supposed to be about.
edit. Actually no. Most of the jobs we're talking about are local. Importing stuff from cheaper places is similar to automation.
Yes. The real issue is that the resentment is between givers and givers. Middle class and working poor are all being screwed over. But the wealthy takers have convinced many of the middle class that their perceived austerity is due to the lazy welfare-takers. And that the "job-givers" (i.e. wealth takers) should be lauded for the part they play.
To be clear I was not saying the characterization of the poor as "takers" is fair, I was just saying that's how they will be labeled by society a large.
The CCC during the Great Depression put millions to work and they built some amazing and lasting infrastructure. As a kid I would go to Skyline Drive in Shenandoah Nat. Park and be amazed and thankful at the work they did. Didn't seem so dystopian to me.
>> It makes givers and takers, and there will be resentment on both sides.
This is oversimplified. There are already takers across both groups, except that the taking is pretty much always looked at more negatively when done by the poor.
We're heading toward a future where more and more is automated and there is less and less room for non-creative work. Let's face it, not everybody can be creative in a way that is lucrative. Do we really want to doom more and more of the population to a subsistence income, while more and more of the gains due to automation go to a shrinking segment of the population? I tend to think that a generous UBI is really the only sensible thing to do.
In case anybody has not read it, Mana, is a short story based on an extrapolation of this kind of rise of automation. I highly recommend it: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Came here to post the link to manna. Thanks for doing that.
It's important to emphasize that while it seems like our economy is beyond human control, it is a human constructuon and the rules can be changed. They were changed in the late 1800s in the USA by populists and they can be changed again. Not easily, to be sure. But possible.
This has been the case for all of human history. The solution is that the economically unfavoured do not reproduce, and the favoured do. We are all the children of European tribal leaders, kings and nobles thousands of years ago.
Follow this approach, and the problem disappears in one generation. Enact some kind of wealth redistribution or welfare system and the problem will continue to grind on.
Not only is lucrative creative work elusive, _rewarding_ creative work is too. Is it really rewarding to make unremarkable art that no one cares about or consumes? Maybe for some people, but not for most.
I think everyone can be creative but most will struggle to monetize their creativity. Maintaining an elaborate garden outside the front of your house requires a great deal of creativity and skill and you could argue that its a benefit to society but it earns the one who put the effort in no money. Some will be able to get jobs as gardeners but there are a limited number of people willing to pay to have a garden maintained.
There are people who work in the old economy, actually doing things in the world. These people are still "tied to the land" in a sense. Their income isn't high enough to live alone, so they still maintain strong familial and neighborly bonds. Their work is physical (that doesn't mean unskilled or low paid, just that it requires physical manipulation), and requires them to physically be in a specific location at a specific time. For the most part this refers to the interior US, so housing is cheap and they generally don't have too much of a commute; they live and work in the same community. They have pride in a sense of place, and feel that they definitely "belong" somewhere because of this. They pinch pennies, compare prices, and generally are not overly wasteful. They might take a vacation once in a lifetime. These people are not poor, they just know the true meaning of a dollar because they are forced to physically work for it.
Compare this to the newly emerged technologically enabled upper middle class whose lives have become entirely abstracted from their physical existence. Our jobs are remote. Our "worksites" are mental abstractions. Our communities are digital. Our clothes are cheap and meaningless. Our connection to neighbors is nonexistent. Our physical location is arbitrary and changes based on a whim. Weekend vacations to Paris are a thing. We don't acknowledge strangers on the street, and if you do you're the insane weirdo. The result is two completely separate world views. A member of the former class simply cannot comprehend things like $14 sandwiches and $50,000 cars because it offends their sensibilities, not because they don't have the money.
I've been in tech my whole professional life and I can't relate to the second class at all. The technologically enabled upper middle class are fighting over Yeezys, Supreme drops, and Rolexes (seriously, try to find any of those at retail price). My neighborhood is filled with WFH techies, and we all head outside in the evening for our kids to ride bikes with each other while we sample microbrews together.
Those trucks you see electricians and plumbers driving, they cost $50k and up. I don't get that remark, either.
You do know a lot of trade people either have a truck stipended or if they are self employed the business pays the bill. My friend is an electrician on commercial sites. He gets a $600-$700 truck stipen from his employer.
This is a ridiculously false dichotomy. Plenty of folks in the midwest/south/appalachia/dakotas/etc. don't give a shit about their communities, and plenty of people in dense coastal cities care deeply about the people around them. And vice versa (as you noted).
Weekend (or, anyways, short) vacations to Paris are a thing. On the other hand, they are also super cheap historically speaking (< $600 east cost <-> Paris, stay in a hostel and it's < $800 total). My weekend trip to Europe was $500 cheaper than what a friend from Neosho spent on a pontoon and a rental at TR the same summer! We both got a lifelong dream that summer (me: paris; him: boat & lake house boozefest).
Also, I have back issues from sitting all day and he has back issues from standing all day. He should wear a brace. I should get a standing desk. We are both too dumb/lazy to change and will probably both regret it in 10 years.
So. Rich laborers spend too much on stupid stuff and all humans have health issues. News as 11.
Furthermore, the modality of caring differs, and this causes a blindness to others' generosity. The average rich person in SF who cares about their neighbors is extremely unlikely to exhibit that care via churches, but might take in a homeless LGBT youth and donate 20K+ to various humanitarian/environmental orgs. Similarly, the average rich person in rural GA who cares about their neighbors is extremely unlikely to exhibit that care by voting for progressive policies or by offering to shelter LGBTQ youth, but might donate 20K+ to their church every year.
Those groups are invisible to each other because they each think of "civic engagement" in terms of their own preferred modality, not realizing that there are other ways to help.
(Tangentially, people from the "interior" refer to themselves as "midwesterners", "appalachian", "southerners", "mountain states", or, more commonly, just by their state or even region within their state. I've literally never heard anyone from anywhere outside of Boston/NYC/SF refer to that part of the country as the "interior". Where in the "interior" do people actually refer to themselves as being from the "interior"?!?!)
>Weekend (or, anyways, short) vacations to Paris are a thing. On the other hand, they are also super cheap historically speaking (< $600 east cost <-> Paris, stay in a hostel and it's < $800 total). My weekend trip to Europe was $500 cheaper than what a friend from Neosho spent on a pontoon and a rental at TR the same summer! We both got a lifelong dream that summer (me: paris; him: boat & lake house boozefest).
Try repeating this statement to a friend who is deciding between groceries or gas to get to work this week. You really can't comprehend what life is like on the minimum wage of $15k.
> > You really can't comprehend what life is like on the minimum wage of $15k.
I have personal experience with exactly that kind of poverty, and the chronic physical/mental health problems and financial roadblocks to prove it.
Putting your assumptions about my life aside, you missed the point.
The presumption that people "in the interior" are poor and virtuous and people "on the coasts" are rich and morally bankrupt is profoundly wrong.
The presumption that people who "work with their hands" are poor and people who work in technology are rich is also wrong.
There are people in each quadrant of the "interior"/coast/rich/poor divide. The "rich=coast=no morals=tech" trope is just the opposite side of the ugly "poor='interior'=lazy=uneducated" coin.
I'll also repeat one of my original questions: who in the "interior" actually refers to the "interior" as the "interior"? I literally never heard that language until I moved to a coast.
You're using false dichotomy in a kind of odd way, it normally means that you have to choose between one of two positions or arguments, not that someone has stereotyped two groups.
I don't think anyone is saying that these classifications are perfect, but are you saying that they're not true even on average?
I honestly don't think there is a solution here. There will always be a large percentage of the population that don't have the motivation or capacity to learn the skills required to get "good jobs". Unless top earners are willing to sacrifice (tax reform, charity, etc), which is extremely unlikely given human nature, others will need to scrape by with low paying menial jobs. That's how it's always been.
The top earners are the heirs who collect dividends, interest and rent - the rentiers in documentaries like Born Rich. They are unwilling to work, as the real hourly wage has sank in the US since the early 1970s, they have reaped all the benefit.
Far below them is a work force which is split in different skill levels. Only a handful of top school STEM majors graduate every year, then there are the rest.
Since in your universe larger social analysis is excluded, the answer comes down to each individual - their motivation and such.
This bears no relation to reality. The overwhelming majority of the rich in Western countries are members of the executive or professional class or entrepreneurs who work for their money.
> The rich different from you and me. … today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind. … Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition.
> > Have the idle rich replaced the working rich at the top of the U.S. income distribution? Using tax data linking 11 million firms to their owners, this paper finds that entrepreneurs who actively manage their firms are key for top income inequality. Most top income is non-wage income, a primary source of which is private business profit. These profits accrue to working-age owners of closely-held, mid-market firms in skill-intensive industries. Private business profit falls by three-quarters after owner retirement or premature death. Classifying three-quarters of private business profit as human capital income, we find that most top earners are working rich: they derive most of their income from human capital, not physical or financial capital. The human capital income of private business owners exceeds top wage income and top public equity income. Growth in private business profit is explained by both rising productivity and a rising share of value added accruing to owners.
The first link is shot through with holes, I would not know where to start. The Fed's Survey of Consumer Finances says otherwise.
The second link is obvious on the face of it - in a country with 325 million people, if you look at 11 million firms, the majority are not run by 1%ers. The data parameters make the outcome a foregone conclusion. Of course the owner of the median firm out of 11 million will be more middle class than the heirs who own a lot of stock in Walmart.
There are things they can do. We have come to accept that e.g. google does not offer support for their products from real people, however they could invest their enormous profits to hiring thousands of people to do that. Not only will they support the "working class" , as many kinds of businesses actively do (e.g. retail), but getting low-skills people doing menial jobs in touch with technology gives them a free education along with such a job. This is true for almost every major tech company who are being stingy with their hiring, even though they are way past the lean stage of a startup and into uber-rich territory.
> Adair Turner, a senior fellow at the Institute for New Economic Thinking in London, argues that the economy today resembles what would have happened if farmers had spent their extra income from the use of tractors and combines on domestic servants. Productivity in domestic work doesn’t grow quickly. As more and more workers were bumped out of agriculture into servitude, productivity growth across the economy would have stagnated.
That's an interesting point - maybe extra income is being spent in ways that don't encourage further growth.
Perhaps things are even worse, though: you could argue that in the past the average person used technology to make themselves more productive (a washing machine instead of hours spent washing by hand, etc.) but in recent years technological innovation is used for entertainment purposes - people use their new smartphones to play games or for social networking, etc.
How many years do people spend in Prussian-model government schools or private schools with mandated State-sponsored curriculum? 12? And the average person isn't imparted enough skills to work on anything besides a precarious assembly-line or perpetual min-wage job?
The story here is not an indictment of robots taking menial jobs; rather, it is an indictment of the atrocious education system that teaches people NOTHING of value. Maybe even less than nothing, since it propagandizes and infantilizes them.
If Walmart ran the schools and produced a bunch of know-nothings as a result, we would never hear the end of it. But somehow the State gets a pass. Even worse; they get more money!---per capital spending has increased 3x in the last 60 years with worse results.
Is this inherently a bad thing, or does it just call for more progressive taxation that can fund services that benefit the broader set of people (transit, housing, health care, etc).
It’s preferable to have somewhat equitable outcomes while preserving a mostly bottom-up market economy. Because that remains the unchallenged champion of organizing an economy, both in terms of productivity as well as dynamism.
It seems, however, that the 50s and 60s were sort of a fluke: WW2 had destroyed the remnants of feudalism. And with even many scions of the upper classes experiencing turmoil and breaks in their CVs, such as going to war instead of college, class mobility reached an all-time high. As long as you were white & male, that is, of course.
The nature of the dominant industries was also beneficial: construction or car dealerships are inherently local, giving many people the opportunity to share in the spoils of growth.
Today, the knowledge economy and other zero-marginal-costs businesses dominate. They who would have run a well-respected local vinyl shop in 1974 are now despised middle managers at Spotify.
Taxation definitely plays a role. Inheritance taxes may the only tax where I care more about the taking-away than the giving-to. Obviously nobody is arguing for a complete leveling of income differences, or even anything close to it. But school budgets should certainly not depend on the wealth of the immediate neighborhood or the specific parents.
I’m not sure if something like UBI could ever be sold to the public. But within the next decade, the 10%-20% of the population work as some sort of ‘driver’ will be asking their new Wayno 5000 to take them to a political rally. What happens next will be interesting.
A big problem is looking at markets locally and ignoring all the people who contribute to that economy but don't live locally. Many of the tools and other resources used by those in Arizona are produced by workers elsewhere. Software might be created by people in the Bay Area. Robots may be designed and engineered by people in Germany or Japan. Etc.
When you only looking locally, you miss out on all the employment elsewhere that contributes to the local economy you're analyzing.
>But automation is changing the nature of work, flushing workers without a college degree out of productive industries, like manufacturing and high-tech services, and into tasks with meager wages and no prospect for advancement.
Meanwhile wages for construction continue to grow as the labor shortage intensifies. Something doesn't add up.
in a sense there is a split between bodies and brains.
The bodies are competing with robotics and other physical manifestations of things that people value. This field seems to be decades ahead of the other group.
The brains are competing with AI and other informational/decision value sets.
The wage gap is real, although I feel like I see an anti ${insert_tech_company_here} article on NYT just about everyday attacking Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc.
None of these tech companies are on a moral pedestal but also, none of these media outlets are on any moral pedestal. These are the same folks who championed the Iraq war. Look, I’m not saying there isn’t a significant wealth disparity, but I do think people should consider the NYT motives.
It couldn’t be that thry hate tech because these large tech companies are direct competitors in the advertising space?
No, tech is continually rendering an ever increasing section of the population's labour economically irrelevant.
It just looks very dramatic right now because its left the lower strata and is now sweeping across the middle.
The end game is a tiny few that have acquired the keys to all of the machines through natural consolidation. The only question is, will the machines be off because there is no reason to run them because the world is full of poor sods who can't buy anything, or will we be running them because we finally figured out how to share their output.
I agree. I thing Americans are drifting apart because we aren't making an effort to create a social fabric that can support those less fortunate around us.
But I strongly disagree that this is a good job for the government. I think empathy exists, but we aren't going to find it in the hearts of the government or enterprises. Empathy comes from people.
Society will just return to the age-old model of kings, clergy, and peasantry. Except this time it'll be the owners of capital and automation served by the highly educated. The rest will fight for the scraps as they have for thousands of years.
An article like this is worthless if it doesn't mention immigration, which it doesn't. It's basically a way to say "LEARN TO CODE" when the real problem is an unlimited supply of cheap labor via uncontrolled immigration. This is the same newspaper which has run "trucker shortage" stories for the last twenty years.
Immigration has become so politicized in the past few years that it's basically radioactive. Any notion of immigration restriction is inevitably conflated with white nationalism, fair or unfair.
The very idea that immigration may be having an impact on wages among the lowest wage tier seems to be treated with the same contempt as the denial of climate change. It's as if the law of supply and demand doesn't apply to labor.
How do we convince the wealthy elite classes on our planet that - in order to have the highest odds of sustaining our species in a way that WE desire, it will require the strength of every human being, which will require individual investment to foster each human's strengths for the time we live in ?
in 1847, Marx wrote Wage Labour and Capital, an accessible pamphlet that made the prediction that over time, the middle classes will be squeezed out of prosperity and the majority of people's wages will trend downwards, until they hit a fundamental low point: the minimum amount required to reproduce the next generation of workers. the key point is that this is completely endemic to capitalism, which is characterized by capital owners having diametrically opposed and competing material interests to workers.
we have seen surges of militant class struggle reverse this trend at specific points in history, but in 2019, with decades of dormancy of class struggle leading up to the present, it's happening again.
abolishing private ownership of capital and democratically allocating society's productive resources is the only solution.
> abolishing private ownership of capital and democratically allocating society's productive resources is the only solution.
But attempts to do so have resulted in more suffering and death, rather than less. Maybe we don't need to solve it at that price. Or maybe there's a better solution than the one you propose.
have you considered that socialist countries are intentionally sabotaged and crushed, and mainstream understanding of the history about it is distorted, by people who don't want their wealth expropriated?
Even were you correct, have you considered that this will also happen the next time socialism is tried?
That said, I will admit that there are almost certainly such attempts as you say, but I deny that they are the actual cause of the problems. The problem is that socialism doesn't work. The rich just give you a nice comic-book villain to explain away the real cause of the failures.
I think tech workers should be worried too. If you don't have the skill set to automate someone's job away, yours will likely go away as well. IE: If you ain't building the robots, you're job's in danger.
This guy will probably be feted across academia for his insight, even though it’s fundamentally the same argument made in The Bell Curve that gets Charles Murray banned from college campuses. Yes, the cognitive elite is a thing and no, they don’t work at Walmart. There is no answer to this problem, either.
There's nothing in this article that mentions "cognitive elite", it talks about education and skills. You brought that to the article completely on your own.
For what it's worth, I think that there are definitely innate differences in ability, but they're very much overstated and the education system is effectively money laundering for privilege. Education != innate ability in a world where elite colleges charge massive fees and all the selection processes are rigged every step of the way by the middle classes.
I have a decent job because I went to a decent uni, if I replay my life with the same ability and different parents who didn't work hard to squeeze me into the best school in the area or push me to value education I'd have no chance at all to be here now, I would be writing javascript for the local bakery for 20k pa. Good tech companies and finance all hire based on degrees.
Maybe if the "favored class" Americans took the bus or went to the laundromat like I did for years they'd want poor people to do well too.