Comment by m_fayer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by m_fayer | Hacker News Reader

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I usually work as a consultant and my income is highly variable. Of course in our field when I earn it's nothing to complain about, and my average for most years is certainly nothing to complain about. Financially, I'm lucky.

And yet. I'm disciplined with money. I'm not impulsive or indulgent. I can build a mean spreadsheet. Put all this together and still the uncertainty and variability is stressful. Running down a savings account without knowing when it will be refilled is something that's always in the back of your mind, eating away at you. You build your life to fit an average yearly income - children, vehicles, rent, gym memberships, etc. When that average yearly income is NEVER guaranteed, you always suspect that this time you won't pull through, and your life will start falling apart, piece by little piece.

I can only imagine how brutal it must be for those whose skills are not as in demand or as remunerative as ours.

Someone always has to take the risks - when working for a company it is the company owners that take it. On average they probably are well compensated for it - but surely they must be more stressed. Or maybe when you are above some level you are not so stressed about the fluctuations - because you know that you'll not hit the bottom whatever happens?

That's what the privilege of wealth, especially hereditary wealth, is - freedom from having to worry about hitting the bottom.

And the higher up the scale you go, the less likely "company owner" is to be a single individual who only owns one company. It will be people or investment bodies with diversified portfolios. The most stressed person is probably the small business owner who is genuinely at risk if it fails.

The "precaritisation" is about pushing as much risk as possible onto those least able to bear it, reversing the expansion of risk-sharing that is the social insurance and the "welfare state".

I would also add that it's pushing risk on those who would avoid it if they could. As GP said, even if the company owners are the ones who would usually shoulder the risk - at least they signed up for it, and are possibly better suited to deal with it. They know what they walked into, they may have less attachments/dependents, they may get a thrill out of it.

Not many humans thrive under high-stakes insecurity. We'll have a pathological (and cruel) society if it's built on the pretense that everyone's an entrepreneurial whirlwind who gets a kick out of doing it without a safety net.

agreed, though one thing about the gig economy is income is not feast or famine, just lower overall.

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