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Comment by runeks | Hacker News Reader

Shortage at what price? There’s always a shortage of bread for people willing to pay 1 cent per loaf, and never a shortage for people willing to pay $10.

One could argue that, while you think you’re experiencing a shortage, reality is that you’re simply not willing to pay enough.

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There can be 10 people willing to spend $inf for a loaf of bread and only 5 loaves. Supply of skilled work isn't immediately elastic.

No. No person owns an infinite number of dollars.

But I will happily bake you a loaf of bread for $10,000 each. In fact, I’d quit my day job to do that. That shortage wouldn’t last long.

Which gets right to the point. Bread supply is elastic,you could quickly set up shop and produce more bread to satisfy demand whereas skilled labor is highly inelastic. Training, gathering hands-on experience, it's all a time-consuming process so there's a long time delay between when demand rises and when supply can rise to meet it

> there's a long time delay between when demand rises and when supply can rise to meet it

Yes, exactly. The demand curve shifts right and the markets find a new equilibrium (most likely at a higher wage than the old equilibrium), but there’s no “shortage”. It’s just markets clearing at a different price level than what people are used to.

Calling it a “shortage” is like saying every time Starbucks raises their prices there is a shortage of coffee — at the old price, sure, but not in absolute terms. That’s not how equilibriums work.

Supply shortage of workers, plain and simple.

A. Takes time for new workers to be adequately trained.

B. Takes even longer to get people that have been raised to look down on the trades to change their worldview and all of a sudden consider working with their hands, no matter how much money is involved.

You do not normally get a shortage in the labour market because as price goes up, the appeal of hiring someone goes down. As you would expect, the formal definition of shortage is not "not being able to get what you want", a shortage is defined as "a situation where an external mechanism, like government regulation, prevents price from rising."

There are real cases of shortages in the labour market. Where I live, the law defines a fixed rate for doctors. Even if I had all the money in the world, I could not legally pay more than my neighbour to employ the services of the doctor in town. Here, a shortage is a real possibility as there is no monetary way to decide who gets the appointment with the doctor. But these tend to be exceptional cases.

Without that legal requirement, I could simply offer more than my neighbour to get the appointment and the neighbour would have to choose to go without seeing the doctor. There is not a shortage in that scenario as the neighbour was not in the market to begin with. This is the same reason we don't say there is a shortage of Ferraris, even though the vast majority of people will never be able to get their hands on one, no matter how much they wish they could have one. They are simply unaffordable to most people.

It really doesn't matter how long it takes to train someone. As long as the price is able to rise, the business who really need the existing people will pay more, taking them from the businesses that cannot afford them, until everyone who still needs that service is fulfilled.

If there was a shortage of pilots and you "happily" offered to fly me safely to my destination for $100k, I'd happily ask the security personnel to escort you off the plane. Nobody is flying that day, and your naive idealism can't change that.

Bread is fungible, construction workers (or any kind of employee or contractor) much less so.

Pun intended?

> Bread is fungible

In what society?

If you see two loaves in a store that are basically the same kind, you normally won't think too hard about which one you pick. As mechanical and indifferent as some hiring processes are, they don't approach that level of indifference.

Okay, that's maybe true. (Although I'd say if they're sufficiently similar I'd probably just base it on price rather than being indifferent.)

But you've added the qualifiers 'in a store' and 'basically the same kind', and it's still not really describing fungibility, is it?

You might also happily weld for $10,000/hr but you aren't a talented welder, and you can't learn in a day.

But certainly somebody would weld for 10k an hour, and therefore the person willing to pay that will have as much welding labor as they need, and everybody else will have to match that price, bamboozle their workers into taking less, or find some way to complete their project with fewer welds.

Can you bake a loaf of bread worth $10k?

If someone will buy it he can.

Technically, a shortage is defined as a situation where price is unable to rise due to an external mechanism, such as government setting a price ceiling. As long as you have an opportunity to pay more, there cannot be a shortage. Rather demand for the given product/service shrinks.

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