Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

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> Starting at the bottom of another career hierarchy at the age of 40 is a complete disaster, you will be out-competed by 22 year olds who cost alot less, are easier to train, have less grievances about a low salary, are okay with the bottom rung, and do not have huge expectations.

Only if those 40 year olds believe they're entitled to higher pay just because they're older. The number of available jobs in a given career hierarchy shrinks pretty quickly as you ascend, which means that most people won't rise very far. Start at the bottom rung, stay at the bottom rung for the rest of their life.

My mother lost her job as a factory worker (bottom rung) when Samsung stopped manufacturing CRTs in Germany. She was 50 at the time and retrained as a call center agent, working for the same pay as 22 year olds. She kept working there until her retirement, while new 22 year olds had to be trained every few months because they hadn't yet learned how to hold down a job. Talk about "out-competed".

> Even more than that, shifting X00,000 people from one career to another would flood the labor market and destroy wages. The whole thing makes literally no sense.

Only if they all retrain for the same job. Spread it over all industries that have room for growth and the effect becomes much less catastrophic.

In general this isn't tenable for two reasons:

1) Older workers have naturally benefited from annual pay increases over the course of decades, so that even if they're in a non-senior role, they would take a sizable pay cut if forced into a new career entirely.

2) Older workers often need higher salaries because they have families to support (along with the many costs associated) which young workers do not. It's a naturally unbalanced situation.

I don't think there is a solution that doesn't screw over a double-digit percentage of the workforce in at least some way. UBI might be a mitigation strategy, but as long as there's an endless supply of young people, older workers who lost the career game for whatever reason will get screwed.

1) How much of those pay increases is just keeping up with inflation? What's the income multiple earned by a manufacturing worker with 20 years experience vs. a fresh hire in the same role?

2) It's true that supporting a family requires a higher salary, but younger people can have families, too, and in any case retraining for a job that allows you to barely scrape by is better than nothing. Better to get mostly screwed than to get completely screwed.

1) Good question. In my experience it's generally around a 1-2% gain over inflation, although in reality that dropped a lot for many workers since 2009 as companies raced to cut costs. But compounded over let's say 20 years, you're looking at 22-49% over starting fresh. Manufacturing is an interesting case beyond this since a lot of jobs were unionized and came with tenure benefits in excess of my numbers above.

2) In a purely rational way, yes. However,

a) I'm most interested in discussing average scenarios which in this case is young people = generally mortgageless and childless, older people = generally have children and associated costs

b) It often ends up more complicated than that when you factor in social safety nets. You could very well do better by not taking a job that allows you to barely scrape by and instead take the government assistance.

c) Rationalizing away a massive decrease in standard of living for a significant number of people as, effectively, "at least they're not homeless" is one of the ways you end up with massive inequality and eventually the populism push we're seeing now leading potentially to something akin to the French Revolution.

I think we can find a better solution. This is exactly the kind of discussion that has been missing on a national level until very recently.

>c)

If they don't care then there is no problem. If they are unwilling to take paths toward self improvement maybe it's for the best to not force them to do something they don't want?

On the second point, the successful penetration of family planning into the western world means that most people do not have children until they can support them. So it is actually worse to lose income and go down to income level X than to have only been at income level X (and for a shorter amount of time) because someone in the first situation has likely had kids by now whereas someone in the second situation hasn't.

And at the risk of stating the obvious, it is in society's best interest to support families, because children are literally the next generation and everything will quickly collapse if it becomes economically untenable for most to have children. So society has to set itself up in a way that promotes the ability for most people to have and support families.

>2) Older workers often need higher salaries because they have families to support (along with the many costs associated) which young workers do not. It's a naturally unbalanced situation.

That's completely illogical. What you need doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is what type of work is available for you and retraining expands the availability of work. If retraining is unattractive because you see higher paying opportunities elsewhere then you don't even have the problem that retraining is supposed to solve.

"Only if those 40 year olds believe they're entitled to higher pay just because they're older. The number of available jobs in a given career hierarchy shrinks pretty quickly as you ascend, which means that most people won't rise very far. Start at the bottom rung, stay at the bottom rung for the rest of their life."

So your solution is to delegate a 40 year old replaced by trade policies to the bottom of the economic rung. This is the exact situation that the article is saying is a problem. Don't think you read the article.

My point was that we should tilt economic policies so that this situation does not occur. And make no mistakes, this situation is avoidable, and caused by the destruction of that 40 year old's career.

Unless I misread the article, it's about blue-collar workers losing their manufacturing jobs due to globalization. I don't know what the typical career progression in manufacturing looks like, but if you can be replaced by some freshly hired 22 year old in China, you're probably in the bottom rung. So it's not like that hypothetical 40 year old was suddenly thrown back into the bottom rung after a successful career where their superior experience protected them from competing with 22 year olds. Their well-paying job at the bottom rung disappeared, with the only alternatives being retraining for less well-paying jobs in the bottom rung of other industries or staying unemployed. It appears many stayed unemployed.

I think they should be given sufficient support to bridge the gap while they retrain; potentially even before their jobs disappear. That seems strictly preferable to unemployment.

"I don't know what the typical career progression in manufacturing looks like, but if you can be replaced by some freshly hired 22 year old in China, you're probably in the bottom rung."

The point is that economic policies can make it so that a career in manufacturing in the United States does not need to compete with a career in manufacturing in China. To keep standards of living high in the USA, we need to wall off companies from undercutting and destroying our workers wages. It doesnt matter if it can be done cheaper in China, when we allow that it ruins the quality of life for American citizens. The only people it benefits are the people running the companies here in the USA and the people in China. The rest of the United States slips further towards being a third world country.

You're talking about getting America involved in the worst possible kind of war - a war against reality. As a field of study, economics is a set of advanced physics word problems. There is no law you can pass and no policy you can enforce that will ever make the economy actually function the way you desire it to if the physical economy would produce a different outcome.

"You're talking about getting America involved in the worst possible kind of war - a war against reality."

Literally this article was about how its possible to defend jobs in a country

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