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Comment by centimeter | Hacker News Reader

Not all 40-hour-a-week jobs are valuable enough to support a high adult standard of living. If adults are still doing those jobs, it’s not a problem with the jobs.

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This is the real issue. Imo: there's not enough upwards mobility in jobs because people are retiring later in life. We need to make it cheaper to retire and for workforces to move up the ladder. I know this sounds elitist, but when I worked in a shop, I didn't expect to be able to afford a house.

This is an interesting point I have not contemplated in my musings on the issue so far. Something I should have thought of earlier since my dad came out of retirement and thus is taking up a position that otherwise could have been occupied by the promotion of someone who graduate more recently.

Thanks for sharing it.

It’s a long article but if you just skip along and read around the graphs you get a lot of context on this situation. I also found it fascinating when I first stumbled upon it .

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Boswort...

Just musing a bit further, there are multiple ways you could attack this. For instance, you could also encourage people to work shorter hours—we've all become much more productive in the past century, so why are we still working 40 hours a week at minimum?

Because we don't sell units of productivity - we're selling units of labour. If I don't sell 40 hours per week, somebody else will.

No. It is a problem with the pay.

Where do you believe the problem lies?

The people who can’t perform labor worth more than a few dollars an hour.

Does the problem really lie in those people, themselves, or in the circumstances that led to their labor being worth so little?

This is a purely moral judgement - you can argue, in the most extremal case, that every aspect of a person's behavior is purely "circumstantial". After all, your personality and capabilities are entirely shaped by circumstances like genetics and life experience.

Of course, we understand this is a pretty useless way of looking at things.

From a consequentialist standpoint, the incentives work out the best when we use the heuristic of assigning responsibility for low labor value to the person performing the labor, so that's the approximation I choose to use. You could choose to think that e.g. being very stupid is no one's fault, so a very stupid person should get paid as much as a brilliant doctor, but the net social consequences of this are pretty well explored and pretty bad.

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