I personally support wealth and income inequality when coupled with social mobility (and a high standard of living at the low end). With that in mind, why do you think it's absurd for both a street cleaner and a brain surgeon to enjoy a middle class lifestyle? I think we both agree neither should be dirt poor, but of course, that's not the only option. I cannot, for one, think of a solid justification. Both do something important, necessary even, and both benefit society at large.
This comes up frequently here when folks balk at Canadian software engineering wages, which are by Canadian standards solid middle class wages. Compared to America it can be a "pittance" but of course, Canada has much lower wealth and income inequality - and it's because there's a much tighter band of compensation.
Fun stuff to think about.
Really ? Any person without a severe physical disabilities can be a street cleaner - you need very low incentives to generate people capable.
Surgeons take like a decade of training and a small % of the population is even capable of becoming one and there's a demand for their skills.
Software developers create output that potentially has a very non-linear return. Few 1000 people can create software used by billions daily. A few people can develop software that manages billions of $ of assets.
(1) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.SAOP.P5?view=map...
I've listened to Yoel Romero talk about their Olympic program, how the children in the camp would get more food if they performed better in training and they would pit each other aginst one another to promote competition. You think the kids participate because they wanted to compete in the Olympics ? He could have just cleaned the streets and make the same as a surgeon...
I can’t fathom pointing to a market that cannot compete globally (Canada’s software engineering job market) and somehow thinking it’s impressive. Knocking everyone down to achieve equality is not desirable.
I’m more interested in approaches that provide safety nets and mobility upward. Not ones that eliminate the paths upward.
To be clear this is my opinion also. I'm not saying Canada's engineering market is impressive, just that this is the context in which this conversation comes up on HN. My question was posed as a platonic thought exercise.
Knocking everyone down to achieve equality is not desirable.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/clarissajanlim/msnbc-ma...
The fact that a news anchor didn’t realize that was complete bullshit is an example of how mistaken people are about what “making the rich pay” will accomplish.
If I had to swap lives with a random citizen of any nation, it certainly would not be the US.
I don't like the odds that I'd find myself incarcerated for shoplifting groceries, or living in a tent city, or crapping in a donut box in the back of an Amazon delivery van, or prostituting my ass to pay for insulin.
What percentage of people do you think you just described?
DoD spending helped build Silicon Valley when it was all fruit orchards, but other forces surpassed it in importance decades ago.
>There are countries that are quite impressive for their software engineering compared to the states and population. Sweden comes to mind and the taxes are a lot more steep there than in Canada.
If you credit defense spending with Silicon Valley today, you ought to do the same with Sweden. It, after, all, has an unusually large native defense industry. Saab jet fighters would not exist today if Stockholm hadn't decided decades ago that having an indigenous aircraft industry would be of value for geopolitical (as a neutral country) and economic reasons.
It is obviously unfair to penalise people for bad luck. It is also unfair for those with good luck to use the talents which fortune has gifted them to extort society, to demand that they receive multiple times more money than the normal citizen lest they deny society their talents and leave. Obviously fairness is not the only relevant value, but it is relevant.
I don't think it is healthy for a society to stream their most talented citizens into high-paying and stable jobs, and to discard the rest as losers that are best forgotten, condemned to low-pay, casualised and insecure work. It is precisely this kind of dual society in which we now live, that is tearing at the social fabric, creating the kind of anger and resentment that produced Trump - and it is profoundly wrong.
I note that the NHS pays doctors markedly less than they would receive in North America, though it is still a considerable amount. Yet we have no real brain drain. The most common reason doctors give for remaining in the UK, besides friends and family, is that they believe in the NHS as a public service provided free at the point of use for the common good. The motives and self-conception of the medical profession has not always been pecuniary. In The Politics, Aristotle is emphatic that medicine is a craft whose end is the good, which is corrupted insofar as it is treated as a means to making money.
But of course they do. Talents and a good surrounding environment aren't worth anything without a lot of education and effort. Why shouldn't a successful doctor be rewarded for that effort.
It is controversial (though a widespread belief among philosophers), but I believe that human talent is entirely a function of the interaction of genes and environment. We don't control the neighborhood in which we are born, the school in which we're enrolled, the values instilled in us, or our temperamental inclination to learning. I believe, for similar reasons, that we don't control our own effort. Humans don't stand apart from the naturalistic universe, but are a part of it. Others claim that while genes and environment play the largest role in determining our talents, we also have a degree of volition in those constraints with which to make better or worse use of those conditions, and for which we should be awarded responsibly. Either way, on the strong or weak version, our talents are largely our of our control, and it is therefore unfair to heavily reward or punish people for them.
I'm also extremely sceptical of the idea that high-earning jobs demand more effort. I have a PhD and it required a fair amount of work. My immediate family were all in unskilled, low-paying jobs which they found boring, and derived little satisfaction from. Who put more effort in? We both had to work, but I found it interesting and fulfilling, whereas they did not. For them, there was a far greater gap between what they were doing and what they wanted to be doing. I think it's obvious that their jobs required more effort in any morally relevant sense. The relationship between effort and pay seems fairly incidental, but a general trend is that the more you are paid, the more likely the job is to exercise and develop your faculties. In this respect, the trendline goes from harder to easier with pay.
For that matter, I agree that many unskilled jobs are quite undervalued, and should be paid more. But the way to achieve that is surely not to dismiss the genuine, sometimes strenuous effort involved in developing valuable skills and talents as the mere outcome of unearned factors out of our control.
Complete and utter bullshit. There are vast amounts of information available on what incomes are for jobs. Unless people have a mental or physical disability, they can put in the effort to train for something more than a trivial minimum wage job.
The average amount of hours spent on watching tv shows, movies, playing video games, etc means that time to improve is not in short supply. As a society we shouldn’t encourage people who want to just coast and contribute very little of what society wants (labor demand).
> to demand that they receive multiple times more money than the normal citizen lest they deny society their talents and leave
The entitlement is palpable here. Nobody is a heart surgeon by by birth. It takes decades of sacrifice and hard work. Very few people are willing to do that and talent only plays a small part. That’s why doctors still make a multiple in the UK of “the normal citizen”: https://www.erieri.com/salary/job/cardiac-surgeon/united-kin...
> and to discard the rest as losers that are best forgotten, condemned to low-pay, casualised and insecure work.
False dichotomy. The rest should be spending time training for skilled jobs. We should absolutely discourage people from getting a BA in Political Science and then spending their life making coffee and shitposting on Twitter. It’s an incredible waste of personal and societal potential.
> I note that the NHS pays doctors markedly less than they would receive in North America, though it is still a considerable amount. Yet we have no real brain drain.
See above. Your doctors make way more than even US software engineers (the thing I’m saying Canadian SWEs should aspire to). You don’t have brain drain because you pay them many multiples of “normal people”.
The surgeon will have spent many years studying while the street cleaner can just get started tomorrow.
The surgeon has responsibilities the cleaner does not.
Finally, given equal pay, people may not want to do unpleasant jobs: I'd rather be a poet than a trash collector.
But on the other hand it's somewhat hard to justify someone earning many orders of magnitude more than others.
Indeed but if it is paid for by the government then what difference does it make? I would rather work my ass off as a SWE than collect garbage even if I'm getting paid the same amount, however that's just me. I suspect it's you too, if you're honest with yourself.
As as for poetry, this is my argument for UBI. Go for it, IMO, poetry has societal value.
> The surgeon has responsibilities the cleaner does not.
[edit] This is true, and also a surgeon generates value through the people they save. I can get behind that. Thanks for entertaining my thought exercise :)
I am a poet on the dole. I tell you, it is good for the soul. I forego prosody for perspicacity, smoke your weed and blow profundity. You could be me if you dared. Give poet your tax money, you declared.
Your brain surgeons will leave and you will be left with the other guy. Which may be fine for you but many Americans do not want that and consequently find things that would bring that about absurd.
Further, why isn't every brain surgeon in America located in NY, SF and LA?
Broadly, America has a pretty bad healthcare system, ranked somewhere in the mid-20s globally. The vast majority of the healthcare systems ranked higher than America are socialized - somewhere between single payer and two tier. With capped pay. Why aren't all those doctors in America?
Why isn't every software engineer in the Bay Area currently located in Seattle and Texas? It's really not that simple.
So naturally I am unsurprised that Canadian neurosurgeons are good. If they’re anything like other surgical specialties they’re probably also making bank. Or maybe they’re not and my extended family is a bunch of superhumans.
Berkeley alone has as many Nobel Prize winners as Canada entire. That’s the kind of society we build here. Winners. And sometimes there’s a price we will pay for that (we’ll have some losers).
EDIT: Pay your doctors what you pay your street cleaners and you’ll see what they do. They won’t stay in Canada for that.
Oh and sorry about the edit style responses. I have hit my comment rate limit.
I guess my simple response to the rest is “show me the code”. No one does this thing except authoritarian regimes limiting emigration. If it is so good, show us.
A US anesthesiologist is paid a median of $400K USD (500K CAD). In Canada the median pay is $393K CAD ($300K USD). In real terms anyways. In PPP adjusted terms, it's closer.
> Berkeley alone has as many Nobel Prize winners as Canada entire. That’s the kind of society we build here. Winners. And sometimes there’s a price we will pay for that.
Winners and losers. I'm not passing judgement I'm just saying that the American society isn't full exclusively of winners, it's full of winners and the folks I pass on my way home shooting heroin. At the end of the day we all live in a society.
> EDIT: Pay your doctors what you pay your street cleaners and you’ll see what they do. They won’t stay in Canada for that.
Unless you pay them both an upper middle class wage ;)
Either way, thank you for engaging in my thought exercise!
> Oh and sorry about the edit style responses. I have hit my comment rate limit.
Nothing to apologize for, I appreciate your thoughts! I know this is a bit of a third-rail topic - but that's why I'm extra interested in what the HN community has to say.
Feel free to give an example of an actual major country that does that then.
If you can't think of such a real life example, then maybe that is your answer as for why this does not work.
As someone who lives in America, I am more than supportive of Canada spending all of their money, overpaying their trash collectors.
That way, Canada can get their trash collections, and we in America can get their engineers.
Go ahead, other countries. Overpay everyone. I'd love that. That way we can poach your high value citizens who are overtaxed.
First off, neither Democrats nor Republicans are interested in supporting immigration into America. The last major immigration tightening was Clinton with the IIRAIRA and the last amnesty was under Reagan. Since then, neither side has been interested in bringing more legal immigrants to the US. After all, the Biden administration is about to allow 100,000 green cards to expire unprocessed and disappear into the aether. At least Donny was honest about it.
> As someone who lives in America, I am more than supportive of Canada spending all of their money, overpaying their trash collectors.
I also live in America, and I am not saying anyone's overpaying trash collectors.
> That way, Canada can get their trash collections, and we in America can get their engineers.
And yet this is only part of the story.
> That way we can poach your high value citizens who are overtaxed.
The lowest tax rate in the US/CA is Alberta and the highest is Quebec. The rest of the US and Canada exist in between these two Canadian provinces. If you factor in health care, basically all of Canada costs less to live in than America for the average individual. YMMV of course.
However, saying Canadians on the whole are "overtaxed" is an indication you haven't given an honest look at what the rest of the western world looks like outside of the US.
As I've been saying, that's only part of the equation. Folks don't move to the US to evade taxes lol - Silicon Valley is among the highest taxed places on earth but still attracts the world's best talent. It's not about the taxes - it never has been. Some small tax break isn't going to get me to leave the Bay Area. I'm confident my opportunity here will outperform the delta. Until that opportunity no longer exists, then I will leave without looking back.
> However, saying Canadians on the whole are "overtaxed"
I was talking about the total amount of money that engineers take home. So just replace the word "overtaxed" with underpaid, and the argument holds.
Engineers in america get way way more take home money, regardless of any tax rates.
> Folks don't move to the US to evade taxes
Ok, they do it to get the high salary. Or a lot of them do.
> but still attracts the world's best talent
Yes. Because engineers get paid way more money than trash collectors.
So great, canada should go ahead and pay their engineers the same as trash collections (through a method that will certainly result in them having to spend a bunch of money to do it), and we in the USA can poach a lot of those engineers.
Once again, feel free to show the example of a real country that is spending an equal amount of money on their trash collectors, and their engineers, and I point out how that country is likely having a lot of its engineers leave.
And yet, despite those obstacles, the brain drain is real and ongoing.
In a survey of scientists from 16 countries (<http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...>), the US is the top destination from 13 of the 15 others and the #2 choice from the other two. If you are a Canadian scientist, there is a 16% chance (<https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/37lgxg/the...>) that you will move to the US. That's not "16% of all Canadian scientists that move out of the country move to the US". Let me repeat: *16% of all Canadian scientists move to the US.* They're also likely to be among the top Canadian scientists, too.
By comparison, 5% of all American scientists move to another country, of which 32% go to Canada, so about 1.6-1.7% total. Since the US has nine times more people, that means that in absolute numbers the 1.7% of American scientists is about equal to the 16% of Canadian scientists, but there is no reason to think that the 1.7% makes up the top tier of American scientists; why would the best move north of the border? In other words, the US is receiving the best of Canadian scientists in exchange for an equal number of its non-best. As renewiltord said, "Your brain surgeons will leave and you will be left with the other guy."
>If I told you that I would pay you 30% more to move to Kansas, would you? Why, and why not?
If Kansas paid 30% more for the same job, maybe you and I wouldn't move but a lot more people would move there than the current status quo. But it doesn't.
>Broadly, America has a pretty bad healthcare system, ranked somewhere in the mid-20s globally.
The US does quite well in most patient outcomes. It does not do as well as it could because of the opioid crisis which has singlehandedly reduced average lifespans, and which is more or less independent of access to doctors.
The US's high per-capita healthcare spending is driven to some degree by the very high spending in R&D (the US by itself produces something like 50% of new drugs globally), and is also a function of its much higher per capita GDP, about 20% higher on a PPP basis than Canada and Western Europe outside Norway. (I wish I could find the analysis that discusses this; I'll edit this if I can locate it.)
Regardless, 91% of Americans have health insurance, compared to 95-97% in every other developed country. (There are always people who fall between the cracks, like a Canadian who moves and neglects to update his provincial health care card. The only way to get true 100% coverage is to go the UK NHS route of not requiring a member card at all.) Meanwhile, an amazingly high portion of Canadians don't have a family doctor (<https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/despite-more-doctors-many-cana...>). In Atlantic Canada the shortage is astounding (<https://www.thetelegram.com/in-depth/doctor-shortage/what-we...>). It's one thing to have shortages in rural areas—that happens in the US too—but Halifax?!? I've heard the same occurs in Vancouver too. I can assure you that such a doctor shortage exists nowhere in the US outside really rural areas.
>The vast majority of the healthcare systems ranked higher than America are socialized - somewhere between single payer and two tier. With capped pay. Why aren't all those doctors in America?
If tomorrow the US said that every medical doctor and STEM PhD holder from comparable countries (Canada, Western Europe, Australasia, Japan/Korea/Taiwan) could enter the country with unlimited working privileges, what would happen? To some degree you answered your own question above; of course there would be at least some, perhaps many, that would still not move because of local ties, friends, language issues. But Anglophones, and others who are comfortable with English or want to learn, and don't have such binding ties? Remember, 17% of all Canadian scientists already move to the US.
The US has among the worst monthers mortality rate in the entire OECD [1] - and most of the rest of the numbers don't look so hot either [2]. Life expectancy is falling. Generally only cancer 5 year survival is improving - because the US keeps people alive just a bit more than 5 years. They die soon after of the same cancer, because the US prioritizes keeping folks alive a hair longer at all costs - and focuses on earlier detection. Earlier detection does not indicate cure, but sure does boost numbers.
> Remember, 17% of all Canadian scientists already move to the US.
This was true in the past, however the US has a NO VACANCIES sign all over it at this point. The Biden administration is allowing 100,000 green cards (authorized, ready to issue) expire without being given to individuals this year. [3] Mine included - and I've been here since 2010 and paid literally millions of dollars in taxes.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats are interested in permitting any more immigration. The last tightening was Bill Clinton under IIRAIRA and the last amnesty was Reagan. Since then, nobody has done anything to make immigration to America any easier, even when Obama Democrats controlled both the House and Senate. Trump made things slightly more painful, but Biden has not rolled those changes back and all signs point to no plans to do so.
The old numbers no longer matter, America is no longer taking new applicants. Doors closed.
But don't just take my word for it, Canada's getting the bulk of North America's new immigrants. And has been for years. [4] Canada is now offering permanent resident cards to immigrants totaling 1% of its entire population every year. Can you imagine America taking 3 million new immigrants per year?
[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants-du...
[2] https://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/health-at-a-glance-united-...
[3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/some-100-000-green-cards-at-ris...
[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2021/07/15/house...
This seems like purely circular logic. Why are you assuming that it's the top Canadian scientists who move to the US and the non-top US scientists who move to Canada, rather than vice versa? Yes the US is a more popular destination than Canada, but isn't that just a reflection of having a bigger population, more cities, etc.? (e.g. as a toy model, if everyone who immigrated did it because they'd fallen in love and were moving to live with their partner, wouldn't that produce a distribution like you describe?). A scientist may well earn more in the US, but they might well have a better quality of life in Canada, there are plenty of reasons to prefer one or the other.
Because a brain surgeon requires a vastly larger amount of money, effort, training, and time to achieve their skill set.
Much less people would spend all of these resources, and time, becoming brain surgeons, if it was as lowly paid as much easier jobs.
> This comes up frequently here when folks balk at Canadian software engineering wages
I mean, ok. But if you don't care about this mismatch, then don't compain when a large amount of engineers in canada flee for better prospects elsewhere. |
Country wide prevention of people fleeing a country for better prospects rarely works.
These types of authoritarian lockdowns just don't work in the long term.
What, do you ban people from going on vacation in other countries? Do you ban traveling entirely?
You can't stop people from leaving, if they can do those things.
A nationwide scheme to arrest people who leave the country, merely because they have in demand skills is absurd.
You are not going to be able to arrest people, who have in demand skills or prevent them from fleeing the country.
Like, what does that even mean? For how long do people have to be slaves to the nation?
People move countries all the time, and the idea that one is now going to be arrested for something that is perfectly normal and common is absurd.
What, is it just now illegal for people in a nation to ever spend time working outside of the country? Do you understand how ridiculous that is, to prevent people from leaving or working outside the country, forever?
> As another example the US requires citizens living abroad to pay taxes.
The most powerful country in the world can get away with this, yes. But a smaller nation isn't going to be able to have enforced prevention of high skilled labors leaving the country.
Accumulating wealth has never been a problem in Cuba or anywhere else. The problem is always creating wealth, which is an economic problem, not a currency problem.