Why is U.S. labor supply so low? | Hacker News Reader

Why is U.S. labor supply so low?

gspublishing.com

90 pointssnowytrees461 comments

There is no such thing as labor shortage.

There are low wages, poor working conditions and companies treating workers like slaves. Everything else is just an excuse.

Treat workers like humans, pay them fairly so they can live a meaningful life, give them a good place to work, and they WILL work.

I disagree. There are two potential causes for the labor shortage: paying people not to work (ie increased government handout), and people retiring early. Both of these things have happened during the pandemic.

I recommend looking at the labor participation rate over the last 5 years. We dropped from 63% to 61.5 %.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti...

do this means companies should pay more to attract people ?

You haven’t defended your “disagreement.” Even if your points did hold up, they still don’t counter parent’s claims.

American wages have been stagnant for over 30 years while benefits, pensions, job security, and working conditions have continued to erode. If you think that’s not going to have any consequences, you’re lying to yourself.

Unemployment insurance only lasts 6 months, is very difficult to live on for low wage workers, and people just generally know that not working is very bad because it wrecks your job history and resume.

Additionally, the majority of Americans’ finances are in very poor shape, which is why Biden was forced to extend the moratorium on student loan payments. To take your word for it, we would also have to explain why employment was ever so high to begin with.

What do you mean by stagnant? Do you mean and individual is stuck at a certain pay level their entire life? Or do you mean that a given quintile of income has been stagnant over time? Here's a quote from basic economics (chapter 10):

> The University of Michigan study found that, among working Americans who were in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1975, approximately 95 percent had risen out of that bracket by 1991—including 29 percent who had reached the top quintile by 1991, compared to only 5 percent who still remained in the bottom quintile. The largest absolute amount of increase in income between 1975 and 1991 was among those people who were initially in the bottom quintile in 1975 and the least absolute increase in income was among those who were initially in the top quintile in 1975.

> In other words, the incomes of people who were initially at the bottom rose more than the incomes of people who were initially at the top. This is the direct opposite of the picture presented by Census data, based on following income brackets over time, instead of following the people who are moving in and out of those brackets.

> Similar patterns appeared in statistics from the Internal Revenue Service, which also followed given individuals. The IRS found that between 1996 and 2005 the income of individuals who had been in the bottom 20 percent of income tax filers in 1996 had increased by 91 percent by 2005, and the income of those individuals who were in the top one percent in 1996 had fallen by 26 percent.{316} It may seem almost impossible that the data from the Bureau of the Census and the data from the IRS and the University of Michigan can all be correct, but they are. Studies of income brackets over time and studies of individual people over time are measuring fundamentally different things that are often confused with one another.

This kind of “moving up” in income brackets is entirely expected.

Would an 18 year old be expected to make the same money as a 50 year old? Even the most unskilled laborer sees pay increases over time.

Compensation has been stagnant, even regressive with respect to productivity for four decades now:

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

Correct. People have a “no deal I’ll wait” option.

Same as business as always had.

If we maintain that then we will have a free market in labour. Pay the price or don’t get any.

Or spend the capital automating and working out how to do more with less. It is supposed to be capitalism after all.

> Correct. People have a “no deal I’ll wait” option.

>Same as business as always had.

"business as always had" that option? Clearly they don't, otherwise they'll never cave to strikes.

Do they always instantly cave in to strikes? Do strikers permanently stay on strike on a barely subsistence wage?

Or do they finally come together to share the spoils of mutually beneficial activity? Which is what a market is supposed to be about.

Interesting, in real estate we are familiar with "buyer's markets" and "seller's markets".

Seems like in the labor force, a "worker's market" only comes around once in a lifetime. For most of my life it's been an "employer's market".

> paying people not to work (ie increased government handout)

83% of the value of all the 2020-21 Paycheck Protection Program loans were forgiven as of December 19th, 2021 [1]. That's a total value of $653,038,613,899. That's nearly as large as the 2008 bailouts. Even that doesn't tell the whole story because 94% of the 2020 loans alone were forgiven, and 2021 is on track to meet it.

[1]: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/2021-12/2021.12.19_W...

I don's see how this contradicts the parent's comment? He's presumably talking about the unemployment subsidy that the federal government offered.

Both the parent comment and the OP article talk about the federal subsidy, which both imply drive low labor participation rates. You can read the same argument from years back out of the Brookings Institute, just substitute COVID subsidies with Opioids [1] as the cause of depressed labor participation.

My counter: The labor-force participation is still at historic highs compared to the 1950s through the early 70s, but not as high as its peak in 2000 [2]. Combined with relatively normal unemployment historically [3] the market for labor is squeezed. After 40 years of neoliberal policy dismantling state programs they've released as much marginal labor as possible, and we are all now seeing a return to historic norms.

[1]: https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/where-have-all-the-w...

[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=KfNL

[3]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE

But the 1950s had very few working women. One would imagine that, having added women to the numerator, a 60% now means society has changed a lot from a 60% then.

That is, the two 60%s tell different stories. Of course, the right way for me to see this is if housewifery rate has returned to the baseline, or if female labor participation rate is similar to what it was, or if households can be supported and are supported in the same way as the past.

My impression was that the rapid growth in labor force participation was because of women. But I have not recently tested if that is correct. M

The distribution did change [1; red, blue]; more women were entering than men leaving. Since 2000 both demographics are dropping about equally and in lock step, but not returning to previous decade distributions.

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=KfNz

Let me see if I understood well.

The problem is not companies practicing wave slavering, but government social aid and early retirement?

Is this you are saying?

Anyone who makes an argument based on something and backs it up with one data point about something as complicated as labor supply isn't making a full thought out argument.

The argument your making is that the US stimulus checks are so great that business just can't compete with laziness. Yet the total cumulative stimulus is less then the poverty line. If business can pay someone above that line than maybe there labor is better spent elsewhere or at least that time with there families.

Now that's harsh but that's the way that your argument comes across. Now the original post balances with reason by saying stimulus has given people room to not work at low paying jobs but it's not necessary because they are lazy but because they jobs they work suck and pay like crap. Hence the reason business will raise wages because that is the major problem. Working retail where people are rude and mean is not pleasant and if you want people to deal with unpleasant people you have to pay them more

And basic stuff like shitty family leave policies drive women out of the workforce.

> There is no such thing as labor shortage.

Of course there can be such a thing as a labor shortage, under many different scenarios (during sustained high rates of real economic expansion, specialized types of labor that are difficult to train enough of, fading-away segments that aren't being replenished with new labor due to lack of interest (yet still require active labor), not enough manual labor, not enough immigration, not enough population growth, and so on).

Low wages can make a labor shortage worse, is the actual context.

As long as you have people unemployed, there will be no labor shortage, everything else is just an excuse.

If workers need training, why don't companies train them? The majority of workers can't afford training, they barely afford home and food.

Why companies don't train workers? Because they don't want to pay, so they blame workers for not having enough training thus shifting the labor shortage cause to workers, not to themselves.

> As long as you have people unemployed, there will be no labor shortage, everything else is just an excuse.

Would you also say that as long as there are more housing units than people, there's no housing shortage?

It doesn't take much imagination to see that this won't work.

Have you ever tried running a company? Let's say you have a band (which is a form of a company. They sell entertainment). You can't find a drummer. Would you train one? How many years are you going to able to wait before you start your band for real while your new drummer trains? In the mean time you aren't able to make any money because the band can't perform.

The average size of a company is 1-4 people. They aren't Walmart size etc.. They don't have the budget to train an employee

https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/

You can't be serious.

We're talking about the kind of training needed to work some garbage CRM that the employer uses, not a decade spent mastering a fine art...

Never mind that plenty of successful bands have flourished with drummers with little more than a few months "training". I mean, you know, it depends on whether you're a prog-rock band or garage/art band, ha ha.

the point you want to make seems intuitive but looking closer it’s a bad comparison. A band is a one and done setup and the startup pain you are referencing while someone gets trained is happening now anyway. Even despite current events the pain to start that training pipeline is O(LOG N) which airlines are doing for pilots now or more now because of the shortage. I think the nvidia build pipeline referenced in good strategy bad strategy about chaining 3 teams of 18 month developments together to continuously release every 6 months even though each team needs about 18 months to go from r&d to production. Yes the first time ever there was 18 months without a release. They have the time and money to invest and they will have to wake up and stop being selfish and start making sure we can coexist.

> Let's say you have a band

The band U2 trained its singer, on-the-job style. Worked out pretty well for the business.

Sorry my example prevented you from understanding. 3 guys getting together to wing it until they make it is not the same as 2 guys needing a third to make a living and not being able to wait years until that 3rd person gets up to speed.

> so they blame workers for not having enough training thus shifting the labor shortage cause to workers, not to themselves.

Do you recall when the pandemic started I think it was the state of Illinois blamed their inability to process employment checks on a lack of COBOL programmers?

It was a really interesting statement. As you say-- blaming people who don't exist for their failure to maintain their systems or create a training program/incentives to ensure that there's a supply of programmers.

I'm sure if it payed well, someone would learn COBOL.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/business/coronavirus-cobol-pr...

Indeed. Whenever i hear of "labour shortage", I'm immediately reminded of the "show! Me! The money!" clip of Jerry Maguire.

There's no labour shortage. There's a lack of currently available labour for the terms you're offering.

Edit: and perhaps some folks who should not be considered as on the labour market, but are labelled unemployed nevertheless.

Not to disagree with you -- of course I agree with you -- but in your scenario a MacDo burger now costs $20.

How much does a McDonalds burger cost right now in the places with the best worker protections and pay?

Pretty sure it's not $20 dollars adjusted for inflation and exchange rates. Who would by them? May $5?

You've missed the point. McDonalds here in Seattle starts workers at $16+. A Big Mac is still within a dollar or two of what it is in the rest of the country. It's not $20.

Dick's Deluxe starts pay at $19 and has benefits. Their burger is $1.80.

And yet these are all the people that are apparently missing in action in the economy. Or are they? Perhaps it's just small businesses that are unable to compete.

It's misleading to say "a dollar or two" cheaper when that's almost 50% cheaper.

"Customers may pay anywhere from $3.75 for a Big Mac in Austin, Texas, to $6.39 in Seattle. For Cheeseburgers, the variation was even greater, from $1 in places like Chicago and Houston to $2.29 in New York City."

https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/why-big-m...

Is this what McDonald's has to charge in New York and Seattle to be lucrative, or is it what they want to/can charge and can now excuse with "our workers are being paid living wages"?

Sounds like no matter what the result is, you get your preferred conclusion. In other words:

big macs costs significantly more in locations that have high labor costs -> "they're just using the high labor costs an excuse to charge more!"

big macs costs slightly more in locations that have high labor costs -> "see! that proves we should raise minimum wages!"

None of the “significantly more” is even remotely close to the cost claimed by the original comment. That’s the problem here - you can’t keep saying “but but but” to clear refutation. The assertion was simply false.

And in places where there are REAL worker protections, like the Scandinavian countries, a Big Mac is cheaper than in Seattle, potentially partly because employers aren’t responsible for healthcare.

But my point is that the commenter overstated the impact of paying higher wages dramatically.

A plain cheeseburger at Dick’s was $2.50 last time I went (this summer). The Dick’s deluxe is around $4.50 or so. The quality is low, so I’ve switched to Cali burger for my Saturday cheese burger with my kid (we go to downtown Seattle via lower Queen Anne, which puts us right next to a Dick’s, but I can’t handle eating there anymore).

Big Mac’s have been pricey here for awhile. Reminds me of Swiss McDonald prices almost, though I’m sure the 11 CHF Big Mac meal from 2006 costs a lot more there now.

https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index

McD's workers in Denmark are paid $22US/hr + 6 wks paid vacation, and their Big Macs only cost $0.35 more than in the US.

Denmark McDonald's prices are among the highest in the world.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/city_price_rankings?it...

So not $0.35 more, but $2 or 20% more it appears.

Take out cities in blue states and the prices are even lower

I imagine the better paid workers in Blue states can actually afford the slightly higher Big Mac price.

Your citation points out that a McMeal in Denmark costs around 12$ while in the US costs around 10$.

Even if you blindly assume that revenue is tied to salaries, are salaries in the US only 20% apart?

Your citation also points out that a McMeal in Spain is cheaper, and I'm sure that quality of life + benefits in the US is even in the same division, specially give that Spain has free healthcare for all.

The truth of the matter is that workers in the US are massively exploited and abused, and that as a deep impact on everyone's quality of life, even the privileged.

You should look at that chart again. Prices in red states are almost uniformly lower than blue states where minimum wages are higher.

I don't want to join this argument, but clicked the link just to see out of interest.

$10 is a little misleading, as that's the very topend places in USA. Check out El Paso, it's closer to $6.

Americans pay more in taxes to provide subsidies that make beef cheaper. https://scet.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/CopyofFINALSavi...

Continuing with the scenario: Easy fast food has contributed to the obesity epidemic, factory farming conditions, eviction of families from farms to corporations can take them over, and environmental disasters that contribute to global warming. The absence of fast food places is a benefit to a sustainable society.

How much of that is “fast food” and how much of that is just “feeding billions of people a lot of meat”?

What would happen if easy fast food went away? I suppose people wouldn’t eat the same quantities of food? So the farming requirements wouldn’t change.

If easy fast food went away then the working poor would have to find time, money, and energy to source their own ingredients, keep them fresh, and cook them. Which is a tall order when you're already stretched to the breaking point working three shitty part-time jobs with ever-shifting hours. A lot of the people in that situation live in places with nothing but fast food in a reasonable distance, too.

Slower restaurants aren't an option - they take far more time and money then people in this situation have.

I don't know what percentage of those shitty part-time jobs are fast food, but all of those jobs are gone along with the places if we imagine snapping our fingers and decreeing No More Fast Food. Some might be substituted by increased demand at grocers?

I feel like one possible result is former fast food workers who do find some measure of fulfillment in the job of "feeding people" pooling their resources and creating some kind of neighborhood co-op kitchen that feeds their community, with a very different allocation of the money brought in by people paying for the food - more towards paying the workers and getting good ingedients than to increasing shareholder returns. Someone's probably gonna try to get rich off of doing this too of course. Depending on what kinds of resources they can acquire there might be a shift towards purchasing food from more local farmers, or even growing some crops themselves.

That's my first guesses, at least.

Or you could look at what people did 100 years ago before fast food. I suppose you typically had one partner that was not employed and could cook, a bachelor might live with his parents, or a boarding house where meals were cooked.

These work too!

Well aside from the fact that paying rent on one person’s salary is nigh-impossible these days.

If you ever see a $40 hamburger, it will be because of capitalistic forces - what the market can bear - and not the cost.

That, or because some jackass wrapped it in gold leaf... https://www.cookingchanneltv.com/devour/2014/10/1700-dollar-...

Nit: is there a grammatical difference between: 'capitalistic forces' and 'capitalist forces'?

Capitalistic forces means the force itself is capitalistic (and says nothing about who is creating the force). Capitalist forces means the force of a capitalist - it directly references the being that is creating the force.

> There is no such thing as labor shortage.

I'll be sure to tell my history professor. He'll be interested to know that all those textbooks he wrote about Europe immediately after the bubonic plague were wrong.

I think we are not in the same context as Europe after bubonic plague.

?? Parent didn't say we aren't in a labor shortage right now. Parent said labor shortages weren't a real thing.

"There is no Ferrari in my garage" vs "there is no such thing as Ferrari"

Don't forget mass death - the pandemic has claimed millions of lives. That's going to deplete the workforce no matter what. Of course, most of the 'labor shortage' complaints are from people who pay bad wages and don't offer benefits, and most of that 'shortage' is from people who quit, not people who died.

I'm not sure mass death is really a major factor. The vast majority of the deaths have been in age groups that are typically out of the workforce. Maybe it's a small factor both directly and in the transfer of wealth allowing the next generation to retire slightly early, but certainly only a small effect. The quitting you mentioned is a bigger driver.

It's sufficient but the causality tends to be secondary.

America, as currently patterned, is a fragile society. People balance work and family through ad-hoc systems with few redundancies. Now a pandemic comes around that killed a bunch of people who were providing informal support for the main workforce.

A man in Georgia can't do full-time anymore because he's a single dad and the daycare shut down for the duration of the pandemic. A mom exits the workforce because the grandparents who were watching the kids after school are now dead. Someone loses someone dear to them and re-thinks their life direction. These things add up.

26% of people 65 and older were working in 2019. Between Feb 2020 and Feb 2021 the labor force participation rate for that age bracket dropped 11.2%, while the younger brackets dropped 1-2%. That's a significant number of people who didn't die but either lost their jobs or felt unsafe continuing to work and decided to retire rather than looking for a new job.

Exactly, the quitting is the bigger factor. It's not that the labor force has died in mass.

> The vast majority of the deaths have been in age groups that are typically out of the workforce.

But I had the impression people were unable to retire or retiring significantly later.

Yes, there has been a trend of working longer. Those older age groups have much lower participation rates to begin with.

Agreed! That 70 year old competing for your job is gone!

About 50K COVID deaths in the U.S. below age 50 so far [0].

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

I am holding out for a professional position where I will work 24-32 hours per week with benefits. I am not doing the full-time "you own me" rodeo again.

Get a full time remote job from a company that treats their employees like adults. You can easily get whatever their equivalent of a "meets expectations" rating is on 4-5 hours of work a day. And ethically you're doing nothing wrong, because the company is formally saying it's satisfied with your work which means they're getting what they bargained for.

It has to be official from now on. There is going to be no potential for a slippery slope of after-hours messages or pizza party overtime. I have even set up a VoIP number with a 9-5 M-F time condition for use with applications and employers.

I don't have it in me to to work in front of a screen all day, although I understand that works for many on this site. I don't care if the workplace is an open office, a cashier's stool at a supermarket checkout, or a train driver's cab.

I agree with you, and I hope this attitude becomes more widely held.

For other non-native speakers: M-F in this context doesn't have its usual meaning, but means "Monday to Friday".

Although the common use would be funny here :)

This is an interesting ethics question that has crossed my mind a lot. I also remember an internet post years ago about someone who had automated 95% of their job and kept it a secret from their employer, who continued to be satisfied with their output. Where do you draw the line?

If I were employing that person and found out about this I would promote them to an executive position… that is if the work was good and they were doing it successfully.

How many people have you promoted to executive positions in your career?

It always depends on bargain and deal conditions. And KPIs.

When swe work conditions discussion reaches this point I always remember Spolsky's brilliant "Smart and Gets Things Done" book. He writes about KPIs a bit, just enough to not treating it too seriously.

As someone hiring engineers remotely, this is explicitly our offer.

About 4 hours is peak productivity.

We don’t need you to work extra to satisfy our god complex.

No need to self censor the company name in that comment.

Where can one apply?

> And ethically you're doing nothing wrong

We don't pay firemen to put out as many huge fires as possible all day long, because that would lead to very peculiar and unwanted behavior incentives to max out those metrics. Firemen hiring pyromaniacs to make them look good, etc.

Plenty of jobs out there where the metric you're trying to maximize is internal/external customer satisfaction, usually something like maximize service uptime. If your assigned responsibility is the accounting dept, and the accounting dept loves you because when they report a problem its rapidly fixed, then you're doing what the company needs.

Some companies refuse to metric stuff like implementing change, because it results in I (heart) change for the sake of change. I quickly close a ticket to tweak the background color on an internal app but that doesn't make the company any money.

There are jobs like mining coal or farm work, where paying you to not produce makes the owners very angry. Sometimes being in a non-productive cost-center has its privileges. "You're paying me so IT is never in the way of production dept" or IT never gets in the way of accounting so accounting never gets in the way of the production dept, etc.

Big industrial factories usually have a maint department whom do nothing but fix machines. If none of the machines are fixed you don't punish the maint dept LOL. Usually they have pointless busywork if nothing else is going on "go repaint the milling machine". Such things exist in IT "go update the reverse DNS records".

The question is, what are you doing during this "holding out" phase. Living on savings? Working a different job? Some other support system?

I've been making sacrifices, bettering myself, and applying to jobs at a relaxed pace (I have turned down a few that insisted that things would be done the Old Way). Thank God that I am in the relatively luxurious position to do so.

Just now I've noticed that downvotes have started to pour in. I am convinced that there is a troll army from a foreign nation-state sent to sow discord, or maybe the Pinktertons, who still have a sophisticated union-busting intelligence group, and get paid tons of money for it by "Great Place To Work" companies you might not expect.

Contract life

"Sorry but I'm working with another client right now I will get back to you"

You bill more per hour; you bill less than 40 hrs/wk; you get higher pay but have to pay full cost of insurance; it averages out. Then there's the other issue where the pay for some technology positions is so high that even if I only got half pay I'd still be pretty well off in general life ...

My long term experience is people say they like working less than 40/wk but in practice everyone seems more happy with work 80 this week and near 0 next week depending on workload. If the company had precisely 40/wk of work to do every week then they'd skip the contract hassle and hire a feudal peon aka full time "long term" W-2 employee, but contractors provide day to day flexibility.

At companies that are more successful than median, they don't outsource their core competencies so you won't get contractor positions to do "rockstar" revenue generating stuff, but they still need temps to do conversion projects or expansions or experiments. At companies less successful then median, they will outsource their core competencies so you could contract program at a below average software company. My point is its easy and common to get unusual side background unseen work at great companies, and only be in the middle of things at failing companies, so if you want a different combination, like being a rockstar at the center of a great company, you generally have to be a W-2, sadly. Then again there's a lot of money to be made under the contractor model.

Contract life requires one of:

a) Dependence on recruiters/headhunters who take a cut (20-50%+ of your 1099 income)

b) A strong, solid network so broad as to always have leads and offers to keep you busy throughout the year, year after year

c) A giant's reputation: you're well-known elite in one of the FAANGs and built something a lot of people use; you've published books or make speeches at conferences. You're the inventor of some open source tool everyone uses.

Since c is out of my range, I attempted b and find I didn't have that type of skill (or energy) to schmooze and booze my way to a vast network. My past connections from previous jobs are OK, but reasonably loose and they tend to hail from large corporations where there's no contract possibility for my skillset anyway.

I was left with A, which meant that I didn't truly feel independent, but also in the last 3 months of my contracts I would be scrambling and not exactly able to take those 3 months or 6 months off to travel the world like I dreamt. Instead there are lease renewal, healthcare (in the U.S.), and other headaches.

I'm happy to be proven wrong or be offered a "d" option.

https://4dayweek.io/

Thanks for the shoutout :)

Thank you for helping normalize it. I get bored of companies being insistent that they want "smart", "data driven" people who will nonetheless ignore the research to everyone's detriment.

> There is no such thing as labor shortage.

I assume most of the ppl here either held a h1b or a worked with ppl on h1b.

Strange thing to say on here.

I don't quite understand what it is you are implying.

Labor shortages and H1-B visas have very little to do with each other.

The nominal reason for h1-b to be a thing is for cases where you can't find someone locally with the skills you need. How exactly do you define "shortage" to be unrelated to that?

Because those H1B requirements are pro-forma and the visa itself gives the company access to another easily controlled and underpaid immigrant to drive down wages.

So there is no labour shortage, there is a local labour shortage.

That’s not how they’re used. We immigrants get hired because companies get away with paying us less.

There’s a shortage of people willing to work for low wages.

> There is no such thing as labor shortage.

The conspiracy theory going around reddit is that US companies are complaining about labour shortage to try to get their COVID payroll subsidies pardoned.

The funny thing is the forgivable payroll loans are the reason many businesses are around to hire now.

Good point. I guess that assistance would have been better off spent elsewhere so that those business would fail and the owners would re-enter the labor market. That would solve the labor shortage.

It may be that the size of precent of businesses that went under in the US and other large economies isn't that significant.

It could be that this is how large economies grow. The realignment of spending and reopening was growth on top of growth.

On top of that more remote jobs opened up and I want to hear about people who moved to LCOL areas or moved to a bigger job center because they could finally afford to.

Additionally, companies do not have a right to exist. If your business needs to pay minimum wage, profits are thin, and employees are quitting to find something better, it probably shouldn't be a thing any more. There isn't a labor shortage - your business isn't providing enough value for the labor it requires.

A world without musicians? No thanks.

That is... quite a leap

A world without corporate musicians? A-OK.

I'm not clear why there would be no musicians if it requires minimum wage, razor thin profit margins, etc.

Music and art existed before currency was a thing. It will continue to exist as long as humans exis.

You can pay musicians fairly by streaming and buying through other channels like Bandcamp and resonate.is, which if we all did it would make the profession far more viable.

Most musicians and artist make nothing from their music and art, yet folks are still making it.

I agree, except why use the word "right"? There is no such right for businesses (although bailouts are a thing...).

Bailouts could be replaced by direct state acquisition of the business (at cost), IF it provides a benefit to society or its demise would create an irreparable loss.

And this is how it should be because bailouts are done with our money, which means the public need to have some level of control over them afterwards.

Bankrupty process is well understood. Let someone else pick up their physical assets at a good price and build back better.

Exactly. A lot of businesses that survived long enough to hire now were saved by generous PPP money.

Every $ x billion in PPP could be attributed to .y% of inflation but we don’t talk about capital the way we talk about workers.

I agree with the statement except for the "minimum wage" part - I assume you mean the legal minimum wage. Companies should have no right to exist as much as people should have no right to a government imposed minimum wage.

On a practical level a minimum wage is either not effective (so broadly set to what the market is paying already o just above that) or it will inevitably decrease job offer.

On a philosophical level, adults should be free to choose what to do with their body and mind - as long as it has no negative effect on third parties.

Employers who create full time positions that don't pay enough for people to live on create a social burden that the rest of society has to deal with.

That's the negative externality.

Hum, I see your point, but I disagree for two reasons.

AFAIK most jobs that would pay under what's enough to live on are entry level jobs usually carried out part-time by students. Denying them such job is removing them that source of income - and in case of jobs that require experience denying them a chance to gain that experience. This means you are not reducing any social externality. You are just shifting those externalities to a different set of people.

I'm also wary of "daling with" this kind of social externalities even if it was possible. If we apply your argument to drugs than the conclusions would be that alcohol and any other drug should be made illegal because it has a social cost. But I believe people still have the right to do whatever they want with their body and mind as long as there is no direct externality, and I'd rather live with any indirect externality that is the result of that.

> AFAIK most jobs that would pay under what's enough to live on are entry level jobs usually carried out part-time by students.

This is a rosy view of things, but I don't believe its true. Walk into plenty of markets in poorer or even middle class areas and you will find older people doing these jobs out of necessity. I've seen 'entry level job' used very often as a way to exploit people with not much choice.

Statistical evidence is better than anecdotal evidence. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2019/home.htm Also, so you'd rather have some of those people have no income as long as some luckier ones get more income?

Quite the moral dilemma, it seems.

They don't really create this externality, though. A person taking this job apparently cannot get a better paying job. With a higher minimum wage in otherwise free market, no jobs for that person would exist, so the social burden would exist just the same.

The situation is diametrically opposite - minimum wage forces businesses to engage in welfare. Those who have enough margins to engage in welfare might do it; the others may disappear with the jobs, or cut the jobs by reducing service/automating/outsourcing (again leading to the same "social burden" existing).

> people should have no right to a government imposed minimum wage

Yes, turn your country into the likes of Bangladesh. Brillo!

Not sure how to take this. Are you saying that Bangladesh is poor just because they didn't think about raising the minimum wage?

I’m saying that without minimum wage laws, you’ll soon enough see corporations depressing wages to the point where a great many workers will be as desperately impoverished as the Bangladeshi, working 60+ hours a week in dangerous environments for wages that leave them literally starving.

I think that's not going to happen because single corporations have no power in choosing wages. The labor market does. In the labor market the wage will reflect the market value of the job. Almost all current jobs already have market value above minimum wage (only ~2% doesn't). For the ones that don't, it's because well either the job is not valuable/the person is not skilled enough. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2019/home.htm

> I think that's not going to happen because single corporations have no power in choosing wages. The labor market does.

The labor market is not a magical entity. It's comprised of companies doing the hiring and people doing the working.

If you look at sectors where unskilled work prevails and corporations treat workers as fungible resources then the labour market lies firmly in the supply side, and workers have no alternative other than getting exploited. This means paying the least possible amount, which means less than minimum wage.

Think about it for a second: why do you think so many companies pay minimum wage, and not a single cent more? Is is because the workers' negotiating power magically breaks even at the minimum wage level, or is it because labor laws make it illegal to pay less than that?

Did you miss the evidence I provided? It's less than ~2% of the hourly paid workers. I know how the market works. That's why I also provided evidence that's not the case.

Also the alternative is having some of those people have zero income and no opportunity to develop skills.

Perhaps read what the latest Nobel price winners in Economics have to say:

Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens “for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships”

They have done real world studies on the issues discussed here and arrive at a different conclusion from you.

I will, but keep in mind that economists are very divided on the subject - and many other subjects. I do listen to economists, but eventually I have to chose to which economist to believe in these cases, and to do that I try to asses how honest they are and if something they say in their reasoning seems flawed.

I agree with you in general. Economics is not a science. It is almost impossible to verify a theory and most Economists are simply advocating theories that confirm their personal politics/morals/values. However what is interesting about the economists I mentioned is that they have found clever ways to use real world data to “run” experiments. It is truly great work.

Companies can expend resources to push the government to implement policies (or ignore existing policies) that flood the labor market with labor from outside of the existing market. This isn't even theoretical, it's something that's been going on almost since the country was founded and continues to distort the labor market on a colossal scale.

Yes, and I'm in favor of allowing people form other countries to "flood" the labor market. I'm not a protectionist. I think people have a right to work no matter their nationality. (BTW I don't even live in the US).

> single corporations have no power in choosing wages. The labor market does.

Counterpoint: Bangladesh. The labour market does not choose to work 60hr 7day weeks for $75/mo performing skilled sewing of your clothing because they like it: it is because they are left no choice. Given the opportunity, corporations will just as happily enslave Americans as it does third world citizens. Already does, in fact: slavery is still legal via imprisonment.

Corporations could choose to pay their Bangladeshi labour significantly more, and it would cost you only pennies more for your shirts … but they don’t. They pay as absolutely little as possible. They will inevitably do the same to you.

Every company try to pay as little as possible. The only reason they can pay less in Bangladesh is because the economy there is much less developed. Raise the minimum wage in Bangladesh and companies will move to somewhere else leaving those people with subsistence jobs and no way up for the economy. Leave enough companies free to move there and eventually wages will raise as more companies will have to bid higher for the same labor.

> In 2019, 82.3 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.1 percent of all wage and salary workers.

I don't understand. How is the rest paid?

No Idea. Bonuses? I have extrapolated to all workers, but the actual number might be a bit different because of this.

Unlike companies, humans have a right to exist. Working full time should be sufficient for survival, as a bare minimum.

A right to exist for humans, to me, means a right not to have interference from others. But still, higher minimum wage means some people will have no income, and some other will have more income. How's that better?

Individualism emphasises negative rights, but positive rights are important too: life, health, air, food, etc.

Why would some have no income if minimum wage was higher? The other possibility is that profits would be lower. Minimum wage has increased in the past in various countries, the effect is always pro-worker.

Or we could rationally plan economies to meet everyone’s needs. Enough homes can be made and we already produce more food than necessary.

> Individualism emphasises negative rights, but positive rights are important too: life, health, air, food, etc.

Positive rights and negative rights are in oppositions as you can't have positive rights without violating someone else's negative rights. We have a trade-off right now, but I personally only believe in negative rights for a variety of reasons.

> Why would some have no income if minimum wage was higher? The other possibility is that profits would be lower. Minimum wage has increased in the past in various countries, the effect is always pro-worker.

Economy 101. Increase the price of something and the quantity bought will be less. Companies will hire fewer people at that price.

> Or we could rationally plan economies to meet everyone’s needs.

History has proved over and over that's not possible (and there are theoretical well known reason why that is.

The number of workplaces isn’t constant. The simplest solution would be to reduce the working week. Another is to use collective funds to improve infrastructure and provide essential services.

Planned economies do work, both historically and today. They are immune to the business cycle (as the USSR didn’t experience the Great Depression) and can be more efficient even within capitalist economies (witness Amazon, Apple and Walmart). I recommend “The People’s Republic of Walmart” on this topic.

They only work up to the point when they don't. Amazon only plans part of the economy of its workers. It doesn't have to plan for what they eat, where they live and how they spend their money in general.

In a capitalist system companies, trying to maximize profit, will try to expand until it is efficient to do so, but not more or smaller competitors will take over.

The USSR was basically constantly in a Great Depression. According to the US definition of poverty almost all its population was in extreme poverty.

The Great Depression was a Government failure, not a market failure. They didn't print enough money basically.

I recommend reading up on the work done by the latest Nobel price winners in Economics. But fair warning: they disagree with your assumptions/conclusions and have found clever ways to verify their assertions using real world data.

Interesting, but I see it differently.

I believe you might be referring to 2021 Nobel Prize winner David Card’s paper A Re-analysis of the Effect of New Jersey Minimum Wage with Representative Payroll Data (with Alan Krueger) written over 20 years ago. See [1]. This paper compared New Jersey with neighboring Pennsylvania that didn’t raise its minimum wage.

Ironically, Joshua Angrist (and a third Economist) shared the 2021 prize with Card, and Angrist had this to say about the research by Card (and Krueger):

“[the] data show a slight decline in the employment from February to November 1992 in Pennsylvania, and little change in New Jersey over the same time period. However, the data also reveals substantial year to year employment variations in other periods. These swings often seem to differ substantially in the two states… So Pennsylvania may not provide a very good measure of counterfactual employment rates in New Jersey in the absence of a minimum wage change.” See [2].

[1] https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/reanal-ff-nj.pdf

[2] Joshua Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke, Mostly Harmless Econometrics, page 293, https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691120355/mo...

Yep that’s the problem with Economics. It isn’t a science like physics. And it is easy to find Economists that disagree with each other. The New Jersey experiment needs to be repeated many times in different settings before we can be more confident in its truth value. The same way it is done in sciences. However it is also true that some people will never accept it as being true no matter the evidence. People are a lot less rational than they think they are.

I can believe it to be true but so far no evidence has convinced me of that.

> However it is also true that some people will never accept it as being true.

I suspect it is because of the philosophical point I made, but maybe some people are not able to articulate it? E.g. I could accept my practical point to be invalid but that would not invalidate the second point - I just give freedom of choice value in itself. Hence I can tolerate costs that arise because of that.

Yep I think it shows the limitations of evidence in complex subjects like Economics. If somebody doesn’t want something to be true, they will simply demand more evidence, claim that the evidence has flaws, claim that the researchers are not rigorous enough and/or somehow corrupt etc. The tobacco industry wrote the book on how to do that.

Freedom of choice is an interesting thing to think about. Most people will agree that freedom of choice is a good thing. However the devil is in the details. How about giving people the freedom of choice to own nuclear weapons? Most people would probably disagree with that one. How about having the freedom to own slaves? Again people would probably disagree. But why? Isn’t freedom of choice always good? How about free education and free healthcare? I personally think that it gives people more freedom to choose the kind of life they want. But I have heard “pro freedom” people argue against it because they think it will make people lazy. I myself received a MSc in Computer Science from a top university and it cost me nothing. It didn’t make me or anybody else I knew at University lazy. So I don’t think it is true. However some “pro freedom” people still want to take that freedom away from other people. And the same goes for minimum wage. I have lived in a number of countries with a high minimum wage. And the economies were strong and people worked hard. So a lot of the claims about minimum wage sounds false to me. So perhaps it all comes down to personal experience. If you have seen or been part of something that works well then you obviously know that it works well. And people who haven’t will disagree.

I got my MSc in Computer Engineering in a country where university is highly subsidized, so it cost me very little. Now I live, work and pay taxes in another country. People that paid for my education are getting nothing in return.

About freedom of choice, for me the line is whenever your freedom directly impacts the freedom of someone else. You can't have slaves for this reason. But for the same reason you shouldn't have others pay for your education. Of course you have more choices if someone pays for your education. But that's not the point. Society has no say on what type of education you choose to have, so it should pay no cost. As I mention in another comment I only believe negative rights should be a thing - and I think I have strong reasons to believe this.

Nukes are only good for war, hence you probably shouldn't have them. On the other hand private companies or individuals with the right clearance should be able to own and manage nuclear power plants - as they do.

So what about public roads, the police, the military, and the system of laws? You grew up taking advantage of those without having paid for them. So following your logic you should not have been allowed to use a public road or go to a public park without paying for it. And moving to another country, again following your logic, you have no right to walk on public roads you haven’t paid for, or take advantage of the military protection that the country provides. I hope you can see that following that way of thinking is very impractical? And according to your logic all of us are lazy freeloaders?

Except for public roads I believe those are functions that can only be carried out by the government and are exactly what and only what the government should do. As I said, for reasons I didn't mention, I only believe in negative rights, and those rights should only be violated if it necessary to protect someone's else negative rights. Because we need the police, the military and a law system to protect those rights I'm OK with having those things socialized.

> those are functions that can only be carried out by the government

I don’t think there is anything that only the government can provide. Look at countries around the world and there are examples where governments doesn’t provide public roads, police, laws, health care etc. so people hire their own security, pay for their own education/health etc. Bribe judges to get the ruling they want etc. Even the military used to be private in Europe. With governments hiring private armies to commit war. I personally would not want to live in those countries (they are often called “failed states” for a reason) but they do exist.

So I think the argument that there are things only governments can provide is incorrect. There might be things you happen to want the government to pay for but there doesn’t seem to be an underlying logical argument for why you choose those and not others?

I meant that they can only be provided by the state in an effective way to protect the negative rights. That is what you need precisely to avoid becoming a failed state, where negative rights are not protected.

So it seems to me that you only want the government to protect people against harm from other people. You don’t want the government to protect people against harm from non-people. If that is correct then you don’t want the government to provide sea rescue services, weather reports, rules for wearing seat belts, weather emergency services, scientific research etc?

> So it seems to me that you only want the government to protect people against harm from other people.

Mostly, with some exceptions. If there is a market failure or natural catastrophe that is going to kill us all and only the government can fix it then I'm OK with that. So, if only the government can prevent a disease to spread or fix pollution, or redirect asteroids, I'm fine with that. But the bar is very high.

> If that is correct then you don’t want the government to provide sea rescue services, weather reports, rules for wearing seat belts, weather emergency services, scientific research

I think some of these can be provided at least to great level by insurance companies but I'm not convinced they can entirely be provided on voluntary basis, so I don't know. But other are clearly of of the scope of my ideal government like rules to wear a seat belt or not.

> scientific research

This is an interesting one. I see lots of people saying that only the government can do valuable research because a lot of recent inventions were initially funded or subsidized by the government - like the internet. I think that private research could work as good if not better. I also think though, why would a private company invest in research if the government is going to tax them and do that research regardless? I think it is an overcrowding issue. Also a lot of technologies that started in government labs are almost unrecognizable after all the private research and development that went into them after.

I'm not saying that negative rights can be achieved perfectly. But positive rights are too problematic IMO, and the further we can shy away from them the better.

Almost all basic research is funded by governments. Even private universities in the US get almost all of their research paid for by the government via grants. And the private universities then turn around and use their research expertise, funded by the government, to attract paying students. So they are private organisations, heavily funded by the government, not benefitting the public by providing a University education for free. The European approach is more honest. People pay taxes, the taxes fund Universities, and the Universities do research and education that benefits the tax paying people. That seems to be a less harm approach compared with the US model of private universities. Agree?

I agree that that's how things are. The fact that they are like this doesn't mean they must be. I believe there is a huge market for private research. Imagine the company getting to nuclear fusion first. They will be extremely profitable, and investor don't even have to pick a company. They can diversify. So I disagree with the conclusion. I believe this is a big case of Crowding-out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowding_out_(economics).

If there was a huge market for basic research then private companies would be all over it. The reason why there isn’t, and never will be, is because investors would rather invest in companies with a clear ROI than in no goal blue sky research. Kinda obvious when you think about it. Investors want to maximise their chance to make money. So they invest accordingly.

No, you missed the point about Crowding-out. The phenomena is exactly this, there is a market but because the Government does it, it crowds out investments.

I think we can agree to disagree on many things. But I want to tell you something before I move on. I come from a country where positive rights are hinted in the constitution and applied in practice. The constitution states that "the government has to remove economic and societal obstacles preventing equality among citizens".

My country of origin has subsidized higher education, high redistribution, minimum guaranteed income, a public health system, strong union rights, minimum wage and many regulations of what you can on cannot do with your property.

I left that country, maybe forever. And many many others that got higher education (either in the country or abroad) left and are never going to come back.

The net wage differential of highly skilled jobs with respect to the average income is not enough to justify the long studies if you are going to stay. They even had to create a law that allows people that come back to pay much less taxes if they stay for a given amount of years to try lure some highly skilled people back to the country.

I believe it's because of all these government policies that the economy grows very little in that country. As a result everyone in that country is poorer that other more "negative rights" based countries.

My subjective experience is also that people feel much more entitled in that country and are less able to take personal responsibility. Everything is blamed on the Government (more than in the country I live in now).

I think my country or origin as a social democracy although it's never mentioned because people only talks about the "successful" ones.

I fear that all countries could become like that.

If there was a market for basic research then thousands of companies would be doing it. But pretty much all private basic research companies (including universities) are today funded by governments. And if you look at the history of any advanced nation, the governments created most of the markets that private companies could then take advantage of. Even the technology of the most basic private companies (pesticides etc. for farming) was researched and paid for by governments. Until it was mature enough for private companies to take over and run with. Most people recognise that it is a good thing for governments to create markets via research because it benefits everybody. New markets are created which means jobs and benefits/products. What is puzzling to me is that the same people who think it is OK for private companies to take advantage of research funded by tax money for feee is not OK with tax paying people taking advantage of the same research by getting a University education in return that they have already paid for or will pay for in the future via taxes.

> Nukes are only good for war, hence you probably shouldn't have them.

Hold on. I thought you said that freedom was the ability to do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else. Now you added rule #2: You only have the freedom pick from things somebody else (the government?) have decided that you can pick from. That sounds exactly like the system we have in most countries. So if the government decides to make education and health freely available then you should be happy with that right? It follows your rules perfectly.

> So if the government decides to make education and health freely available then you should be happy with that right? It follows your rules perfectly

The government doesn't produce any of those. It has to take from someone else. You can't make any of those things free. You can only make them socialized.

> Nukes are only good for war, hence you probably shouldn't have them.

If they are planning to kill people then that are planning to violate negative rights of others. You lose your rights in that case.

> You can't make any of those things free. You can only make them socialized.

If something is socialised then it is free to choose from. So it is free as in $ and free as in freedom.

> If they are planning to kill people then that are planning to violate negative rights of others. You lose your rights in that case.

Makes sense in principle but impossible to do in practical. Nobody has a mind reader. Nobody can accurately predict the future behaviour of other people. Do you agree that your thinking is impossible to actually implement?

> If something is socialised then it is free to choose from. So it is free as in $ and free as in freedom.

Yes, and that's positive rights. As I said, I only believe in negative rights.

> Makes sense in principle but impossible to do in practical. Nobody has a mind reader. Nobody can accurately predict the future behaviour of other people. Do you agree that your thinking is impossible to actually implement?

Then we don't allow them. It's a price to pay in lost negative rights but only to protect other's negative rights.

Ok so you want guns, kitchen knives, vehicles etc. to be illegal because we don’t know ahead of time if somebody will use it to harm somebody else? Very impractical.

Not what I said. I said Nukes. There is a huge difference. Nukes can only be used to blow up stuff. But the other things, while they can be used to do harm, their capacity to harm is orders of magnitude lower than the capacity of a Nuke, and, at the same time they have very practical uses that we depend on. So I can assume you will likely use a knife to cut bread or a gun in self defense, but I can't think of a common peaceful or legit use of Nuke.

So what you are really saying is that it comes down to a cost/benefit evaluation. You are OK with vehicles, alcohol, factories etc. harming and killing people as long as the perceived benefits to the public outweighs the cost. So nukes are not OK because clearly nobody benefits except the person who enjoys owning nukes, and the potential cost is high (millions dying when a nuke owner goes postal). The gun issue is really interesting. Obviously some people think that owning guns is worth sacrificing a few hundred school kids every year for. Others disagree. But almost everybody agrees that killing thousands of people every year using vehicles is unfortunate but acceptable. Perhaps you can argue that public roads and vehicles do benefit pretty much everybody. But guns only benefit people who likes guns and/or people who are more afraid of random violence than they are afraid of crazy people legally getting access to guns and shooting up schools.

> People that paid for my education are getting nothing in return.

So are you happy with that or are you going to pay back the government for your education? If your answer is no would it be fair to say that you want others to not get anything for free but you are perfectly happy to get free things yourself?

> it be fair to say that you want others to not get anything for free but you are perfectly happy to get free things yourself?

I'm happy if it's legal, even if I think it shouldn't be. As long as it's legal for everyone I'm not going to be the only person to pay.

The inflation isn’t new either. We have had loony inflation in real estate (by far the worst), stocks, speculative assets, tuition, etc. for well over a decade.

Nobody cared until we started to get inflation in the one area we actually need it: wages. Now we have an “inflation crisis.”

Don’t forget healthcare, property insurance, rent, and autos/transportation.

There's an ever-increasing issue of people who are not able to provide value sufficient to justify their wages as those wages increase.

That may well be true (FWIW I agree that it's a problem and it's getting worse), however, that's not a "labor shortage" or low supply of labor, eh?

So the company was designed to fail if wages increased?

All companies would fail, if wages were increased beyond a point.

The argument is about where that point lies with respect to a minimum, living, or worthwhile, wage.

You use the loaded word "shortage" without defining it, and you don't appear to be using the typical definition.

Easy said than done. Capitalism is imperfect, but socialism is worse, much worse.

Let the market decide, and let the welfare to help those truly in need(those disabled or mentally ill, but not the lazy), use tax as a way to mitigate the gap.

It's imperfect, but nobody has designed a perfect system yet. The government actually did its part(food stamps, free lunch, section 8 housing, no tax or low tax for low income families,etc), doing more will lead all of us to poverty(been there seen that).

You imply a false dichotomy. There are numerous systems between the barely regulated capitalism of the US that pushes so many people into poverty in the richest country on the planet while enriching billionaires as if they provided a huge benefit for society, and traditional by-the-book socialism that was never implemented except in Star Trek (except it’s never mentioned).

Europe has pretty much everything in the spectrum and, so far, it hasn’t led us to poverty.

You didn't explain how Socialism is worse, much worse. It might be but you assume we know this to be a fact? Many in the U.S look envious to the social support that is offered in European countries.

> and let the welfare to help those truly indeed

That's more like Socialism than Capitalism, that's for sure.

> use tax as a way to mitigate the gap

This is Capitalism?

> It's imperfect, but nobody has designed a perfect system yet.

You could just as well be defending Socialism with that comment.

Someone equated capitalism to freedom the other day and I asked which one is more free: choosing what you study so you can work and have a large and comfortable house for your family or work on what you want, knowing that your basic needs (including a house, even if not large) will always be provided for.

Since capitalism is imperfect so adding some socialism for the poor as stated is OK, going too far on the socialism side will ruin us all. This is my point.

They're not black and white binary choices, keeping capitalism as the backbone is key. If you really like socialism, welcome to Venezuela.

Alright, so let's try a few of points to clarify. Do you support any of the following?

* Universal healthcare.

* 4 or more weeks of paid vacation per year for all full-time employees (and some proportional setup for part-time).

* ~6 months of paid (albeit not 100% of ones salary) parental leave per parent, per child.

* Subsidized child care to make it affordable for everyone.

* Government funded university tuition (student debt is only in the form of upkeep).

* Employer/Government funded sick pay (at least 6 months).

Because these things and more are what you're missing out on in the US. Year by year.

Is it really worth it? What's the point of having a higher salary if it's just consumed by higher rents, healthcare fees etc and no time to actually enjoy the money (vacation)?

> Government funded university tuition (student debt is only in the form of upkeep).

And how many people get to go? And who chooses which majors are available?

If you have a pulse, you can get into a US college/university.

> And how many people get to go?

All who qualifies through grades or tests.

> And who chooses which majors are available?

The universities.

> If you have a pulse, you can get into a US college/university.

That doesn't seem to be the case, and certainly not without significant student debt.

In other words, you tell people "no, you don't get to go to college/university". The US doesn't do that.

And yes, there are free and/or very low-cost colleges in the US. (https://www.sjcc.edu/ is under $1,500/year.)

The fact that some people choose to go to schools that cost and then can't afford what they spent doesn't change that.

It is interesting to look at what many of the people complaining about not being able to pay choose to study.

Perhaps we should have told them no.

> In other words, you tell people "no, you don't get to go to college/university".

Why would you say that?

> And yes, there are free and/or very low-cost colleges in the US. (https://www.sjcc.edu/ is under $1,500/year.)

Clearly seem to be a problem of either US-ranking of universities or their general availability. Otherwise this wouldn't be a problem?

> It is interesting to look at what many of the people complaining about not being able to pay choose to study.

That sounds just like the reactionary whine about non-STEM education.

>> In other words, you tell people "no, you don't get to go to college/university". >Why would you say that?

Because you wrote "All who qualifies through grades or tests." That implies that folks who don't qualify don't get to go.

> Clearly seem to be a problem of either US-ranking of universities or their general availability. Otherwise this wouldn't be a problem?

Or it's mostly a problem for people who find it easy to get press coverage.

>> > It is interesting to look at what many of the people complaining about not being able to pay choose to study.

> That sounds just like the reactionary whine about non-STEM education.

I've nothing against non-STEM education, but I do object to paying a lot for it.

> That implies that folks who don't qualify don't get to go

Well, yes, of course? Why wouldn't both the uni and students want a threshold to ensure that no one's time is being wasted? But this doesn't mean that people are barred by tuition or crippled by debt when/if they graduate.

> Or it's mostly a problem for people who find it easy to get press coverage.

Since I'm not from the US I had to google the distinction and from what I can tell a community college main PR is that one may be "transferred" to more prestigious institutions. So it definitely doesn't sound as equivalent as you present it.

> I've nothing against non-STEM education, but I do object to paying a lot for it.

Luckily any decent society consists of more than smug tech folks like this place.

>> That implies that folks who don't qualify don't get to go > Well, yes, of course? Why wouldn't both the uni and students want a threshold to ensure that no one's time is being wasted?

Like I said, the US doesn't tell people they can't go. Your country does.

We also don't tell them what they can study.

> Since I'm not from the US I had to google the distinction and from what I can tell a community college main PR is that one may be "transferred" to more prestigious institutions.

Not at all.

Moreover, there are less-expensive "big-time" colleges. You only hear the stories wrt certain types of schools. (In most cases, they're the kinds of schools that are extremely rare outside the US. Even the second-tier schools in the US are very good. For example, Apple employs more graduates of a school that few people outside of CA have even heard of than it does graduates of Berkeley even though Berkeley is significantly larger than said unknown school.)

So, should we tell them "no" up front?

> > I've nothing against non-STEM education, but I do object to paying a lot for it.

> Luckily any decent society consists of more than smug tech folks like this place.

You already said that you/your country won't pay much, so why is it wrong for me to express the same sentiment?

> Your country does.

What do you mean by can't go? People "can't" go to high-school either if they don't get the minimum grades required in elementary school. How does this even relate to the money angle that I'm criticizing?

> So, should we tell them "no" up front?

What do you mean by telling who no up-front? By requiring that you actually have finished high-school math before being accepted for a 4-year math program in uni? That's just common sense.

> You already said that you/your country won't pay much, so why is it wrong for me to express the same sentiment?

Uhm, no? In what way?

> What do you mean by can't go? People "can't" go to high-school either if they don't get the minimum grades required in elementary school.

The US lets people go to college who haven't graduated from high-school.

Flunk out or quit, and you can go back.

> > You already said that you/your country won't pay much, so why is it wrong for me to express the same sentiment?

> Uhm, no? In what way?

Your country says "we'll let n people into college." or "we'll spend $x on colleges, which is basically the same thing. The tests are then used to pick those n people.

What happens to the other people, the people you won't pay for?

35-40% of US adults have graduated from college. (Different sources have different numbers.) >10% of US adults attended some college and didn't finish. (Some do go back.)

> What happens to the other people, the people you won't pay for?

Not sure what your point is. All who qualifies is paid for? If you don't qualify you can take classes to make you qualify, also at no cost.

I'm pretty sure it's not possible for companies to simply decide to pay everyone across the economy better in real terms so they can "live a meaningful life", for the simple reason that all of the things those workers want to buy need to be produced, which in turn is constrained by the availability of workers (amongst other things). If a whole bunch of businesses become non-viable due to not being able to get labour, that actually decreases the supply of stuff to buy which means people's pay has to become worse in real terms. Now, of course there are ways to reduce the number of workers required, but the easy options will have been taken by now leaving only capital-intensive choices that require taking other scarce resources (like, say, chips) away from being used to create things people buy directly.

There's no magic hoard of money being sat on by the rich or corporations that could just be used to pay people better in real, inflation-adjusted terms. That's inherently limited by the availability of actual stuff, and the super-wealthy just aren't a high enough proportion of overall consumption that there's any way for them to that. Maybe if we were in a 2008-style crisis where unemployment was high and the problem was the financial system there'd be clever solutions involving redistributing money or something, but that's not the reality we're living.

“ There's no magic hoard of money being sat on by the rich or corporations that could just be used to pay people better in real, inflation-adjusted terms.”

Sure there is. The hoard of money is called “profits”. Companies pay higher wages and have less profits or possibly (if they can) raise the prices of their goods to compensate.

That depends on how you measure things. I think what people want most of all is to have access to the stability of production guaranteed by modern industrial practices.

Our society converts stability and abundance in the production process into precarity and reward/punish incentive structures in the access controls to consumption.

These represent fundamentally different modes of interaction with the economy and social environment. They're different worlds. And what does talk about production in "real terms" say about the value of one over the other?

If we're running out of people, then shouldn't the companies that produce less per person be the ones that die? Anything else would be sub-optimal.

> There are low wages, poor working conditions and companies treating workers like slaves. Everything else is just an excuse.

Well, that's in theory.

In practice every single country prefer thousands of minimum wage workers employed by Amazon than thousands of unemployed people because Amazon doesn't really need them and hiring a lot of people that do not provide actual value to the company is simply their part of the deal with governments.

Now imagine that there are literally hundreds of smaller Amazons that employ millions of workers.

It's an hard problem to solve, shortage of labor does exist and appear in many forms, one of them is not enough qualified workers for the job.

Where worker protection laws are stronger than US, conditions are better for employed people, but worse for unemployed ones,because the job market is blocked.

Salaries are lower because a stiff market guarantees that workers will have a harder time switching job, they'll accept a lower salary for a job that's safer and protected by the State and work there as long ad they can.

Also: a very limited number of businesses are competing for talents in the job market.

Most of them will only make sure they fill the positions they need at the price they are willing to pay, they won't start offering higher salaries to everybody.

[deleted]

Honestly, I'm just tired of this. People gets attached to some pet theory and just downvote factual comments.

I should know better that some topics are just out of limits for rational discussions.

> Not every single country works like that

They do.

Have you ever wondered why unemployment stats are so important for politicians?

> Unemployment is more expensive,

It is not a financial issue.

Nobody in charge wants to be the one responsible for a -10% in eomplynent rates.

Especially if some Amazon like company shuts down their branch in an area where they employ 50% of the population and the other 50% makes a living out of their workers salaries.

EDIT: I don't know why you are being downvoted, what you said makes a lot of sense, but the game is rigged and it doesn't work in a rational way, unfortunately. Especially in "free markets" like the US.

I explicitly qualified my comment, as you can see in the fragment you quote. Not every single country is the USA.

There are countries where Amazon is rejected and the reason, not the immediate reason (unions), but the ultimate reason that affects the bottom line is what I wrote, then deleted.

Anyway I give up, nothing that touches any politics anymore. Some people doesn't deserve my time, really.

I am from Italy.

I live in Italy.

I am almost 50 years old.

Amazon is only the most popular choice of brand, but all other big companies act like that, unions or not.

I would say that here in Italy, were unions are pretty strong and have been historically even stronger for a long time, many companies have received undeserved favours simply because they employed hundreds of thousand of people (see FIAT in Italy) and in Italy the constitution at art. 1 says "Italy is a democratic Republic founded on labor" so everybody tries to preserve the jobs of those already employed, rising their salaries is not as important.

That's the bottom line, you might think people don't understand you, but truth is realism is necessary to address complex issues.

Another example is public schools in Italy, where unions prefer two teachers at a shitty salary than hire half of them with a substantially higher salary.

Why?

Because that's two jobs created instead of one, during their time, it sounds great in the brochure.

Of course not all unions are equal, of course some of them are fighting for better salaries, bit when the choice is between better salaries for less people or same old salary for more people, they will always chose the second.

What you get here is better social welfare, more work protection, paid holidays, paid sick leave, but much worse salaries than in US because that's not a priority, better salaries for everybody means that companies will start questioning why they should pay more people that can barely do their job, after years of doing the same thing over and over and nobody wants to discuss about that. Unions first.

In Italy salary negotiation is mostly collective, if you hire someone to do job X at salary Y, you have to give the same amount of money to all other workers with the same job X. If you hire Alice and Bob to do the same job and Alice is better than Bob, you can't pay her more than Bob. It's illegal. You can't even promote her at will if the contract requires a minimum seniority before stepping up (for example: minimum two years). I theory its purpose is to avoid favoritism, in practice it completely annihilate the incentive to do better at work.

The only way to negotiate a better salary is working as a contractor, which is another can of worm entirely here, and that also means renounce to almost all the protections.

Don't assume people don't know shit, try to assume people have experience on how a perfectly good solution in theory is going to fail miserably in practice.

Amazon isn't hiring all those people to suck up to the government. They would happily replace them all with robots. They are constantly trying to automate more.

That's exactly what I said.

They are hiring all those people to have leverage in governments deals.

But they could automate a lot more, hire much less people and make higher profits, at the cost of more scrutiny from the government: it recently happened in Italy where they have been fined for abuse of dominant position and immediately after they announced a program to hire a thousand more workers by year-end.

Millions of people become american residents on the 'labor shortage' permise.

Quite silly to say there is no such thing as labor shortage. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/perm...

> The DOL must certify to the USCIS that there are not sufficient U.S. workers able, willing, qualified and available to accept the job opportunity in the area of intended employment

dol literally has a certification for 'labor shortage'

People will work to survive. The article states people left the work force primarily due to ‘generous government stimulus’

Well there is labor shortage for the exact same reason - if paying workers fairly means it is not worth hiring them then there is no business, hence no demand for workers.

Labor shortage just means that the market is not in equilibrium where for all the conditions labor is asked for there is an offer available on the market. It goes both ways.

Retirement is a near universal human goal. Why would people work instead of retire? That seems at odds with observed behavior.

Sure those are all feel good platitudes, but we both know that's not how the world works.

Consider the device you used to post your comment, where did it come from?

So a huge pandemic has been raging through the world for almost 2 years now, massively reconfiguring the world in so many ways. lockdowns, deaths, fear, government subsidies, cheap money, GME and unions, several global mindshift changes e.g of how crucial low wage jobs are or how short life is. But the bean counters are confused about why “labor supply” is low. hmmmm

Or maybe they aren’t confused, they're worried.

> More broadly, the participation rate has generally underperformed in economies with large increases in household liquidity. The most notable case in point is Chile, where the participation rate declined by 5pp as fiscal support and pension withdrawals flooded households with liquidity.

“if people have money they might not work at jobs”. jobs that have systematically trained them over decades to expect a paycheck but nothing else, not loyalty or satisfaction or upward mobility or any semblance of agency. wow. fucking clueless.

When media speaks about a good or bad 'economy' it means is capital being returned at near record rates, not can most people afford a subsistence existence without soul crushing levels of anxiety from fear of accidentally becoming destitute

> not can most people afford a subsistence existence without soul crushing levels of anxiety from fear of accidentally becoming destitute

This is the human condition - through all the ages, most people would feel this way, and will continue to do so in the future. Until the day free energy and star trek level replicators exist, all wealth and all goods and services that people consume will need to be created by people. It's just the relative amounts that differ between the ages, but unfortunately, people don't compare themselves to people 100 years ago, they compare themselves to the jones.

Is the labor shortages as bad elsewhere in the world? Plenty of places with great social safety nets, not just now but all the time. Treating the vast majority of people as wage slaves seems particularly American.

> Treating the vast majority of people as wage slaves seems particularly American.

The vast majority of people (75%?). Fascinating claim. I bet you can't support it.

Americans earn higher wages at the median than: Canadians, Germans, Swedes, French, British, Spanish, Italians, Russians, Japanese, Chinese, South Koreans, and so on.

Americans are also richer at the median than either the Germans or the Swedes (which should be impossible if you buy in to the propaganda). And that's despite the massive demographic shift at the median in the US over the past 40 years (comparing demographics to demographics, Americans are far richer than either of those two nations).

So, why are Germany's workers so poor? Why are Sweden's workers so poor? Why have incomes stagnated so horribly over 20 years across most of Europe (as with their economic growth which has been mostly net flat since ~2007)? Treating people as wage slaves must be a particularly European thing.

Americans work longer hours per week and get less holidays. A typical European 37 hour work week and 3 additional weeks vacation adds up to about two months more work by US workers than Europeans. So it's not really that they're paid more in the USA, it's that US workers get less vacation and longer hours.

Nah, US workers are generally paid more even accounting for the 2-3 weeks vacation that skilled laborers get.

Americans also live shorter lifespans while going bankrupt for things like medical debt while enjoying less vacations and well, living than Europeans.

I don't need to check any official sources to be pretty sure the number of able-bodied working age Americans who died from Covid is (statistically, not in humanitarian terms) negligible.

Once word: socialism, for the rich and poor alike, promoted by the US government and the Fed.

It's the same in the EU, the only difference is it's worse and it started before Covid-19.

Funny but completely expected thing about it is gubmint stats refer to some of those non-working as "discouraged" whereas many are in fact encouraged to be unemployed. It's hard to be discouraged if you're hungry.

>It's the same in the EU, the only difference is it's worse and it started before Covid-19.

What? Do you have any sources for those EU claims?

The impacts of these deaths are going to be far reaching though. For example, I had a friend in his 30s who died from Covid during the first wave. His last tweet was about how his manager at T-Mobile was a dick for making him come into work during a global pandemic.

Even though he is but one death in a sea of almost a million, he alone serves as a cautionary tale to dozens and dozens of surviving friends, family, and acquaintances. His friends and family have a much different view now of the nature of work in the US. For many of them, this has fundamentally changed their relationship with work, and yeah, some of them quit their jobs and won’t be coming back. Big business are left scratching their heads wondering why. Here’s a hint: check the Twitter feed.

There are hundreds of thousands of such cautionary tales out there now, impacting families across the nation. I don’t think we’ll be able to really understand the full impact of this for a long time to come.

I remain perpetually bemused at how the same people who wax lyrical about the efficiency of the free market in determining prices of goods and commercial services via supply and demand will then turn around and bemoan the lack of willing workers at their autocratically decreed pay scales.

Surely the market shall provide, and if it doesn't provide at your offered price, the answer is wonderfully clear? Pay. More.

If the government pays people to stay home, do you have a free market?

no, because free markets are an illusion (information asymetry).

also the ppl payed to stay at home are mostly not working-class.

> no, because free markets are an illusion (information asymetry).

That's not relevant.

> also the ppl payed to stay at home are mostly not working-class.

Citation?

> That's not relevant.

it serves to disprove your misleading implication that free markets were destroyed by the goverment paying ppl to stay at home.

> Citation?

look around

The people I was talking about clearly have no problem with the government paying corporations to stay home, and they still call it a free market.

Then you're right about them being inconsistent.

didnt the govt assistance for covid already end? also i wasnt aware it was actually enough to live on...

It wasn’t enough for anyone to live on. At best, it helped a few of my relatives when they couldn’t work for one paycheck due to illness.

Supposedly it moved large swaths of kids out of poverty. If that’s the labor companies we’re counting on using…

Ha! My spouse got $1000 per week, which I can assure you is more than enough for even both of us to live on.

Those elusive two weeks of minimum wage pay were enough for all workers to live off for all time!

The government paid businesses too via PPP. They were called loans, and then some part of them were forgiven [1]. Is that a free market?

[1] https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/covid-19-relief-o...

Not original poster, but I presume that the answer would be "of course not".

The government paid workers via PPP, not businesses

Businesses especially the large one get free guarantees, bailouts, low interest rates, preferential treatments, etc. It isn't free for many decades.

The US federal government hasn't been paying people to stay home for a while and some of the more US conservative states stopped the extra payments before the feds did but those states are having trouble filling jobs too.

Of course you do. The government has set the absolute price of labour relative to activity. Business then has a relative cost to obtain that labour.

In fact the market has been levelled. Before workers needed to work to eat whereas business only needed to hire if there was a chance of a profit.

Now both sides have a “no deal I’ll wait” option.

> Now both sides have a “no deal I’ll wait” option.

No, only the workers do. The companies will go out of business without workers, but the "workers" (should we even call them that if they choose not to work?) will live off of our tax dollars through our safety net programs without jobs.

Good. The invisible hand if the market will cull the companies too weak to provide living wages.

When you can live off of the money you get for doing nothing, companies have to pay a lot more than a living wage to get you to work for them.

Does the money people are 'living off' not get spent with companies in your world? Doesn't that mean the company owner gets an income, the bankers get an income and the workers in that company get an income. The company owner and bankers only get an income to the extent that there is a productive use of workers above 1-1 - delivering sufficient surplus of real goods and services to feed and house the rest of us.

Isn't that what we want?

Always remember that money doesn't stop at its first use.

If the government pays people to not grow crops, do you have a free market? If the government props up certain industries with $BB in subsidies, do you have a free market? If the government approves mega-mergers that remove the ability for new companies to compete, do you have a free market? If the government bails out megabanks and investment firms after they crash the world economy, do you have a free market?

Of course not. The US hasn't had a free market economic system, or anything closely resembling that, in 60+ years. The US is at best a mixed economic system.

The megabanks didn't crash the world economy, they assisted as role players. The Fed's artificially low interest rates - an attempt to try to dodge a harsher recession after 9/11 and the dotcom implosion - primed a massive real-estate bubble that inevitably had to collapse. Just as the Fed has once again primed the massive asset bubbles in the US (both stocks and housing) by holding rates artificially low for far too long to try to spur fake economic growth.

prior to world war 2, the US wasnt a free market either. with massive government involvement to solve the great depression.

If people are not born into wealthy or well networked families in an environment where they can acquire the skills and connections that allow them to choose between multiple hundred thousand dollar desk jobs that can be worked from home versus working as a janitor in hospitals, do you have a free market?

I can't see why not.

Yes. Including a free marriage market. And in a free marriage market an assortative mating strategy, which is generally used by human beings, will result in the children of successful people being considerably more likely to have heritable traits that contribute to success.

I think the notion that government is only supposed to subsidize and help and tax break and bail and help businesses, and not people, will need more thought out support to stand a chance of being taken seriously, than a snarky half sentence :)

> If the government pays people to stay home, do you have a free market?

[1]: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/2021-12/2021.12.19_W...

It is actually a freer market, because it counterbalances the government paying banks to keep the financial treadmill going.

I'd love a sane economy where the government isn't distorting the market with trillion dollar stimuli and artificially low interest rates. But we haven't had that for many decades! Spending on social programs isn't some brazen giveaway, rather its mitigation for the ill effects of extreme giveaways to the financial industry that "both" parties solidly agree on.

As wealth concentrated to a few thousand people, fiscal policy shifted from full employment to as close to zero inflation as possible. One of the ways to do that has been to devalue labor. Another has been the manipulation of asset pricing through increasingly cheaper debt.

Even progressives are stuck in a Stockholm syndrome like thought process for this stuff. People pitch stupidity like UBI over paying an honest days wage for an honest days work.

The 0.1% can comfortably endure a 50% reduction in net worth from a pullback in risk assets.

The US govt and Joe Everyman cannot.

Do the truly wealthy care about inflation? Their wealth is tied up mostly or entirely in assets, and inflation may even benefit them as their labour costs go down in real terms.

Inflation and taxes are all the generational investors care about, and most have trusts that are tax free in perpetuity!

Who exactly is complaining here? Amazon and Target have no problems with raising their wages to meet demand. A small business owner isn't going to tell you it's more profitable to have shittier service than hire more workers with higher wages, so they'll just say "labor shortage".

They are starting to pay more. A Walmart near me in rural Midwest is offering $18.50 an hour for someone to stock shelves. That’s the supply & demand of the free market at work, efficiently determining the price of labor.

I find it interesting that when discussing this nobody mentions immigration much or at all. The number of green cards awarded took a huge dip in 2020 [1]. As an immigrant myself, I heard a lot about USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) slowing down considerably.

Could the effects of the pandemic on immigration, on top of the slow down in legal immigration that happened during the previous administration [2], not be a significant part of this perceived shortage in labour supply?

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/22/key-facts-a... [2]: https://www.cato.org/blog/president-trump-reduced-legal-immi...

By far the major visible reason for the “labour shortage” in Australia is the restrictions on tourists entering the country to take on unpaid or low paid jobs such as fruit picking.

I'm surprised by the tourism angle.

Can you say more about that? Are these tourists who fell on hard times and had to work to raise some money?

Or is it workers who exploit tourist visas just to get entry and take these jobs... In which case, why call them tourists?

When you say “exploit”, keep in mind there are two parties in a work/employer relationship. Both are exploiting, and often the regulator is perfectly okay with that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_holidays_in_Australi...

Link to the work/tourist visa: https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-li...

This is my thought as well. Take away the supply of cheap labor coming from around the world, and from Central and South America, and you're left with lazy Americans. I don't mean that all Americans are lazy, but I mean most of us have led relatively toil free lives, and the idea of picking crops, cleaning, washing dishes, landscaping, or other hard physical jobs: Americans aren't that interested. Combine that with a movement of anti-work where menial jobs are heavily disfavored, add in a dozen other factors, and here we are.

Nailed it. Couldn’t take the article seriously in its omission of these facts. I believe I read that immigration policies are having a negative effect of removing around 1.5m workers from the force.

Not just in low income jobs, either. I’ve been unable to hire quite a few folks in high tech because of our VISA process issues. Such a fucking mess.

This labor shortage feels like it could have been easily avoided with some common sense govt regulation, but America has gone totally off the deep end there.

I used to do credential evaluation for foreign tech workers looking to work here. I mean, I still do but the applications have dried up, and it actually started before the pandemic due to the previous administration. Before I would do maybe a dozen a month. Now I’m lucky to get 1 a quarter.

Some of my family are very anti immigrant and glad to hear this. But I’m not sure they realize how much work is getting done in the US due to foreign labor. Combine declining immigration, declining birth rates, and a system predicated on uninterrupted, unending growth and this is setting up a big issue.

As an immigrant myself it seemed wild that I could work in the USA, and send money back to my country. It felt like a capital drain problem the USA blindsided on.

Then I realized the economic gain from labour made the whole deal very worth it for the USA. The whole idea of a workforce is that it produces more value than it costs. Although I could take the money, that generated value was staying in the USA [1]. Especially for high-skilled industries where the bottleneck to growth might be hiring, this was very much worth it for them.

[1]: This plus, of course, the chunk of capital the USA keeps as taxes.

You mean American employers are too cheap to pay for anything other than immigrants?

It's not just the cost. It's the greater subservience too. The threat of being sent home gives the employer considerably more leverage than they have over a citizen.

Right, and the presence of H1Bs in a company serves as a threat to the regular workers, so it pays off even in secondary subservience.

Many Americans are hard-working janitors, garbage men and hospital orderlies. They are absolutely crucial jobs. I would gladly take a part-time job mopping floors if I could pay the rent, save a little, and then do my own thing.

I'm not going to say Communism failed because they didn't have machine learning, but I have a feeling that a more equitable and humane economy is possible if all the variables in the equation are tuned right.

> I'm not going to say Communism failed because they didn't have machine learning, but I have a feeling that a more equitable and humane economy is possible if all the variables in the equation are tuned right.

You might enjoy the book Red Plenty, which talks about a group of mathematicians who wanted to optimize the soviet economy with linear optimization, but were ultimately stymied by internal corruption and Brezhnevism.

Exactly. This reason is entirely down to the lack of immigration due to travel restrictions and its effects on the wider economy. The media hasn’t really reported on this but it has been obvious for the past year. In a world without mass immigration to the west wages at the lower end would he substantially higher.

Speaking of wages, another factor that could be interesting to consider: it's well known that Mexico is by far the country has most immigrants in the USA.

The current president of Mexico, who took office right before the pandemic started (Dec 2019), has been increasing the minimum wage at an accelerated rate [1] and set up a special economic zone along the Mexico-USA border. This zone has a minimum wage that's almost twice the national minimum wage, and lower taxes for companies [2].

The minimum wage there is still much less than the minimum wage in the USA, although I don't know what the average wage would be in one vs the other. Nonetheless, along with the rest of incentives immigrants have to remain in their country, I wonder if this could be leading to less immigration, on top of travel restrictions, etc.

[1]: https://www.vynmsa.com/blog/en/economy/minimum-wage-in-mexic...

[2]: https://www.gob.mx/se/acciones-y-programas/zona-libre-de-la-...

Funny how Goldman Sachs completely misses the entire PPP program, with a total value of $791,242,381,400 as of the latest report from the SBA.

Also funny how they missed that 83% of the value of all the 2020-21 Paycheck Protection Program loans were forgiven as of December 19th, 2021 [1]. That's a total value of $653,038,613,899. That's nearly as large as the 2008 bailouts. Even that doesn't tell the whole story because 94% of the 2020 loans alone were forgiven, and 2021 is on track to meet it.

Why only talk about one bailout, GS?

[1]: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/2021-12/2021.12.19_W...

Do you think EIDL loans would be forgiven since many businesses go out of business in 30 years and have limited liability? How large was that program compared to the PPP?

This is my hypothesis. Severely reduced spending due to restrictions, combined with massive stimulus/Covid support leaves a lot of people with a lot of surplus dollars.

Even lower income people can sock away a few months of expenses and say “nah, I’m not going back to my old job, I’m going to take some time to figure out my next steps”.

Hell, I read that Vietnam’s economy was propped up by US Covid support that was sent to Vietnam by relatives.

https://e.vnexpress.net/news/life/remittances-help-covid-hit...

What a great article, I think much of it has to do with relatives back home being unable to work at all.

The lockdowns taught me how much money I was wasting each month. After the first month I had enough left in my bank account that I panicked and briefly thought I missed a mortgage payment or something. No, it just turned out that going to restaurants, bars, coffee shops, malls, etc., was just a lot more money than I was mentally tracking. I've completely cut them out of my life and have been putting an extra $700/mo into my Roth. It made me realize just how much of the economy is unnecessary and really just convenience-based, and largely invisible if you're engaged in the habitualized behavior. After looking at things through that lens, I just spend a heck of a lot less than I used to as I basically now categorize everything into "necessary" or "unnecessary." I don't see that changing. I now really enjoy cooking for family and friends and my freshly burr-ground coffee is perfect, every day, without a line.

Ah yes, let's all stay home all the time and hoard money. Experiencing life isn't worth it and the only thing that matters is dying at age 97 with an extra $3 million in our bank accounts.

I think you're both right.

Theres ways to experience life that doesn't mean consumerism hell hole that doesn't actually satisfy anything.

It could mean saving up for things to do DIY with, it could mean taking classes, it could mean starting your book collection, or just it could mean meaningful conversations with people.

The idea of you have to spend copious amounts of cash to enjoy life is one rooted in capitalism and consumerism, and generally leads to depression and lack of any substantive impact on one's life.

For me I saved up for 3D printers, read over 100 books, made new virtual friends and had deep conversations with them, and explored my sexuality safely with others. Most of which didn't really cost me a ton of money.

Americans have massive amounts of high interest credit card debt. Maybe after they pay that down we can worry about saving too much...

Quite the contrary. I was out in the forests all last summer (over 2 solid months) exploring forest roads, camping, fishing and doing work at night via starlink. I haven't experienced that much life in a long time. Made for some fun and comical work zoom calls with my fishing pole in the background. It's funny, and odd, you categorize it as "hording," as if there is some social contractual obligation to spend money on stuff you don't really need. I haven't been this active since my 20's and if I had to estimate, my quality of life has increased 10x. As it turns out, if you cut out stuff you don't need, you have a lot more time and resources for the things you actually want and enjoy doing.

You carried around that starlink gear? Or with a vehicle?

Hah, no, in my 4Runner, with my solar/battery/inverter setup.

Most people can't afford that shit anyway yet they still manage to experience life.

How can you put extra into the Roth? I thought the cap was like $6000/yr (500/mo)

__mega backdoor roth__ or whatever the fuck it's called.

I have a SEP IRA, and opened a Roth on top. It didn't seem pertinent to go into all of the financial details for the point.

The conclusions this article comes to re: the reason for the shortage (that is, that pandemic unemployment and emergency assistance prevent people from looking for work) are backed up by an article that predicates all it's findings on studying lottery winners: How Americans Respond to Idiosyncratic and Exogenous Changes in Household Wealth and Unearned Income

This comes off as more than a little lazy at best, and totally disingenuous at worst.

Could you do tldr?

I suspect there’s no single cause (as is the case for all complex issues), but I’ll just respond to those saying that the 1m+ excess deaths can’t be a cause because those people were predominantly retired: you need to consider the second-order effects.

When the 70+ population dies, dealing with the consequences is tough, both emotionally and organizationally. It’s totally plausible that their working age children need to take extended time off work to deal with grief and estate wind-up. And those who inherited substantial estates may not see the need to return to work - at least not right away. Their own retirement plans may have been effectively moved forward.

Yep. I think a big chunk of people decided to retire early. This isn’t predominantly young people leaving the labor force. It’s older people looking around and realizing life is short.

At least anecdotally I can agree. Several of my coworkers and I retired early. In hind-sight I should have done it sooner.

This has some interesting numbers: https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/15/economy/labor-force-retiremen...

"Nearly 70% of the 5 million people who left the labor force during the pandemic are older than 55, according to researchers from Goldman Sachs, and many of them aren't looking to return"

I suspect that many of those left good jobs. And then everyone essentially took a step up in jobs. So for the lowest level, there just aren't people to fill those jobs now.

Thank you for this response. I completely agree and get tired of the reddit tier “lol just pay more” hot takes. I think if paying more were the solution the labor shortage would be over quite quickly. Around where I live wages have not only gone up for menial jobs, but companies are offering large sign on bonuses, guaranteed raise after x days, daily pay, and “job on the spot” interview slots every day. Somebody can walk in off the street and get a job at the local gas station making $15+/hr, a bonus, and a guaranteed raise if they stick with it. And yet they still cannot find anybody to work. Paying more might solve the problem on a micro scale, but at a macro level the shortage will remain. Unless there are a huge number of people sitting on the bench willing to get up at some specific threshold. But as you point out for many people there might not be any amount that would motivate them to get off the bench at this moment.

> Somebody can walk in off the street and get a job at the local gas station making $15+/hr, a bonus, and a guaranteed raise if they stick with it. And yet they still cannot find anybody to work

What do you mean? They can't find anybody to interview? Or they won't hire anyone they interview?

What they mean by "so low" is a change of just over one percent, and their explanation is that the modest benefits programs that ended in September are keeping people away from work in December. This is garbage from people who demonstrate no interest in comprehending the economy.

Five times "why" tends to give us more answers.

1) Why is the labor supply so low? Workers are not interested in the relatively low salary for relatively bad working conditions.

2) Why do salaries not rise? Mid-term the hard cap for salary increases is the increase in worker productivity.

3) Why does worker productivity not rise? It does rise, but far less than inflation (about 1% p.a. for the last ten years). Mostly due to micro-optimizations of existing jobs.

4) Why can't we increase productivity significantly? It would require a shift in how we structure work, i.e. stop doing things that shouldn't be done in the first place instead of optimizing them. Existing jobs will barely change, new ones will.

5) Why is this process not faster? Because both institutions and people are unwilling to change behavior on a large scale. Institutions because they did not need to (before the great resignation) and worker mostly out of habit and complete lack of economic understanding, aka. salary must be earned in form of generating revenue, not in the form of passing time.

> 1) Why is the labor supply so low? Workers are not interested in the relatively low salary for relatively bad working conditions.

It is not about what workers are interested or not. They just need to earn enough to live.

> 2) Why do salaries not rise? Mid-term the hard cap for salary increases is the increase in worker productivity.

Salaries are not proportional to productivity and you all know it. There are people out there doing the same job with the same output but one earns more than other just because companies want to pay more for one and less for other.

> 3) Why does worker productivity not rise? It does rise, but far less than inflation (about 1% p.a. for the last ten years). Mostly due to micro-optimizations of existing jobs.

There are lot's of research out there showing how much worker's productivity increased but salaries didn't increase proportionally.

1: It's the same from an econ perspective as long as people are interested in being alive.

2: I think "same job" is the misunderstanding here. It is about your contribution to the company's gross result. Being a lumber jack at a badly run company is the not the same as being a lumber jack at a great company with economics of scale and a large distribution network.

3: If you have data, please provide it. The official OECD number for GDP per hour worked (aka productivity) back my claim of about 1% p.a. ( https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm )

> It's the same from an econ perspective as long as people are interested in being alive.

A lot of people downsized during the pandemic. It turns out full time work has a cost and relaxing that has a huge benefit. Also, for a lot of us, there is remote work where we can work less time, have no commute, and live wherever the reduced income can afford a better living.

I (living in Ireland) am seriously thinking about leaving Dublin (a high-cost region) and move to perhaps Galway or Mayo and just continue to work the same job.

> 2) Why do salaries not rise? Mid-term the hard cap for salary increases is the increase in worker productivity.

That's not true at all. Firms can take in monopoly profits and pay workers above their productivity indefinitely.

There's no hard cap, just that workers are unlikely to be powerful enough to negotiate such an arrangement. (NBA players union is good example.)

Shareholders are in a sense workers with 0 productivity, and yet they receive more payment than 0.

Thank you for that comment. It helped me understand that many people do have their own definition of productivity (getting X done per hour) which differs starkly from the economic definition of it (GDP per hour).

Speaking in economic terms: Being a monopoly potentially increases worker productivity, because they can achieve more revenue per hour worked.

Why would you attribute monopoly rents to worker productivity? It doesn't make any sense from a causal perspective.

It doesn't have to, that is probably the largest take-away and also most important aspect when it comes to career advice: Being a 10x engineer at a small, insignificant company without growth potential means that you hardly produce anything at all in economic terms. It's much better to be a 0.5x engineer at FAANG (economically speaking). Your productivity is dominated by the industry and market position of your employer. Don't optimize what shouldn't be done in the first place.

Again: productivity = GDP/working hours. Due to more price control the monopoly can increase the numerator, while the denominator remains the same.

I mean why would you attribute the "GDP" to the worker if there's no causal connection?

> Being a 10x engineer at a small, insignificant company without growth potential means that you hardly produce anything at all in economic terms. It's much better to be a 0.5x engineer at FAANG (economically speaking).

That's not the kind of scenario I'm talking about. You're talking about an actual difference in what the worker produces. Not what I mean.

Suppose the worker produces a widget while working for a monopolist who controls the distribution channel. Then the worker's productivity is the price P the customer pays for the widget.

Now suppose the worker's firm is distinct from the monopolist firm. The worker's firm sells to the monopolist at a lower price, P - X, the monopolist marks it up to P.

The worker's causal productivity hasn't changed, the only difference is which people capture the value. If the people capturing monopoly rents are in the same firm as the worker, then the worker's "GDP" is higher. If they're in a different firm, the worker's "GDP" is lower.

In scenario 1 (monopoly): Only one company with worker w1, price p.

prod_1 = punits / hours_w1

In scenario 2 (supplier + monopoly): Let's assume that the second company is not magic, but needs a worker to coordinate with the other company, mark up the price, etc.

prod_1 = (p-x)units/hours_w1

prod_2 = x*units/hours_w2

In summary, coordination between suppliers is an extra job which does not increase GDP. Productivity is decreased, because more hours are required to produce the same GDP.

As if workers were not interested in working for a low salary before the pandemic. This line of reasoning blows my mind.

Productivity gains quickly get eaten up by increases in rent. That's why productivity doesn't always add an increase to wages. The business owners must pay rent.

Rent is commonly very low on the list of issues a business owner faces. This may apply to mom-and-pop shops who feel two simultaneous effects: lack of demand and gentrification. Do you have a specific business in mind that is very rent-dependent?

So there are a few obvious issues - people don't want to work for low wages with no other benefit to their lives, so if they don't have to, they won't. But the blame is on companies here: if you raise wages high enough and treat your employees well, someone will do the job. In order to suppress wages, we've generally kept immigration high and kept social services low. As immigration has declined and we've recently injected cash directly into the hands of the people, wages have climbed.

But I think there's another elephant in the room that nobody has mentioned: the accumulation of wealth and its staying power over generations has created a large class of people that don't have to work (and have never had to). You don't have to be a billionaire to be in that class. If you inherit (or are gifted) a home, the amount of income you require to live is very low, certainly less than full time wages. If you additionally inherit money and have it modestly invested, you could easily live off that money and never work. Some of these people work, but not all, and they are quite able to take long breaks in employment during a pandemic if they choose. This class of people continues to grow every year as our methods for taxing wealth are ineffective. Frankly, assuming most of us are software devs or work for vcs - our children will probably be a part of this class of people. Some of you reading this already are. But I don't know how an economy continues with this class growing the way it has (ok, the answer is the wealth will eventually get inflated away but that will be a big problem for all of us).

There's also another class of people that are perfectly happy working part time and just getting by - this group is happier working a bit but not full time, and certainly not multiple jobs. The lack of motivation is tied to the lack of advancement options for all but a few. If you didn't take one of the few high-income tracks in university, and you don't have the technical chops for software, or the physical durability for a trade, there aren't great options for you to make a lot of money.

I think this is a good point.

In the upper end, people don't need to work anymore. On the lower end, people don't see a reason to try anymore.

I'm in the top 30% percent bracket of income (despite being at the beginning of my career). I save more than 30% of my income. This year, the house prices increased so fast, that the downpayment roses by more than I could save in a year.

I can see people who are in the lower 30% bracket just giving up facing these numbers. What's the point? They could try all they want and work as hard they can and still not be able to make it. Might just as well do the minimum to scrape by and try to get ahold of some VR googles.

No one wants to work for low wages. That hasn’t changed since before the pandemic.

There is no ‘large class’ of rich people. It’s literally called the 1%.

There are many high income tracks - medical, engineering, legal, financial, trades - pick one.

Anyone can get a loan to finance their education.

The system can always be improved, but there’s a lot of people out there who have the choice to improve themselves as well.

A lot more than 1% have enough wealth to not need to work full time. The top 40% by wealth have wealth of at least 200k. Top 25% have 400k. Top 20% have 600k. These numbers are huge, but they are enough to indicate outright homw ownership at least depending on area, which is enough to make working full time unnecessary. There are places where you can own a home for under 100k as well.

I addressed high income tracks already regarding the time investment and limited opportunity. Loans are not as readily available as you suggest, particularly for 7 or 8 years of education, even less so if you're older, and taking on a lifetime of debt is not wise. There's a reason med school and law school (actually most graduate and professional schools) are full of students from affluent backgrounds.

Unless you have no family, kids, responsibilities or retirement plan then not working is not possible below the 1%, and even then not a great idea.

My point is most people not in the 1% and many in the 1% are working to maintain whatever lifestyle they have including their kids and parents which need support as well.

If anything the higher someone’s net worth the more they need to work to maintain it. Life gets a lot harder as you get older.

Also you don’t need an 8 year degree from an expensive school to work as a highly paid professional as your example suggests.

Hell I know tons of people who have earned BS/MS degrees part time while working at from very affordable school.

In summary your fantasy of a large upper class sitting around doing nothing while at the same time keeping the poor down is just that - a fantasy. Everyone is just out there trying to live their lives and get by while supporting their kids, family and parents.

You're simply wrong. You can certainly never work well outside the top 1%. Hell, you can live on social services while near the bottom if you really want. But I know many upper class people who don't work or barely work. It's not a fantasy, it's reality. It's not about keeping anyone down, that's a strawman and not even close to something I said. It's just the economic reality; when all you need to pay for are property taxes, utilities, and food, that's covered very easily by income earned from even modest amounts of wealth. This is a flaw in our economic system.

As for the other class of people, there simply aren't many avenues for those people. I've watched many 20 somethings and 30 somethings struggle. A small number become programmers, a small number become strippers, and the rest tend to work long hours for little pay even with great educations, let alone without those educations.

My pet theory isn't addressed at all. And it's weird they're comparing across other countries when the US is an outlier with housing prices.

Before the pandemic, there were many people just barely keeping up with the rent treadmill. Situations that maybe they wished they could leave, but would have cost too much to make the switch (or they'd seem like a social failure for giving up). Losing their employment (service industry) or losing their commute (remote workers) gave them zero downside to moving at the same time living in denser areas became a liability rather than a benefit. So they moved out to less dense areas with family in existing housing (safety during crisis). They found new jobs (eg package delivery), or just a bit of gig work for their much lower burn rate, or they're "unemployed" doing informal labor for family members. Moving back onto the treadmill would mean drastically increasing their burn rate, and they're not going to do that without drastically increased wages that not only cover rent, but make it lucrative to move back.

Basically the labor supply is sticky. This benefited businesses for decades by keeping wages down, but the physical pandemic flipped it to another stable state. Relief payments helped this along a bit, but they're merely the tip of the iceberg.

Pay bus drivers and school janitors and cafeteria workers enough to own their own home. Pay everyone enough to live the life they deserve to live as humans. For some reason we have gone down the path of exploiting and demeaning people and there is no turning back. I am surprised that both parties refuse are so disconnected from reality.

You are disconnected from reality if you think more money is what creates more jobs or homes. The government literally just did that and we ended up with more supply chain problems and more inflation. Money is paper meant to balance resources, money does not magically create more resources. That’s where education and technology advances come in.

I do not believe that "more" money will create jobs or homes. The bigger question is why does it make sense for companies to optimize for luxury apartments or mansions, that are well out of reach for most people. Why does our system of capitalism incentivize that? Should it not incentivize taking care of society? Why have workers wages been stagnant over the past decades?

It is clear that the capitalism practiced in America is starting to harm society at a fundamental level. Why does our government allow companies to pay wages that are so little people are basically ostracized from education, health care, and housing? That is messed up. Why does our government allow companies in the United States to benefit off of cheap labor in countries that do not treat their citizens fairly and exploit them? I'm not saying that I have all the answers here, because it is a complicated problem, but it is important to bring the obvious truths to the forefront.

If you want to see capitalism with a lot less rules, harming the poor and environment then go back 50 years. Then go back 100 and 150. It gets much much worse than where we are today.

If you have perspective you’ll realize that while things are never perfect, they are improving. And you do recognize ‘why’ as well in your own post - the government. The gov sets the rules and playing field for capitalism to regulate resources.

Still you don’t understand when you say, why don’t companies pay higher wages. As that would create more healthcare, education or homes, as opposed to inflating prices. I’ll say it again, money doesn’t create resources it only balances the limited resources that exist right now.

To increase resources in a sustainable way requires improved education and technology to increase productivity.

It doesn't matter that it isn't perfect; the point is to call out the flaws so the problems can be addressed properly. For some reason it is taboo to mention the issues caused by the current system. The reality is that people who are attempting to articulate the flaws are driven by a sense of fear and remorse that society seems to be decaying and eroding at an alarming pace. I only wish to produce the best system for the generation of my children.

I strongly suspect that the current system of capitalism has conspired to lower the overall well being of American workers on several fronts. For one, it is impossible to compete with countries that do not have the same moral compass/laws for treatment of their workers as the United States. There is an obvious cost associated with this. Many jobs have been shipped overseas, along with supply chains and the ability to produce important materials and equipment.

Entire cities have no opportunity, and no way to improve themselves. Heck, in a crisis, could the United States military even build the equipment it needs to compete completely in the United States?

The point is that, the way system has been working in the past several decades has pulled the rug out from underneath the average American, and the country as a whole. It must be recalibrated. I would tend to suggest that, if managed properly, we would already be at a point where the people in the lowest rungs of society could have home ownership.

There is no conspiracy. It is in our best interest to have the most educated, stable, productive people possible in our society for our collective well being. While at the same time not forcing people to work or study and giving them the ability to make their own choices. It’s a super hard optimization problem that we’re constantly trying to find better solutions to.

To think someone is plotting to ‘keep people down’ assumes there’s some super smart god like person out there pulling all the levers and playing 5 dimensional chess. I guarantee you there isn’t.

> To think someone is plotting to ‘keep people down’ assumes there’s some super smart god like person out there pulling all the levers and playing 5 dimensional chess

No it doesn't. You just have to be paying attention to politics. There is right now an ongoing political debate about whether we need to lower child poverty (child tax credit) or starve the poor into working.

It's in the New York Times, it's on Fox News, it's everywhere.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/opinion/stimulus-unemploy...

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/fox-news-guest-says-po...

The political class determines the level of deprivation of the poor explicitly in order to manipulate productivity and employment.

'benefit off of cheap labor'.

It is also the ease and convenience of outsourcing pollution of iPhone manufacturing to Foxconn in China, for example.

A wage parity import tariff could be difficult to implement. It could be easier to implement environmental parity tariffs.

Did anyone notice Trump didn't close the Mexico border in 2020 though the Canada border was closed? Maybe environmental parity tariffs would encourage manufacturing on-shoring and relieve pressures on foreign imports at the ports. The current administration would make many blue collar friends if they started this. And those focused on a clean environment would like it, too.

This is capitalism reacting to bad government policy. An artificial shortage of construction permits means only the high bidders (luxury condos) get them. Tuition keeps rising as long as we keep guaranteeing reckless loans for teenagers. Health insurance lacks competition because it’s mostly arranged through blanket contracts with employers for tax reasons (dating back to world war two!)

This is terrible social science:

-The data is incomplete

-They test only hypotheses regarding unemployment benefits and COVID health effects. The study design was geared to get the answer they wanted.

-They don’t ever ask why labor force exits in the US are dominated by women with children and workers over 55.

-They don’t ask why the biggest issues are in leisure and hospitality businesses, where weekly wages are 29% lower than retail, even after a substantial rise in 2021.

I think the real question is how people are actually paying their rent and buying food. If they don't need jobs, then they must be solving this problem somehow.

I listened to a recent podcast on NPR that talked about this. (This is just one source so find others.) One couple was drawing down retirement money and slashing spending rather than work horrible conditions in tv/movies. They both said that they would have to start working more soon as their money buffer was getting small. I think there are a lot of people at the lower end that are doing this. Using the government payouts, plus savings, plus cutting costs to just take a break and reset what work is and what it should be.

A "break" from work I agree. A "reset", I'm not so sure (though I'd love it to be the case!). If they're drawing from their savings and so on, then at some point they'll have to go back to whatever shitty jobs are available -- though now they and society will be much more brittle as the retirement buffer is gone.

If they took the time and money to reinvest in their skills -- I'd agree it would be a reset. But the cynical side of me says they are not, most of them.

It's just a question -- everyone is talking about this great revolution -- however who's paying the rent? I keep coming back that question. Maybe I don't have all the information, but I sure have to pay rent. I wonder how others do this too.

Thanks for your suggestion of the NPR podcast -- I'll check it out :)

It's very simple, when people can't pay rent, they move more and more people into fewer and fewer apartments.

The older people fully own their homes, so they don’t have to pay as much to sustain their lifestyle. Then the younger lower wage people either moved in with family, got roommates, or are now homeless.

This article misses both the PPP program and the drop in supply of immigrant workers. Seems like they wrote the conclusion before doing research…

https://www.cato.org/blog/us-issued-12-million-fewer-visas-w...

I find it surprising that no one in the comments has mentioned that at least in the US, immigration, documented and undocumented is down. Especially documented. For all the negative comments from some circles about immigration, it doesn’t surprise me that it would contribute, at least in part, to a labor shortage.

I don't know if decreased immigration is a cause of the current situation, but it does strike me that increased immigration is a potential solution. Unfortunately it appears unlikely due to the political situation in the US.

The approach here of inferring US causation by comparing policy responses and outcomes in other countries is potentially useful tool for understanding what is going on, but it seems to ignore known facts about the actual nature of the LFPR decline in the US. Particularly, it ignores that more than half of the labor force reduction during the pandemic (through the second quarter of 2021) was through excess (above age-based trend) retirements.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synops...

In my industry, we draw from the same labor pool as the construction industry, which is on fire right now. So we fight for people. Each industry has it's own story to tell.

Low interest rates and stimulus have caused over demand in the supply chain, labor shortages, and inflation. Exactly what you would expect from trillions of dollars in stimulus. This article agrees with this, but it was already obvious from the beginning.

Nearly a million adults died from COVID too, I'm sure that affects the labor supply. How many millions of people are we "short" in the labor supply precisely?

800k to be more precise. And they're not working age adults, the vast majority of covid deaths happened in elderly population (70+). And even the 800k figure is disputed as Covid being the primary cause of deathin all of those.

this is both imprecise and inaccurate - excess deaths are or will very soon be 1M+ in the US

The 800k is disputed as being far too low. Including for excess deaths that aren't directly attributed to Covid, the count is well over a million US deaths during the pandemic.

> The 800k is disputed as being far too low.

Interesting, but since it is said without anything to back it up it can also be as easily dismissed. I based my data on https://usafacts.org/visualizations/coronavirus-covid-19-spr...

> Including for excess deaths that aren't directly attributed to Covid, the count is well over a million US deaths during the pandemic.

Correlation doesn't mean causation. Isolation also creates excess deaths. Economic hardships also creates excess deaths. Stress and anxiety create also excess deaths. Alcohol and drugs also create excess deaths. All of these increased since the pandemic.

The exact cause doesn't really matter in this context. The point is that more than that have died compared to a normal year.

> The exact cause doesn't really matter in this context.

It does when you're doing risk and cost analysis

> The point is that more than that have died compared to a normal year.

Deaths do not exist in a vacuum. They are caused by something.

Be quite with those statistics and mask the children because ... emotions.

quiet*

CDC estimated deaths are about 920k: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

More important are the millions of working-age Americans dealing with sequelae from acute covid illness, aka long covid, who are now unable to hold down a full time job. This issue has been grossly neglected because the majority of medical professionals have been largely dismissive of it.

On what basis do you believe long covid is significantly causing adults to not hold down a full time job?

The scattered anecdotes are scary: brain fog that's bad enough to prevent you from doing any mechanical or intellectual labour. The initial data was also scary, but I never saw anything with a particularly convincing survey size.

What initial data?

Near the beginning of the pandemics I've seen percentages of confirmed infections presenting symptoms X weeks after diagnosis. It seemed to not die off. But it both topped at a not too long interval and didn't see that many cases yet.

That data is not hard to find:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7036a1.htm

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-safety-outcome...

Based on a quick scan, none of these studies back up the OP's claim. All these studies show is that long covid exists, but nobody disputes that.

Your scan was far too quick, in that case. You might want to scan again. :)

The US Census Bureau basically said as much recently. Their findings from October stated that 3.7 million people in the US were currently unemployed because they were "caring for someone or sick myself with coronavirus symptoms" [1]

[1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/hhp/202...

Edit: to clarify, a lot of those 3.7 million people are probably suffering from acute Covid, but if you look back at the older survey data, the number of people not working due to "coronavirus symptoms" still seems to remain pretty high even when cases are low.

It unfortunately does not describe how long the surveyed people were unemployed for which would be interesting to know. Thanks for the relevant link & data.

Most of these labor articles are about participation - which is a percentage. Unless it killed laborers disproportionately, and spared non-laborers - absolute deaths is a non-issue for participation.

It's obviously an issue for the total labor force.

That said, >75% of deaths occured in 65+ [1].

~200k*.61 = ~122k people in a workforce of 165M is a rounding error.

.61 = labor force participation rate [2]

Additionally, almost 85% of deaths occured in 55+, and participation for 55-65 is already pretty low (~38%). Articles would've stated the obvious (that people died) if it was a major cause. Almost 3M dropped out of the labor force. Deaths probably account for less 4% of that.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

> Unless it killed laborers disproportionately, and spared non-laborers

This is actually highly likely, given the facts we know.

1) It is highly transmissible when people are in close quarters for longer than a few minutes

2) Many businesses forced their employees to continue working with no PPE, no adequate ventilation, and no paid sick time

Combine these things, and you get a very high likelihood of increased transmission among the most vulnerable of laborers—which thus increases their likelihood of death in proportion.

Ah, yes, I’m sure the obese geriatric day laborers were hit extraordinarily hard by this.

Your comment piqued my interest in the death stats. The CDC has a nice table about half way down the page that compares rates between 2019 and 2020.

What's interesting is not that Covid spiked, but the following causes of death also changed significantly in 2020:

- heart disease +5%

- cancer -2%

- unintentional injuries +20%

- stroke +5%

- chronic lower respiratory disease -6%

- Alzhiemer's disease +10%

- diabetes +15%

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/deaths.htm

How about:

Aside from salary or possibly social connection, there’s better places to work that the us.

If people are going to work for crap pay, there’s far less tiring roles than pickers or servers. These have been filled with domestic or imported underclass. See Brexit.

If you don’t have to work to do what you like, why would you?

Schooling looks pretty good right now.

Why work just to pay child care?

I could go on, but as many have written covid has given everybody time to think rather than just go along day to day. Thinking is dangerous to the status quo.

When I read this it feels like the underlying question to be answered off it is "how do we force more people back to work?". Work shouldn't be mandatory.

"Nebraska’s quandary: Can it force more citizens to work?"

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-business-hea...

""I don't think mask mandates are appropriate," Ricketts told reporters. "I think they create resistance. Masks are just a tool, not the only tool, (and) they are not a panacea to solve all the problems.""

It will be most interesting to see how Ricketts spins mask mandate == bad / forcing people to work == good.

>Work shouldn't be mandatory.

How do you think that would work when our economy isn't post-scarcity?

Automation and robots.

Think about what Universal Income is all about.

> Automation and robots.

But we're actually not there yet, otherwise business wouldn't be clamoring for workers.

It shouldn't be required by law or anything like that, agreed. But if you can work but choose not to, nobody should be giving you any money or paying for anything for you.

There are plenty of scenarios where you're given money for doing nothing. Child tax credits. Unemployment insurance. Redundancy monies. Investment income. Social security. List goes on.

Unemployment insurance is supposed to be for supporting you if you lose your job while you look for a new one. Redundancy monies and investment income aren't free money from the government (i.e., out of my taxes and/or printed, causing inflation), so they're not a problem. Social security is for people who are disabled or too old to work.

Free money from the government is the best form that free money can take.

If the free stuff isn't given out by government, it will be captured by plutocrats with no democratic accountability.

The problem is that the government can't run out of money, so when free stuff from the government goes runaway, the whole economy gets wrecked. If free stuff from private companies goes runaway, then the private companies will run out of money and go out of business.

I didn't say free stuff FROM private companies.

There's a lot of free stuff in the world, and if governments don't distribute it, then it will be captured (not distributed!) by a plutocratic elite.

Not speaking as to the rest but child tax credits are payment for putting in the work for building tomorrow’s labour force. I fully support paying people for making productive kids.

And absent that, I fully support paying people for making kids (without testing the kids for productivity), assuming most kids turn out productive (which they do).

Unemployment and Social Security are insurance programs. You didn't "do nothing", you paid premiums (either directly as with SS, or indirectly through your employer in the case of UI). Would you say that receiving an insurance pay-out if your house burns down is being "given money for doing nothing"?

Unemployment in particular is normally only available if you are laid off through no fault of your own and are actively looking for work. "Looking for work" does not mean you have to accept absolutely any possible job that comes along, you are allowed to continue looking for jobs that suit your skills and experience.

Agreed, but supporting people who don't work shouldn't be mandatory either.

I find it interesting to compare the written narrative vs the graphs.

The written explanation implies its entirely due to overly-generous unemployment compensation (the lazy youth meme that's millennia old). The graph in exhibit 10 implies at least half of it is due to long term demographic trends and early retirement (bye bye boomers). So the written explanation is blame lazy kids, and the graphical explanation is blame the tired elders.

The equivalent of universal basic income during the pandemic has caused the labor force to shrink, and inflation to increase.

Central banks and other researchers have been writing for decades now about the inevitable shift in labor markets as a result of the US demographic curve and retiring baby boomers. My POV is that the pandemic served as an accelerant, pushing more end-of-career folks into retirement (perhaps earlier than planned) and that employers haven't understood or accepted that the "mix" in the workforce is changing rapidly.

The impacts go beyond the usual arguments about social security / government-funded pension programs. The producer-consumer ratio is changing, which is increasing the value of producers.

Early on in this article there is a graph of the change in US, Canada, and EU wages over the past year. It is in "percentages of change".

I suspect that this article's question would be answered much more quickly if these wages were graphed in something like "value in the same currency".

How does the cost and availability of child care factor into this analysis?

This may be a bit stupid of a thing to say.

But didn't a bunch of people just die? Wouldnt this make labor more scarce and valuable?

Why is this continually framed as a "these lazy kids" or welfare thing?

Because mass death, displacement and dramatically reduced immigration.

I expect it to get worse as we face more pandemics and the climate crisis worsens.

Baby Boomers are retiring and dying off. So many of them held jobs without a college degree because they didn't need one out of high school or the military.

That and covid-19 killed the job market as people found they could last on unemployment rather than work a job.

> people found they could last on unemployment rather than work a job.

I haven't found this credible (this year, at least). Unemployment doesn't last forever and it's decidedly less than what they were making before. The former is more compelling than the latter, but the basic economics tell me that it isn't ppl living out of hallways that has caused a shortage of labor. How many years can this be reasonably asserted?

I think it's a combination of the inflation and the building up of debt/loss of stability due to the pandemic. While the unemployment was nice, it's long gone and that labor (by the numbers) didn't all die off.

There were absolutely people that were making more on unemployment, at the height of the pandemic in 2020. (Specifying 2020 because more people have died from Covid-19 in 2021 than 2020.) Depending on the state, unemployment was some $900/week. That works out to $46.8k/yr, which is below the official federal poverty line of $52k/yr. But there are people who live there. That these people seems to have been the undervalued backbone our economy, working 3 part-time jobs, 7 days a week, is extremely depressing.

> That works out to $46.8k/yr, which is below the official federal poverty line of $52k/yr.

The federal poverty line depends on household size, and only reaches $52k/yr when the household size reaches 10 people. For a household of N people in 2021 it was 12880 + 4540 (N-1).

Did you perhaps mix the poverty line up with the ACA subsidy maximum income? The ACA subsidy maximum income is 4x the poverty line, which works out to just under $52k for an individual?

Ah thanks. I was confused, $52k is SF median income.

> That works out to $46.8k/yr, which is below the official federal poverty line of $52k/yr.

What on earth? It's $12,880. Not 52k. How does 52k even pass the sniff test for you?

https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/povert...

> people found they could last on unemployment rather than work a job.

The real question to ask when considering anyone to whom this genuinely applies is what kind of job provides less net benefit than unemployment?

i guess taking part in scociety is a net benefit on it's own, but the low-pay job sector is booming in no small part due to the rise of automation at discharge/distribution platforms.

You seem to be assuming that the job provides too little and unemployment provides the right amount, and ignoring the much more likely case that the jobs provides the right amount, and unemployment provides way too much.

Who doesn't know anyone who subsided off social benefits well before the pandemics?

Lots of people. What's your point?

Saying that "job market was killed by people realizing they can subside off benefits" simply ignores the reality. A small but non-trivial percentage of people hold jobs only as much as they need to get the benefits back. Each such person knows a hundred more people, that now also know one can do this. But most of them don't like the idea of not having a job for cultural reasons. On top of that a job is more money, which is nice.

The antiwork movement is extremely popular here on HN. Supporters of this view are brigade downvoting any view they see as opposed to this: especially if it suggests that government handouts result in people not wanting to work.

I think the desire for better pay and better work conditions are well founded. Most of our Fortune 500 companies are run by hired gun CEOs, not founders, that are trying to extract maximum short term profits at the expense of employees and customers and the environment. That is evil behavior.

The solution to bad companies that mistreat people is not stick out heads in the sand and claim that no one should need to work, the solution is to remove government monopolies (parents) granted to these companies, government contracting to them, and government bailouts.

We also need to find ways to expose the predatory financial classes: venture capitalists mislead entrepreneurs by saying they will support their vision but then fire the founders at high rates, private equity pays founders to leave then makes money by harming customers, employees, and the business, and the stock market gives perverse incentives based on short term profit.

Read Henry Ford's autobiography, he has a lot of brilliant ideas including keeping all of his companies equity so he could retain control and do things like cut prices every year on his cars while paying employees double the going rate.

These guys are hacks. There are papers by serious economists on this question.

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