Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

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It reminds me of my first time visiting South Korea. While there I observed people who's job it was to wear a cute uniform and bow to cars entering the parking garage at the local department store, people hired by companies to stand in the aisles at the local supermarket holding packs of coffee or shampoo or whatever and dance to loud techno music (usually young women in short skirts and thigh high boots, bizarre to see families shopping for vegetables, fighting their way around scantily clad 20 year olds in the middle of a dance routine around the cabbage aisle), and other similar, "keep people busy" type jobs. I'd be highly surprised if these folks made more than $3-4/hr, not even remotely a living wage.

- checking on the numbers, the minimum wage in South Korea for 2011 was about $3.75. I'm guessing when I first went there in 2003, it was even lower.

- in 2006 I visited and remember having to make my way around a gauntlet of guys in doorman uniforms, who's job it was to bow to people entering the hotel, and another guy who's job it was to push the "up" button to request an elevator. That's it, that was his entire job. For eight hours a day, he stood outside of the elevators, waiting for guests, and pushed the only button to request an elevator (there was no down button the hotel I was staying in).

So yes, while the unemployment figures were pretty good, the actual "work" that people were doing was essentially meaningless.

I've never been to Japan, but I'd be highly surprised if there weren't similar analogues.

A general point to keep in mind here is that unemployment numbers are hard to compare. The best example is a country like India which has no social security net to speak of, so if you're unemployed and are not rich you will actually die of hunger. Which means that the unemployment rate is actually the percentage of people who can afford to stay unemployed. A less drastic comparison might be between unemployed people in Sweden and the US. I'd think that being unemployed in Sweden is lot better than being unemployed in the US because of the US's lack of a medical safety net.

Similar logic applies to your example of people doing "meaningless work". There are lots of those in India as well. I'm not going to judge whether these jobs are meaningless, but I'm pretty sure they produce a drastic improvement in quality of life for those who are employed in these jobs. Life as a greeter at a mall or a lift-operator is way better than life as a struggling farmer. And this doesn't even consider all the second-order benefits these people enjoy. Life in a big city means better education, more access to information, more opportunities, all of which almost certainly guarantee a much better life for their children.

This was a bit of a rambling post, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that both comparing unemployment rates as well as comparing the types of employment on offer are too simplistic to make any useful judgments about an economy. I think some aggregate quality of life measure is what we really need to look at.

"I'm not going to judge whether these jobs are meaningless, but I'm pretty sure they produce a drastic improvement in quality of life for those who are employed in these jobs."

You're right of course, "meaningless" is probably too hard a harsh word choice. Looked at another way, dancing girls promoting powdered coffee mix probably moves a lot of coffee. And having a guy operate the elevator button made a 3-star hotel feel like a 4-star. In fact, one thing I notice every time I'm in Korea is that the level of customer service is generally very high simply because there's so many people working at places.

I was thinking of this the other day when I was in a Home Depot and couldn't find somebody to help me find a dryer vent for love or country. "If I was in Korea I'd have half a dozen employees showing me the aisle, and dancing girls promoting the product" I was left thinking.

All marketing is "keep people busy" work.

In Australia, people don't like service-people. There's this weird pseudo-independence thing, where we'd like to believe that we haven't oppressed any workers to get our cup of coffee. It's not a problem if the coffee was grown by plantation slaves, and made by a Philippino guest-worker on an exploitive H1B1 equivalent visa, but the waitress had better be quick, efficient, and get out of our way so we don't feel sorry for her. If it's a waiter, he'd better be even quicker, because we detest seeing men do degrading work even more.

So all the marketing is depersonalised. Cafes might have lavish interiors which were extremely labor-intensive to build, but the work is all done behind closed doors. People will pay lots of money for seamless advertising and marketing, so you can't see that a real human being had to put the sign together.

It's kind of strange.

I'm sure service people hate their jobs, and do kind of meaningless stuff, but no less than the rest of us.

Having worked in retail and service jobs, I can tell you that a generous fraction of Australian consumers rely on the lowly checkout chick / salesman / service assistant / phone operator etc as someone to prop up their self-worth through condescension.

If you want to do something bad to a person (i.e. slightly inconvenience them) it's a lot easier to justify if you hold them in contempt.

Reminds me of store self-checkout scanning machines. A lot of the time, they aren't actually faster than waiting in one of the staffed checkout queues—especially if they have a queue themselves, as customers operating the machines are inevitably less experienced at it than the cashiers are at operating the POS.

But people still prefer them. Why? I think it's a social anxiety thing. You don't want to think that you're wasting someone's time on your goods—showing them what you've bought, having them fuss over each item and acknowledge that you bought that—when you could instead check yourself out in relative anonymity. You don't have to make any small-talk, or even take out your headphones if you don't want to. It's really about eliminating the "friction" of the social norms involved with the manual checkout process as much as it is about automating anything.

I've heard of the ridiculously low wages in South-Korea. For example 7-elevens etc are staffed by students doing part-time work for a pittance. It's unfortunate, but what can you do.

In Japan, you'll see retirement-age men working silly pretend-jobs, like guarding a hole in the sidewalk and telling passersby to avoid it, as if the fence wasn't enough.

It's actually worse than that. Most students don't get part time work (most people I know here never worked before finishing their post-grad university). When you see someone young in a 7-11 they are probably stuck there. Education has such a huge social force behind it and every job is very competitive so you get people with masters degrees working sales jobs. For the folk who never did well enough to get into university they are often stuck in minimum wage jobs for life. No safety net means most people rely on their children to retire, if you were infertile or your children died you are probably going to be sorting garbage when you are 80 in -10°C temperatures. I stopped to talk to this old woman on the street yesterday, she's one of millions in her situation.

South Korea takes capitalism pretty seriously. Competition is real here and failure is ultimate. Japan still has a fairly decent safety net with their pension schemes. South Korea, however, does not and relies on children to deliver for their parents. When children don't (because they are poor, they died, they abandon their parents) it all falls apart and the government doesn't step in (which provides a pretty strong incentive to succeed).

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