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Comment by dxjones | Hacker News Reader

The Calorie Tracking example (in the blog posting) illustrates that Mechanical Turk relies heavily on tremendous inequities in wealth.

A rich, fat, lazy person snaps a picture of his lavish meal with a fancy iPhone, and rather than take a brief moment to ponder the calories, … uploads it for, not just one, but three other people to ponder and estimate the calories and report back. The most dissimilar answer is rejected; that person is not compensated.

This only works if there is a very large pool of very poor people who are willing to do these mundane tasks for (fractions of) pennies. These “workers” certainly can’t afford an iPhone; they probably can’t even afford the meal they are looking at.

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There’s a common perception that Mechanical Turk thrives on exploiting 3rd world labor. This doesn’t appear to be the case.

From: http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2008/03/mechanica... and http://asc-parc.blogspot.com/2008/07/mechanical-turk-demogra... 82% of turkers are from the US, Canada or the UK and over 75% have a Bachelor’s degree or higher.

Yes, the average wage is $4/hour and most people spend it as Amazon credit on plasma TVs and home theaters.

My mom has a phd and does HITs for fun.

Thanks for this link. It makes an explicit link to similar demographics for "ESP" games.

You're right that "relies heavily on tremendous inequities in wealth," but not in the way you argue.

People don't spend time on MT for the money. Ok, some people do, but I believe the overwhelming motivation is the same motivation behind casual gaming.

It's just a fun thing you do because you're bored and it's like a little internet scavenger hunt.

Most Turkers are from North America, IIRC. It's more about the cognitive surplus of western laborers versus their third-world counterparts, which is related to their earning power.

Edit: Not sure why your comment was getting downvoted. I voted it back up -- it's an insightful and appropriate comment!

I would say its actually a case of efficiencies using batching rather than the pay discrepancy.

Taking the time out from what you're doing to write down what you ate and how many calories it was incurs a lot of "transaction" costs. Its distracting.

However, if you're on your computer and are sitting there doing many of these one right after another its a lot faster and doesn't require changing your focus.

This is the exact same reason all time management books recommend answering emails in batches.

Even if it were true (and unfortunately it isn't), don't say this like it's a bad thing. Every business which relies on inequities of wealth works to eliminate them. If it succeeds, it will either adapt to a world without inequities or die.

On a similar vain I'd like to point out that Mechanical Turk jobs can only be submitted by people from the US. I can't see any reason for this. It does tend to reinforce the image of inequality.

Any thoughts and any ways to get around this?

>Mechanical Turk relies heavily on tremendous inequities in wealth.

Actually, almost all forms of employment do so as well.

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