11 ms·

Productivity has everything to do with it. Why do people work? To earn wages to buy things that have been produced. And race to the bottom? More like race to

• littletimmy 11y ago
  Demand and supply does not apply when you are talking about involuntary labor. Given that a lot of labor is forced wage-slavery (the "freedom" to choose between working to death and starving to death / being homeless is not freedom), your point about the equilibrium is false. Labor wages are simply the lowest that labor can be paid.
• lordnacho 11y ago
  A friend of mine has a little dev shop. Some of is customers are private, and some are government agencies. The private customers use modern agile techniques. They have modern clouds with modern provisioning systems. Their managers get back quickly about changes, and their IT guys set up new servers quickly. The pay x per hour. The public agencies have old school bureaucratic management. They are slow to respond with feedback. Their IT guys have a 6 month lead time to install Windows XP (yes in 2015), and when the lead time is up, they still haven't done it so my friend has to show up there and do it for them. They pay 3x per hour. Productivity is not really a factor. Nobody doing the government job could ever in a million years be more productive than the other job, even though any dev could do either job. There's no queue of people for either of these types of jobs.