3 ms·

A glut is when the supply is available to anyone who wants it and additional supply goes unused. We've already established that we have the exact opposite prob

• zanny 11y ago
  The supply and demand of labor does not care what people need - it does not care at all that mothers want childcare, or the citizens want better roads. All that matters is if that mother or if the citizenry are willing to pay for it. Predominantly most of that is due to the labor glut driving down median incomes and leaving people with less economic negotiating power to get the things they want done. It isn't appropriate to talk in absolute figures of reducing labor supply. That is one side of an equation without considering the other. UBI would generate tremendous real demand for cheap housing, cheap healthy food, and all manner of amenities that can fit in that universal budget. Those demands would be met, because everyone than has the economic negotiating power equal to their UBI as a minimum, rather than today where many people have no (unemployed) or negative (indebted) negotiating power at all and thus have no effective economic influence at all. It is always about supply and demand, and to only talk about economics in terms of one or the other is to argue for an intended outcome rather than seeking out the best possible one. If there were actual demand for childcare, the going rate of childcare workers would continuously rise as capital fought to be supplied by limited demand. The rising prices would create incentive for people to enter that labor force. That does not happen because real economic demand does not exist at those levels - it is not an actual labor shortage if all you want is childcare workers at minimum wage. If I want rocket scientists at minimum wage, I cannot claim there is a shortage of rocket scientists period if they are not willing to take the lowest possible payment I can give them. There is a shortage of something when the real supply cannot meet demand at sustainable price points. Are Nannies expensive? Yes. Is that not a sustainable cost? Absolutely not, Nannies are a valuable commodity, and those that can do a good job should be paid for the scarcity of their skillset. The reason there are not more Nannies is not because of some incredibly bullshit argument about how "nobody wants to do the job, we would pay them anything, but people just refuse to act rationally economically" it is because nobody is willing to pay anyone sufficient wages to justify the career pivot into the discipline. And that relates back to my central argument for UBI - our economy prioritizes the work "worth doing" as a central tenant of capitalism. All a UBI does is potentially drop out the labor force of the work being done now that is the least worth doing to begin with. But TLDR, fundamentally, it is important to recognize that in capitalist economies, demand is not people wanting something (better roads), it is the money willing to be spent on the supply. So if nobody will supply the money to build better roads at rates construction workers are willing to take, you do not have a shortage of construction workers, you have a shortage of funds to pay for better roads and thus you are not generating enough demand for them. We have a demand problem, not a supply problem, as long as major corporations are hoarding money and the stock market is at all time highs, capital is out there. There is just nothing the controllers of that capital actually want that anyone who isn't working now could supply.
  • yummyfajitas 11y ago
    Conversely, if there was an oversupply of labor prices would come down. Note that I said labor is scarce, not that there is a shortage. The fact that prices remain high suggest people are choosing not to work, not that their labor is worthless and they can't find any job. Why do we need a BI if labor is valuable and people are merely lazy? Why do we want to make a scarce resource even scarcer?
    • zanny 11y ago
      What prices are high? One important, central consideration must remain that labor is local. Surely some cities in the US have a labor shortage, and the worse it gets the more financial pressure it puts on the unemployed elsewhere to somehow manage the opportunity cost to immigrate. But the workforce participation rate is at a twenty year low, it is below 1960s levels before women even entered the workforce en masse, and it is continuing to decline.[1] I'm also curious who is "lazily" not working, and somehow still eating and sleeping under a roof. And then I'd also argue that if you can find people that are refusing to work minimum wage and instead prefer to be homeless, that is probably because they have no negotiating power in wage relations because... there is a glut of labor. If there is work to do, that is valuable, prices will rise to find supply. If the prices will not rise, then you do not have actual demand, you have desire. Money is the only thing that speaks in economics. [1]http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/record-94610000-americans-not-labor-force-participation-rate-lowest-38 http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/record-94610... In the macrospective economy, I would like to see evidence of unsupplied demand at the minimum wage for child care or construction workers. My father works construction, and there is a tremendous glut of foreign laborers in our area (Eastern PA) that drive wages down straight to the minimum with no benefits. There is a shortage of skilled labor in the industry, but only because the hiring practices of firms has prioritized the unskilled cheap workers and thus drove talent westward. So now there is a shortage of skilled workers, but only at non-competitive pay rates that the skilled workers left because there was a labor glut, with firms simultaneously unwilling to raise rates back up to attract them back.
      • yummyfajitas 11y ago