15 ms·

Why Garbagemen Should Earn More Than Bankers

63 points by kschua 10y ago

golemotron 10y ago
The thing about markets is that they cut through all of the fuzzy thinking about what jobs "should" pay more than others, and tell us what we actually pay - what we collectively find valuable. That reality escapes most people.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > The thing about markets is that (...) tell us (...) what we collectively find valuable. No, they don't - that's the very point of this article. What society finds valuable and what is economically valuable are two different, separate concepts (and we should really have two different words for them - the term "value" is way overloaded). First of all, the market is not an information display - it's an actor. It doesn't report on how much something is "worth", nor does it "settle" on true prices - it provides a lot of intertia and maintains whatever status it ends up with. Rarely can a society coordinate strongly enough to have its collective will affect the market on purpose (if it could, soccer players and movie stars wouldn't be making that much money). Secondly, the market - that emergent system of aggregated individual economic decisions and incentives - suffers from the typical problems of greedy optimizations. It gets stuck in stupid local minimums. It gets stuck in idiotic feedback loops. Look at e.g. advertising industry - a negative feedback loop where each actor works to cancel out the effort put by other actors. It's a stupid loop that can suck up infinite amount of resources - not money, but tangible resources. Time, manpower, fuel, energy. Think of how much of e.g. printing industry exists only to support advertising by manufacturing trash - leaflets, magazines, billboards, etc. Nature - or the Creator, if you're a believer - gave us brains so that we can notice and correct local minimas and stupid feedback loops of incentive gradients. Market economy isn't a god.
  - golemotron 10y ago
    > Rarely can a society coordinate strongly enough to have its collective will affect the market on purpose (if it could, soccer players and movie stars wouldn't be making that much money). This is just wrong. Soccer players, movie stars, and the organizations that front them make money based upon ticket sales. If you don't want them to make as much money you don't buy the ticket. Buying the ticket is making a choice to give them that money. The problem is that it is easy for people to dissociate from the choices that they make with their purchasing. Not everyone is this deluded. Some people boycott things they disagree with. What you are arguing is that mechanisms like boycott, i.e., voting with your dollars don't always work in the sense of producing outcomes that an observer might consider better for everyone. The same case could be made about democracy for exactly the same reasons. That is a different argument than the one outlined here, that markets do not represent the direct choice of their participants. They certainly do, even when the participants refuse to acknowledge that they are making those choices.
- RobertoG 10y ago
  "what we collectively find valuable" The mystic approach to markets. What determine the wage of a job is scarcity or abundance of people available to do that job. Multiply by one hundred the number of doctors or programmers and you will see "how valuable" their job is. You can apply that to the economy in general. Keep a few millions without job and you will see how you don't need to pay so much to the lucky that have a job.
  - Chris2048 10y ago
    > Multiply by one hundred the number of doctors or programmers and you will see "how valuable" their job is. The reason there is a scarcity is precisely the fact that multiplying availability is not easy, i.e. training is long and/or hard and/or expensive. If you find yourself in a lucrative, scarce job, just make sure it's hard enough that it will always be that way...
- mac01021 10y ago
  That's probably 90% true, but there are phenomena that defy this. Imagine you live in a society where the population is mainly composed of two segments. Members of the first segment enjoy consuming service A. Members of the second segment would benefit tremendously from service B, but all the money is held by the first segment. Which service are you going to spend your time offering to the public? This is at least part of the reason that, as a software engineer, I am much better off selling my time to an advertising company than (say) running a programming/compsci dojo for middle school kids in a low-income urban community. You'll say, of course, that advertising is so lucrative because businesses around the world (and therefore the society made up of them) value the extra income that advertising provides. You'll say that society as a whole does, in fact, want more, better advertisements. But I suspect that there is a segment of the population just as large that would rather everyone in the advertising industry do something else. Only that segment can't pay.
  - Chris2048 10y ago
    > selling my time to an advertising company than (say) running a programming/compsci dojo for middle school kids There are lucrative teaching jobs, and lucrative consumer products bought by low-income communities. But in this case, teaching dojos don't scale the same way ads do. Also, high-income communities can often incubate products that eventually become available to low-income communities, after they get over initial cost burdens. Advertising is a good example though: If everyone uses ads, there is no individual (company) advantage to using ads, but you still have to use them to compete.
    - mac01021 10y ago
      At the risk of hurting my case, advertising is probably not quite as good an example as you're making it out to be. In particular, competition between two brands of the same product need not be a zero sum game. If every beer company runs ads in which beautiful women fawn over a guy drinking beer, the outcome might be that every company sees higher profits than in a world without any ads at all.
  - golemotron 10y ago
meric 10y ago
http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-high-pay/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-h... Some garbagemen do make $100000, more than some bankers (and some software engineers), as they rightly should, as described in this article.
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  Where there's muck there's brass
- GFischer 10y ago
  Garbageman used to be a very highly sought-after job a few years ago in my city. 160.000 out of a population of a million registered for a lottery to be considered for one of the 200 spots back in 2006. It helped that they had an employment contract that basically guaranteed them employment for life and several perks. Nowadays the city government privatized most of the garbage collection, so it's not such a great deal anymore (the employees they hired before on advantageous conditions are still employed and working though). http://www.espectador.com/sociedad/83328/se-realiza-el-sorteo-entre-los-anotados-para-la-imm http://www.espectador.com/sociedad/83328/se-realiza-el-sorte...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
armenarmen 10y ago
> Nearly a century ago, economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that we would work fifteen-hour weeks by the year 2030 In 1930, when Keynes predicted the 15 hour work week, the average American earned $1,368/year which is roughly $19,500/year in todays dollars. 19500/52 = $375/week. In 1930, in manufacturing, the average person worked 50.6 hours per week. (https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/). so about $7.50/hour In 2015 the average family income was $53657. 53657/52 = $1031/week But in 2015 the average person worked on average only 34.4 hours per week (http://fortune.com/2015/11/11/chart-work-week-oecd/ http://fortune.com/2015/11/11/chart-work-week-oecd/) so just shy of $30/hour. If modern Americans were content living at the same level of consumption as their 1930's counterparts they would only have to work 12.5 hours per week to earn that same $375 in purchasing power. Outdoing Keynes' prediction 15 years ahead of schedule.
- meric 10y ago
  60% of families are dual income. [1] (53657/1.6) / 52 = $644. That makes the hourly rate $18.72. So around 20 hours to make 1930's purchasing power. Keynes prediction still ahead. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/18/5-facts-about-todays-fathers/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2012-2/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/18/5-facts-abou...
  - armenarmen 10y ago
    Very true, I just did a quick Google search. Thanks for the link!
  - veronicatorez 10y ago
    Interesting read.
  - SimpleXYZ 10y ago
    In that case I would predict we'll hit it at around, say, 2030.
- tmnvix 10y ago
marmaduke 10y ago
I remember when they did this in Marseille a few years back and it didn't take a week but just a few days before huge trash piles in the streets, set on fire by bored kids, got cleaned up by the army.
maruhan2 10y ago
I wish there was a way to get rid of these bullshit jobs. Also, I wish there was a way to make entertainment business such as singing, acting, and sports much much less profitable.
- MrScruff 10y ago
  There are very few people making a good living out of singing, acting or professional sports. So why would you care what they earn?
- nyandaber 10y ago
  The problem with entertainement isn't that it's too profitable, it's that the top earner are taking a huge part of the pie while the majority is fighting for crumbs. It's easy to see the few soccer stars making millions by the dozen, but there are way more people playing soccer professionally that are barely getting by.
- Scea91 10y ago
  Why do you care what someone else is willing to pay for? What is the problem exactly when someone hires a consultant and pays him from his own pocket? You are free to spend your money as you wish.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > I wish there was a way to get rid of these bullshit jobs. Bankers? Or garbage removers? I suspect the first will be around for a while and there are plenty of people working on autonomous garbage removal trucks. The crew on those trucks has gone from 4 to 3 to 2 and now in plenty of cases it is only 1, the driver and a robotic arm to empty the containers into the back of the truck. That last person is a bigger step than the previous ones but with all the automated driving research going on I don't think it will be long before that last person too will be laid off.
- joelrunyon 10y ago
  Why do you care if it's profitable or not? People enjoy it. Why not let them spend their money on what they enjoy?
bertjk 10y ago
> Some law firms even make a practice of buying up patents for products they have no intention of producing, purely to enable them to sue people for copyright infringement. sigh copyright != patent
digestives 10y ago
My grandfather recalled once how his Latin teacher told him the most important job in society is that of the garbage collector - how can it function properly if everywhere is piled high with waste?
- Chris2048 10y ago
  > how can it function properly if everywhere is piled high with waste? Reminds me of http://joek.com/jokes/joke_102.shtml http://joek.com/jokes/joke_102.shtml
WalterBright 10y ago
My father told the story once of a secretary who told him "my pay is a disgrace. Even garbage men get paid more than me!" To which my father replied "why don't you quit and get a garbage man job?" And the secretary says "are you kidding? That's a filthy, dirty job!"
askyourmother 10y ago
One of the most important jobs in a hospital, is the cleaner. To help prevent the spread of infections like MRSI, to help keep outbreaks of vomiting virus under control, and help reduce the number of admitted and post procedure patients dying as a direct result of infection acquired in the hospital itself. And yet, they are treated as the lowest employees there, well, most are not even employees, outsourced three or four levels removed as a cost to be cut to the cheapest provider, damn the consequences. Society has some warped views sometimes.
- monk_e_boy 10y ago
  Doctors are also important. And nurses. And the admin team. And the cleaners....
  - askyourmother 10y ago
    I didn't say they weren't important. But, what a waste, when the doctor saves the life via an operation, the nurse administers care, and the patient dies from an infection acquired due to a dirty ward, when it could be so easily avoided, by respecting the important role of the cleaner, starting with actually making them employees, paying them well, proper training, materials and care, and finally, giving them respect, so they feel proud, as they save the life just as much as the doctor or the nurse.
    - Tomte 10y ago
      What a waste, when a patient dies in a shining, clean ward because no doctor was there. ;-) But I agree, cleaners should be more respected.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        And now that we've stated both boundary conditions, we can have a productive discussion - is the pay allocation in a hospital arranged optimally in terms of lifes saved and if not, then how can we shift the arrangement (i.e. who should be paid more, and who less) to maximize the effectiveness of that hospital in saving lives?
atemerev 10y ago
A strike of HFT traders would actually make some news. HFT is in a fragile balance. Markets disturbance would be enormous.
maehwasu 10y ago
The writer thinks of money as something people give to you, and so he's never going to make much of it. He's totally right that no one would mourn a strike of lobbyists or high-frequency traders. But those guys aren't waiting to be handed money--they're actively finding ways to get it, for better or worse.
- hvm 10y ago
  Exactly the problem the author is writing about: because of the way the system works - people are striving to make money, not value.
  - lmm 10y ago
    Those two things should be aligned - that's how capitalism works. There are cases where we create the wrong incentives - e.g. the whole HFT industry exists because the sub-penny rule forbids market-makers from competing on price - but let's fix those. Fundamentally the best way to make money should be - and in my view largely is - by creating value for your clients.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      > Fundamentally the best way to make money should be - and in my view largely is - by creating value for your clients. Should be - yes. And to a great extent it was - that's why capitalism is undeniably responsible for propelling (most of) us into the age of prosperity we now enjoy. But I disagree creating (social, not just economic) value for clients is the best way to make money now. Profit and value motives are increasingly misaligned. It is to be expected - we've picked up all low-hanging fruits years ago. Now the money is being made on gaming the system, on exploiting the fact that profit is only a proxy for value. Companies nowadays know that they can get away with almost anything because the market has very short memory. They also know they can sell any kind of bullshit with enough advertising, and that marketing expenses have much better ROI than actually delivering a working product. In contemporary marketplace, providing honest value to customers is not a competitive strategy - hence less and less of it happens (it's painfully visible in our industry - it's why most Internet startups are bullshit).
kartickv 10y ago
If some people are getting paid highly without making a positive contribution to society, they are either: - Taking advantage of gullible customers or, - Exploiting loopholes in the system, as with HFT. In the latter case, regulation should take care of these people.
lmm 10y ago
Where is the money coming from, hmm? The author describes finance as a "tax on the population", but how could such taxation possibly work? The HFT firms are taxing ordinary people's retirement accounts by... undercutting the human market-makers, providing a much better service while employing fewer traders? Um, yeah. No doubt there are inefficient companies - those with an excess of management (say) or some other kind of employees in "bullshit jobs" that aren't adding value. That's ok; those companies will be competed out of the marketplace. We're already seeing plenty of SV companies experimenting with different management models, for example. In some cases "bullshit jobs" are forced upon companies. If we have so many more lawyers than Japan, maybe we need to simplify or otherwise improve our legal system. Or maybe not - maybe the Japanese have a worse quality of life as a result - certainly I've heard complaints about e.g. the treatment of people who suffer serious injuries, or even the ability of small businesses to break into markets that are dominated by racketeers. But in many cases, if a job really is "bullshit", who is paying for it, and why? It's not like banking isn't competitive - you only have to look at the recent quarterly results to see how much effort the industry has put into cutting costs (much of which comes in the form of employing fewer people).
facepalm 10y ago
Garbagemen are paid from taxer money, bankers aren't. If you don't like bankers, don't give them your money. Problem solved. I get more angry at people with cushy bullshit government jobs than at bankers. The example of the Irish pubs seems to show that actually bankers do something of value. Otherwise anybody could have replaced them, instead it was Irish Pub owners because they had knowledge of their customers financial situation.
Sam-------- 10y ago
IMO this is wrong: Most any banker can become a garbageman. They are way overpaid, that's why there is a lottery for the jobs. Is the reverse true? Relying on strike time to tragedy is complete BS. As we saw in 2007/8 when banker messed up the consequences are indeed harsh. None of this works without gov putting its thumb on the scales. Where do you think the lack of innovation came from?
- oarsinsync 10y ago
  > IMO this is wrong: Most any banker can become a garbageman. They are way overpaid, that's why there is a lottery for the jobs. Is the reverse true? The article actually states exactly this as part of it's "bullshit jobs" discussion. > Relying on strike time to tragedy is complete BS. As we saw in 2007/8 when banker messed up the consequences are indeed harsh. You're mixing up a strike with a very complex series of events that can arguably be described somewhere on a scale between "messed up" and "maliciously and fraudulently manipulated markets for their own profiteering at the expense of everyone else". However, determining exactly where on that scale they sit is a much bigger discussion than HN allows in a comment. Eitherway, the article again compares a garbage collection strike with a banking strike, which is a fairer comparison, and suggests that the biggest losers from that strike were the bankers.
mac01021 10y ago
As someone who does not live in a high-density urban environment, I would rather keep my bank than my garbage man. My waste is about half compostable and the other half, through a slight change in purchasing decisions, could easily consist solely of easily-burnable paper and cardboard. Meanwhile, if I had noone to finance the purchase of my house or manage my retirement savings then I would be considerably worse off.

63 points by kschua 10y ago

The thing about markets is that they cut through all of the fuzzy thinking about what jobs "should" pay more than others, and tell us what we actually pay - what we collectively find valuable. That reality escapes most people.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
> The thing about markets is that (...) tell us (...) what we collectively find valuable. No, they don't - that's the very point of this article. What society finds valuable and what is economically valuable are two different, separate concepts (and we should really have two different words for them - the term "value" is way overloaded). First of all, the market is not an information display - it's an actor. It doesn't report on how much something is "worth", nor does it "settle" on true prices - it provides a lot of intertia and maintains whatever status it ends up with. Rarely can a society coordinate strongly enough to have its collective will affect the market on purpose (if it could, soccer players and movie stars wouldn't be making that much money). Secondly, the market - that emergent system of aggregated individual economic decisions and incentives - suffers from the typical problems of greedy optimizations. It gets stuck in stupid local minimums. It gets stuck in idiotic feedback loops. Look at e.g. advertising industry - a negative feedback loop where each actor works to cancel out the effort put by other actors. It's a stupid loop that can suck up infinite amount of resources - not money, but tangible resources. Time, manpower, fuel, energy. Think of how much of e.g. printing industry exists only to support advertising by manufacturing trash - leaflets, magazines, billboards, etc. Nature - or the Creator, if you're a believer - gave us brains so that we can notice and correct local minimas and stupid feedback loops of incentive gradients. Market economy isn't a god.
- golemotron 10y ago
  > Rarely can a society coordinate strongly enough to have its collective will affect the market on purpose (if it could, soccer players and movie stars wouldn't be making that much money). This is just wrong. Soccer players, movie stars, and the organizations that front them make money based upon ticket sales. If you don't want them to make as much money you don't buy the ticket. Buying the ticket is making a choice to give them that money. The problem is that it is easy for people to dissociate from the choices that they make with their purchasing. Not everyone is this deluded. Some people boycott things they disagree with. What you are arguing is that mechanisms like boycott, i.e., voting with your dollars don't always work in the sense of producing outcomes that an observer might consider better for everyone. The same case could be made about democracy for exactly the same reasons. That is a different argument than the one outlined here, that markets do not represent the direct choice of their participants. They certainly do, even when the participants refuse to acknowledge that they are making those choices.
RobertoG 10y ago
"what we collectively find valuable" The mystic approach to markets. What determine the wage of a job is scarcity or abundance of people available to do that job. Multiply by one hundred the number of doctors or programmers and you will see "how valuable" their job is. You can apply that to the economy in general. Keep a few millions without job and you will see how you don't need to pay so much to the lucky that have a job.
- Chris2048 10y ago
  > Multiply by one hundred the number of doctors or programmers and you will see "how valuable" their job is. The reason there is a scarcity is precisely the fact that multiplying availability is not easy, i.e. training is long and/or hard and/or expensive. If you find yourself in a lucrative, scarce job, just make sure it's hard enough that it will always be that way...
mac01021 10y ago
That's probably 90% true, but there are phenomena that defy this. Imagine you live in a society where the population is mainly composed of two segments. Members of the first segment enjoy consuming service A. Members of the second segment would benefit tremendously from service B, but all the money is held by the first segment. Which service are you going to spend your time offering to the public? This is at least part of the reason that, as a software engineer, I am much better off selling my time to an advertising company than (say) running a programming/compsci dojo for middle school kids in a low-income urban community. You'll say, of course, that advertising is so lucrative because businesses around the world (and therefore the society made up of them) value the extra income that advertising provides. You'll say that society as a whole does, in fact, want more, better advertisements. But I suspect that there is a segment of the population just as large that would rather everyone in the advertising industry do something else. Only that segment can't pay.
- Chris2048 10y ago
  > selling my time to an advertising company than (say) running a programming/compsci dojo for middle school kids There are lucrative teaching jobs, and lucrative consumer products bought by low-income communities. But in this case, teaching dojos don't scale the same way ads do. Also, high-income communities can often incubate products that eventually become available to low-income communities, after they get over initial cost burdens. Advertising is a good example though: If everyone uses ads, there is no individual (company) advantage to using ads, but you still have to use them to compete.
  - mac01021 10y ago
    At the risk of hurting my case, advertising is probably not quite as good an example as you're making it out to be. In particular, competition between two brands of the same product need not be a zero sum game. If every beer company runs ads in which beautiful women fawn over a guy drinking beer, the outcome might be that every company sees higher profits than in a world without any ads at all.
- golemotron 10y ago

meric 10y ago

http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-high-pay/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-h... Some garbagemen do make $100000, more than some bankers (and some software engineers), as they rightly should, as described in this article.

monk_e_boy 10y ago
Where there's muck there's brass
GFischer 10y ago
Garbageman used to be a very highly sought-after job a few years ago in my city. 160.000 out of a population of a million registered for a lottery to be considered for one of the 200 spots back in 2006. It helped that they had an employment contract that basically guaranteed them employment for life and several perks. Nowadays the city government privatized most of the garbage collection, so it's not such a great deal anymore (the employees they hired before on advantageous conditions are still employed and working though). http://www.espectador.com/sociedad/83328/se-realiza-el-sorteo-entre-los-anotados-para-la-imm http://www.espectador.com/sociedad/83328/se-realiza-el-sorte...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

armenarmen 10y ago

> Nearly a century ago, economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that we would work fifteen-hour weeks by the year 2030 In 1930, when Keynes predicted the 15 hour work week, the average American earned $1,368/year which is roughly $19,500/year in todays dollars. 19500/52 = $375/week. In 1930, in manufacturing, the average person worked 50.6 hours per week. (https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/ https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/). so about $7.50/hour In 2015 the average family income was $53657. 53657/52 = $1031/week But in 2015 the average person worked on average only 34.4 hours per week (http://fortune.com/2015/11/11/chart-work-week-oecd/ http://fortune.com/2015/11/11/chart-work-week-oecd/) so just shy of $30/hour. If modern Americans were content living at the same level of consumption as their 1930's counterparts they would only have to work 12.5 hours per week to earn that same $375 in purchasing power. Outdoing Keynes' prediction 15 years ahead of schedule.

meric 10y ago
60% of families are dual income. [1] (53657/1.6) / 52 = $644. That makes the hourly rate $18.72. So around 20 hours to make 1930's purchasing power. Keynes prediction still ahead. [1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/18/5-facts-about-todays-fathers/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2012-2/ http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/18/5-facts-abou...
- armenarmen 10y ago
  Very true, I just did a quick Google search. Thanks for the link!
- veronicatorez 10y ago
  Interesting read.
- SimpleXYZ 10y ago
  In that case I would predict we'll hit it at around, say, 2030.
tmnvix 10y ago

marmaduke 10y ago

I remember when they did this in Marseille a few years back and it didn't take a week but just a few days before huge trash piles in the streets, set on fire by bored kids, got cleaned up by the army.

maruhan2 10y ago

I wish there was a way to get rid of these bullshit jobs. Also, I wish there was a way to make entertainment business such as singing, acting, and sports much much less profitable.

MrScruff 10y ago
There are very few people making a good living out of singing, acting or professional sports. So why would you care what they earn?
nyandaber 10y ago
The problem with entertainement isn't that it's too profitable, it's that the top earner are taking a huge part of the pie while the majority is fighting for crumbs. It's easy to see the few soccer stars making millions by the dozen, but there are way more people playing soccer professionally that are barely getting by.
Scea91 10y ago
Why do you care what someone else is willing to pay for? What is the problem exactly when someone hires a consultant and pays him from his own pocket? You are free to spend your money as you wish.
jacquesm 10y ago
> I wish there was a way to get rid of these bullshit jobs. Bankers? Or garbage removers? I suspect the first will be around for a while and there are plenty of people working on autonomous garbage removal trucks. The crew on those trucks has gone from 4 to 3 to 2 and now in plenty of cases it is only 1, the driver and a robotic arm to empty the containers into the back of the truck. That last person is a bigger step than the previous ones but with all the automated driving research going on I don't think it will be long before that last person too will be laid off.
joelrunyon 10y ago
Why do you care if it's profitable or not? People enjoy it. Why not let them spend their money on what they enjoy?

bertjk 10y ago

> Some law firms even make a practice of buying up patents for products they have no intention of producing, purely to enable them to sue people for copyright infringement. sigh copyright != patent

digestives 10y ago

My grandfather recalled once how his Latin teacher told him the most important job in society is that of the garbage collector - how can it function properly if everywhere is piled high with waste?

Chris2048 10y ago
> how can it function properly if everywhere is piled high with waste? Reminds me of http://joek.com/jokes/joke_102.shtml http://joek.com/jokes/joke_102.shtml

WalterBright 10y ago

My father told the story once of a secretary who told him "my pay is a disgrace. Even garbage men get paid more than me!" To which my father replied "why don't you quit and get a garbage man job?" And the secretary says "are you kidding? That's a filthy, dirty job!"

askyourmother 10y ago

One of the most important jobs in a hospital, is the cleaner. To help prevent the spread of infections like MRSI, to help keep outbreaks of vomiting virus under control, and help reduce the number of admitted and post procedure patients dying as a direct result of infection acquired in the hospital itself. And yet, they are treated as the lowest employees there, well, most are not even employees, outsourced three or four levels removed as a cost to be cut to the cheapest provider, damn the consequences. Society has some warped views sometimes.

monk_e_boy 10y ago
Doctors are also important. And nurses. And the admin team. And the cleaners....
- askyourmother 10y ago
  I didn't say they weren't important. But, what a waste, when the doctor saves the life via an operation, the nurse administers care, and the patient dies from an infection acquired due to a dirty ward, when it could be so easily avoided, by respecting the important role of the cleaner, starting with actually making them employees, paying them well, proper training, materials and care, and finally, giving them respect, so they feel proud, as they save the life just as much as the doctor or the nurse.
  - Tomte 10y ago
    What a waste, when a patient dies in a shining, clean ward because no doctor was there. ;-) But I agree, cleaners should be more respected.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      And now that we've stated both boundary conditions, we can have a productive discussion - is the pay allocation in a hospital arranged optimally in terms of lifes saved and if not, then how can we shift the arrangement (i.e. who should be paid more, and who less) to maximize the effectiveness of that hospital in saving lives?

atemerev 10y ago

A strike of HFT traders would actually make some news. HFT is in a fragile balance. Markets disturbance would be enormous.

maehwasu 10y ago

The writer thinks of money as something people give to you, and so he's never going to make much of it. He's totally right that no one would mourn a strike of lobbyists or high-frequency traders. But those guys aren't waiting to be handed money--they're actively finding ways to get it, for better or worse.

hvm 10y ago
Exactly the problem the author is writing about: because of the way the system works - people are striving to make money, not value.
- lmm 10y ago
  Those two things should be aligned - that's how capitalism works. There are cases where we create the wrong incentives - e.g. the whole HFT industry exists because the sub-penny rule forbids market-makers from competing on price - but let's fix those. Fundamentally the best way to make money should be - and in my view largely is - by creating value for your clients.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > Fundamentally the best way to make money should be - and in my view largely is - by creating value for your clients. Should be - yes. And to a great extent it was - that's why capitalism is undeniably responsible for propelling (most of) us into the age of prosperity we now enjoy. But I disagree creating (social, not just economic) value for clients is the best way to make money now. Profit and value motives are increasingly misaligned. It is to be expected - we've picked up all low-hanging fruits years ago. Now the money is being made on gaming the system, on exploiting the fact that profit is only a proxy for value. Companies nowadays know that they can get away with almost anything because the market has very short memory. They also know they can sell any kind of bullshit with enough advertising, and that marketing expenses have much better ROI than actually delivering a working product. In contemporary marketplace, providing honest value to customers is not a competitive strategy - hence less and less of it happens (it's painfully visible in our industry - it's why most Internet startups are bullshit).

kartickv 10y ago

If some people are getting paid highly without making a positive contribution to society, they are either: - Taking advantage of gullible customers or, - Exploiting loopholes in the system, as with HFT. In the latter case, regulation should take care of these people.

lmm 10y ago

Where is the money coming from, hmm? The author describes finance as a "tax on the population", but how could such taxation possibly work? The HFT firms are taxing ordinary people's retirement accounts by... undercutting the human market-makers, providing a much better service while employing fewer traders? Um, yeah. No doubt there are inefficient companies - those with an excess of management (say) or some other kind of employees in "bullshit jobs" that aren't adding value. That's ok; those companies will be competed out of the marketplace. We're already seeing plenty of SV companies experimenting with different management models, for example. In some cases "bullshit jobs" are forced upon companies. If we have so many more lawyers than Japan, maybe we need to simplify or otherwise improve our legal system. Or maybe not - maybe the Japanese have a worse quality of life as a result - certainly I've heard complaints about e.g. the treatment of people who suffer serious injuries, or even the ability of small businesses to break into markets that are dominated by racketeers. But in many cases, if a job really is "bullshit", who is paying for it, and why? It's not like banking isn't competitive - you only have to look at the recent quarterly results to see how much effort the industry has put into cutting costs (much of which comes in the form of employing fewer people).

facepalm 10y ago

Garbagemen are paid from taxer money, bankers aren't. If you don't like bankers, don't give them your money. Problem solved. I get more angry at people with cushy bullshit government jobs than at bankers. The example of the Irish pubs seems to show that actually bankers do something of value. Otherwise anybody could have replaced them, instead it was Irish Pub owners because they had knowledge of their customers financial situation.

Sam-------- 10y ago

IMO this is wrong: Most any banker can become a garbageman. They are way overpaid, that's why there is a lottery for the jobs. Is the reverse true? Relying on strike time to tragedy is complete BS. As we saw in 2007/8 when banker messed up the consequences are indeed harsh. None of this works without gov putting its thumb on the scales. Where do you think the lack of innovation came from?

oarsinsync 10y ago
> IMO this is wrong: Most any banker can become a garbageman. They are way overpaid, that's why there is a lottery for the jobs. Is the reverse true? The article actually states exactly this as part of it's "bullshit jobs" discussion. > Relying on strike time to tragedy is complete BS. As we saw in 2007/8 when banker messed up the consequences are indeed harsh. You're mixing up a strike with a very complex series of events that can arguably be described somewhere on a scale between "messed up" and "maliciously and fraudulently manipulated markets for their own profiteering at the expense of everyone else". However, determining exactly where on that scale they sit is a much bigger discussion than HN allows in a comment. Eitherway, the article again compares a garbage collection strike with a banking strike, which is a fairer comparison, and suggests that the biggest losers from that strike were the bankers.

mac01021 10y ago

As someone who does not live in a high-density urban environment, I would rather keep my bank than my garbage man. My waste is about half compostable and the other half, through a slight change in purchasing decisions, could easily consist solely of easily-burnable paper and cardboard. Meanwhile, if I had noone to finance the purchase of my house or manage my retirement savings then I would be considerably worse off.