4 ms·

There should be incentives to skill development and personal investment.

danbruc 10y ago
Why? If that worked out, there would be nobody left doing low-skilled work or those workers would at least be totally overqualified. There need to be incentives to fill jobs with a deficit in the available workforce, not incentives to obtain better qualifications for the sake of it. And even then, do these incentives have to be 1000% more instead of 50% or so? This is also very unfair against people that are unable to obtain higher qualifications, they are punished for being what they are even if they are doing great work in a low-skilled job and work as hard as someone bringing home six-figure salary from a high-skilled job.
- darpa_escapee 10y ago
  As long as we have an underclass that will sell their labor to the lowest bidder, that's incentive enough.
- noonespecial 10y ago
  Because of the "there would be nobody left doing low-skilled work" part. Once there is a scarcity of people who are willing to do this work, the price will automatically rise. When it does, people will either be highly paid to do these unpleasant tasks, or (more righteously IMHO) these tasks will be done by robots. The problem is that anyone can clean toilets. Its unpleasant, hard work, but requires no training. There is a glut of people who can do only this type of work so there is a race to the bottom of the price ladder back-stopped only by minimum wage laws at this point. We need to lift as many people out of this through education and personal betterment as we can as quickly as possible. For those we cannot, basic minimum income or something like it will fill the gaps.
  - danbruc 10y ago
    Once there is a scarcity of people who are willing to do this work, the price will automatically rise. This presupposes that there is enough high-skilled work available and that all low-skilled workers are capable of obtaining higher qualifications. The later one is certainly not true and the former one seems at least questionable. And every time the demand in a high-skilled professions drops, those workers end up in the lower-skilled worker pools, at least temporary until they requalify for a different high-skilled professions. The problem is that anyone can clean toilets. Its unpleasant, hard work, but requires no training. That is my point, I want workers to be paid for the work they do, not for the training it required. Besides, as mentioned in the initial comment, to compensate for the the additional training time. We need to lift as many people out of this through education and personal betterment as we can as quickly as possible. Empirically this does not seem to work, otherwise we would see a narrowing gap, not a widening one. Also there are certainly people that are happy with the low-skilled work they are doing, besides the wage maybe, why do we have to force them out of it?
    - noonespecial 10y ago
      >That is my point, I want workers to be paid for the work they do, not for the training it required. Unfortunately, supply and demand confounds this with alacrity. Things that are plentiful are cheap, even if we wish otherwise. We can make rules to "fix" it but it's so difficult and expensive I'm not even sure it's a break even proposition. It does feel good to try. >Empirically this does not seem to work, otherwise we would see a narrowing gap... The gap is irrelevant. It's the lifting that counts. The gap only becomes a problem when the top doesn't get farther ahead by moving up, they get farther ahead by pushing others down (often while their absolute material wealth actually declines).
      - danbruc 10y ago
        The gap is irrelevant. It's the lifting that counts. The gap only becomes a problem when the top doesn't get farther ahead by moving up, they get farther ahead by pushing others down (often while their absolute material wealth actually declines). This is a point of view I do not share. It is a common argument, capitalism made everyone better of. But I would argue the gap matters even if the lower is better of. The CEO making 10 million Dollar a year did not create that value, the 10,000 workers on the factory floor did this. That are only 1000 Dollar per worker and it might not matter that much to each one of them whether they earn 1000 Dollar more or less. But he fact that the workers are the ones actually producing the value while the CEO is the one disproportionally profiting from that, that seems to me unfair and at least psychological more relevant than 1000 Dollars more or less. I fully agree with all the arguments about taking risks when founding a company and so on and getting some compensation for this, but that should not be excessive. Taking a bit of money from many to become disproportionally wealthy is something I am not okay with. And I make no distinction how it is done, whether you take it from your employees, or from your customers depositing money in your bank, or by investing your existing wealth and collecting dividends. Taking some money from many is no better then taking much money from a few.
vkou 10y ago
Exactly what benefit to society does your taxi driver having a PHD provide?
- Tenhundfeld 10y ago
  >Exactly what benefit to society does your taxi driver having a PHD provide? That is an extreme example, but it doesn't really make any points. In general, society benefits from each member striving to fulfill their potential. That doesn't mean everybody needs to have PhDs; in fact, I think more the opposite, that more people should be doing apprenticeships and attending trade schools. But in general, a society that has higher skill development will be more competitive in a global economy. That helps society as a whole, even more so in societies with less extreme wealth disparity. I honestly don't know what you're advocating. Are you saying some people shouldn't be allowed to get a PhD? Or that somebody with a PhD shouldn't be able to change their mind and switch careers? Or that it's a waste of time for people to pursue a PhD unless there's a direct and immediate benefit to society? And maybe your hypothetical taxi driver's PhD dissertation actually did make a breakthrough contribution to society, but then she decided she didn't care for academia and has taken some time off to plan her next step and is moonlighting as an Uber driver in the interim. Is that enough benefit for you? That question feels like it's making an awful lot of silly assumptions – though maybe I'm the one misinterpreting and making bad assumptions.
  - danbruc 10y ago
    Let me bring this a bit back to were we - or I - started. My point is that I consider it unfair that wages are hugely different between low-skilled work and high-skilled work even if both require similar amounts of work. This only works because the market exploits an imbalance between supply and demanded low-skilled work and is empirically unable to correct this imbalance, for whatever reasons. We of course need some differences in wages to steer the market to match supply and demand and to encourage better education. I certainly have no desire for a society where everyone is happy flipping burgers because it pays good money. But as long as there is low-skilled work to be done, I want those workers to be compensate for the work they are doing, not punished because of an excess in available work power. I also hope that people doing low-skilled work would still strive for better education for the sake of it and to become a »better« human, no matter if it is required for the job or not. And they could do this more easily if they did not have to work three jobs to survive. Finally higher wages for low-skilled workers would also encourage automation and therefore reduce the amount of work humans have to do while not reducing the wealth.

Why? If that worked out, there would be nobody left doing low-skilled work or those workers would at least be totally overqualified. There need to be incentives to fill jobs with a deficit in the available workforce, not incentives to obtain better qualifications for the sake of it. And even then, do these incentives have to be 1000% more instead of 50% or so? This is also very unfair against people that are unable to obtain higher qualifications, they are punished for being what they are even if they are doing great work in a low-skilled job and work as hard as someone bringing home six-figure salary from a high-skilled job.

darpa_escapee 10y ago
As long as we have an underclass that will sell their labor to the lowest bidder, that's incentive enough.
noonespecial 10y ago
Because of the "there would be nobody left doing low-skilled work" part. Once there is a scarcity of people who are willing to do this work, the price will automatically rise. When it does, people will either be highly paid to do these unpleasant tasks, or (more righteously IMHO) these tasks will be done by robots. The problem is that anyone can clean toilets. Its unpleasant, hard work, but requires no training. There is a glut of people who can do only this type of work so there is a race to the bottom of the price ladder back-stopped only by minimum wage laws at this point. We need to lift as many people out of this through education and personal betterment as we can as quickly as possible. For those we cannot, basic minimum income or something like it will fill the gaps.
- danbruc 10y ago
  Once there is a scarcity of people who are willing to do this work, the price will automatically rise. This presupposes that there is enough high-skilled work available and that all low-skilled workers are capable of obtaining higher qualifications. The later one is certainly not true and the former one seems at least questionable. And every time the demand in a high-skilled professions drops, those workers end up in the lower-skilled worker pools, at least temporary until they requalify for a different high-skilled professions. The problem is that anyone can clean toilets. Its unpleasant, hard work, but requires no training. That is my point, I want workers to be paid for the work they do, not for the training it required. Besides, as mentioned in the initial comment, to compensate for the the additional training time. We need to lift as many people out of this through education and personal betterment as we can as quickly as possible. Empirically this does not seem to work, otherwise we would see a narrowing gap, not a widening one. Also there are certainly people that are happy with the low-skilled work they are doing, besides the wage maybe, why do we have to force them out of it?
  - noonespecial 10y ago
    >That is my point, I want workers to be paid for the work they do, not for the training it required. Unfortunately, supply and demand confounds this with alacrity. Things that are plentiful are cheap, even if we wish otherwise. We can make rules to "fix" it but it's so difficult and expensive I'm not even sure it's a break even proposition. It does feel good to try. >Empirically this does not seem to work, otherwise we would see a narrowing gap... The gap is irrelevant. It's the lifting that counts. The gap only becomes a problem when the top doesn't get farther ahead by moving up, they get farther ahead by pushing others down (often while their absolute material wealth actually declines).
    - danbruc 10y ago
      The gap is irrelevant. It's the lifting that counts. The gap only becomes a problem when the top doesn't get farther ahead by moving up, they get farther ahead by pushing others down (often while their absolute material wealth actually declines). This is a point of view I do not share. It is a common argument, capitalism made everyone better of. But I would argue the gap matters even if the lower is better of. The CEO making 10 million Dollar a year did not create that value, the 10,000 workers on the factory floor did this. That are only 1000 Dollar per worker and it might not matter that much to each one of them whether they earn 1000 Dollar more or less. But he fact that the workers are the ones actually producing the value while the CEO is the one disproportionally profiting from that, that seems to me unfair and at least psychological more relevant than 1000 Dollars more or less. I fully agree with all the arguments about taking risks when founding a company and so on and getting some compensation for this, but that should not be excessive. Taking a bit of money from many to become disproportionally wealthy is something I am not okay with. And I make no distinction how it is done, whether you take it from your employees, or from your customers depositing money in your bank, or by investing your existing wealth and collecting dividends. Taking some money from many is no better then taking much money from a few.

vkou 10y ago

Exactly what benefit to society does your taxi driver having a PHD provide?

Tenhundfeld 10y ago
>Exactly what benefit to society does your taxi driver having a PHD provide? That is an extreme example, but it doesn't really make any points. In general, society benefits from each member striving to fulfill their potential. That doesn't mean everybody needs to have PhDs; in fact, I think more the opposite, that more people should be doing apprenticeships and attending trade schools. But in general, a society that has higher skill development will be more competitive in a global economy. That helps society as a whole, even more so in societies with less extreme wealth disparity. I honestly don't know what you're advocating. Are you saying some people shouldn't be allowed to get a PhD? Or that somebody with a PhD shouldn't be able to change their mind and switch careers? Or that it's a waste of time for people to pursue a PhD unless there's a direct and immediate benefit to society? And maybe your hypothetical taxi driver's PhD dissertation actually did make a breakthrough contribution to society, but then she decided she didn't care for academia and has taken some time off to plan her next step and is moonlighting as an Uber driver in the interim. Is that enough benefit for you? That question feels like it's making an awful lot of silly assumptions – though maybe I'm the one misinterpreting and making bad assumptions.
- danbruc 10y ago
  Let me bring this a bit back to were we - or I - started. My point is that I consider it unfair that wages are hugely different between low-skilled work and high-skilled work even if both require similar amounts of work. This only works because the market exploits an imbalance between supply and demanded low-skilled work and is empirically unable to correct this imbalance, for whatever reasons. We of course need some differences in wages to steer the market to match supply and demand and to encourage better education. I certainly have no desire for a society where everyone is happy flipping burgers because it pays good money. But as long as there is low-skilled work to be done, I want those workers to be compensate for the work they are doing, not punished because of an excess in available work power. I also hope that people doing low-skilled work would still strive for better education for the sake of it and to become a »better« human, no matter if it is required for the job or not. And they could do this more easily if they did not have to work three jobs to survive. Finally higher wages for low-skilled workers would also encourage automation and therefore reduce the amount of work humans have to do while not reducing the wealth.