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> but there are claims that for those of us without education, how much we make depends largely on how many educated people we are near. There are a lot of dub

> but there are claims that for those of us without education, how much we make depends largely on how many educated people we are near. There are a lot of dubious claims about education though. I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt. Some even claim that gaining an education will result in earning more money, all while incomes have remained stagnant for decades upon decades and educational attainment has ballooned. How does one earn more money while also earning the same amount of money...? What they are probably referring to is the fact that the education system filters out people who are less capable. Someone with, say, down syndrome is unfortunately unlikely to withstand the academic rigour required to graduate from college, and is unlikely to possess the traits that employers want to see in order to pay the big bucks, leaving the data to show that this person who did not graduate from college is also paid poorly. But it is faulty logic to think that if you don't graduate from college that you will contract down syndrome. > That's a big part of why I am so stuck on the bay area; I don't have a degree, and I do really well here. All the offers I get from other parts of the country are terrible. Your strong ties to the Bay Area suggest that you are probably involved in tech. Which is no doubt centred around the Bay Area, and pays less outside of the Bay Area no matter who you are. But what if all you knew was farming? Do you think you'd see a huge pay bump by moving your farm to the Bay Area (or any other major metropolis)?

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
> But what if all you knew was farming? Do you think you'd see a huge pay bump by moving your farm to the Bay Area (or any other major metropolis)? This has been so common throughout history that there is even a name for it (rural flight): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_flight https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_flight As agriculture is increasingly mechanized, fewer farmers are needed. So it doesn’t really matter if all you know is farming, moving to the city is your best bet if you aren’t inheriting the family farm. That’s just how economics works.
- Retric 8y ago
  The remaining farmers can make very good money. The median wage for ranchers and other agricultural managers is $66,360/year and this is for generally low cost of living areas. It’s farm hands that that really benifit from moving to city’s.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Yes, but the number of farmers significantly decreases every single year. What happens to those that are squeezed out? They have to be going somewhere....
    - Retric 8y ago
      Not really. There where ~2.2 million us farms in 1982. It dropped to ~2 million in 2002 but it’s still ~2 million today. Many of theses are more hobby projects than giant industrial operations. Even still giant subsidy’s keeps the farm sector from the kind of massive consolidation you see in most industries.
      - randomdata 8y ago
        > Even still giant subsidy’s keeps the farm sector from the kind of massive consolidation you see in most industries. The bulk of the massive subsidy received by farms is crop insurance premium assistance though. No doubt a huge benefit if you have a weather disaster, but not anything you see directly until you have a disaster, and that only provides stability in those freak years. I am not sure that alone is keeping farms from consolidating like other industries as most other industries don't have the same kind of instability from the weather. I would argue that in North America mega-farms, by and large, simply cannot compete with smaller farms. It takes farm expertise to run a farm and one person can only manage so much. Hiring more people with farm expertise is exceedingly difficult as anyone who has farming expertise would prefer to have their own business. If your thing is developing search engines, chances are you're going to have to align yourself with for Google or Microsoft for the network advantage. You have almost no chance of succeeding on your own in the search engine space at this point. But food is quite different. If you produce food, there is guaranteed to be a buyer for it. There is no real network advantage to working for someone else there like you see in other industries, so why let someone else take their cut off the profit of your labour?
        Retric 8y ago
        Crop insurance is 8.5 billion out of $23 billion in subsidies directly given to farmers. Divide by 3.2 million farmers and that’s 7,200$ per year each.
- randomdata 8y ago
  I feel like you have missed some important nuance in my comment or misunderstood the context of our discussion. Rural flight says nothing about moving farms into the city. But, statistically, farmers make substantially more than most. Moving to the city (to find a new career) would not be one's best bet if farming is what they know.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Being a farmer these days is capital intensive and heavily mechanized, so even if they make more than most, most can’t be farmers. Even farmers have trouble being farmers these days, because they have to keep up with an increasingly mechanized profession that needs fewer of them every year. Then most definitely, moving to the city might be your vest bet even if farming is the only thing you know.
    - randomdata 8y ago
      > Being a farmer these days is capital intensive and heavily mechanized, so even if they make more than most, most can’t be farmers. They are already farmers, so that's a moot point. How could you move your farm to the city if you did not have a farm to move? > Even farmers have trouble being farmers these days, because they have to keep up with an increasingly mechanized profession that needs fewer of them every year. Mechanization is causing attrition, but I am not convinced it is causing farms to fail. If you are established, it won't be mechanization that gets you. > Then most definitely, moving tk the city might be your vest bet even if farming is the only thing you know. Or you could just sell your business, retire off of the proceeds, and live wherever you want (which is probably not the city; I've never heard of a retired farmer keen to move to the city – in fact, rural areas are often thought of as retirement communities for former city dwellers). Like you said, it is a capital intensive business. There is an incredible amount of capital at your disposal.
      - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        This is very well studied and the effect is very real, see https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2018-04-04/family-farms-pushed-to-get-big-or-go-bust%3fcontext=amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/best-states... You only have as much capital as the bank will lend you, and you are often living year to year on whatever your income is (which you’ll need to use a lot to either pay down loans or save so you don’t have to take out loans). And if you are successful, you buy out your less successful neighbor to expand your farm, where does your neighbor go? Old farmers can probably retire, but what about young ones? They often just give up and move. This has been talked about a lot in the last decade, there is no big mystery or open question about it. Other countries have it even worse than America; eg Japan.
adventured 8y ago
> all while incomes have remained stagnant for decades upon decades and educational attainment has ballooned. How does one earn more money while also earning the same amount of money...? There are two issues that explain that. First, the stagnation period begins from an artificially high point. A point where US global economic dominance peaked in the ~20-25 years after WW2, because the other dominant powers were mostly busy rebuilding their decimated cities and infrastructure. The US was able to immediately swivel its industrial base to traditional economic output. It pushed the US share of global manufacturing to over 50%. That extraordinary share of global manufacturing output provided a vast, artificial over-abundance of blue collar jobs. That's a ridiculous comparison point to start from and impossible to replicate (short of blowing up the world again). Second, most of the compensation growth has gone into benefits that aren't counted in the salary figures that show income stagnation. Per capita healthcare costs have increased by ~$10,000 in 35-40 or so years (a six fold increase), and about ~40% of the US gets its healthcare through an employer. The median full-time wage is $50,000 in the US. The cost to insure a solo 35 or 40 year old earning that median full-time wage, has gone from $40-$60 per month in the early 1980s, to more like $500-$600 today at a minimum. If you're earning $80,000 as an engineer for example, your insurance compensation might cost the company more like $800 to $1,000 per month. A family of four - two full-time employed adults - earning $150,000 per year can easily be spending $25k-$30k per year on health insurance. If you have two people earning $90,000 together, with one child, their insurance cost is going to be $1,500 per month or more - $18,000 per year - representing the equivalent of 20% of their salary. All of our wage growth potential is going into that blackhole of healthcare cost expansion. The UK, Japan, Australia, Canada, France (elite healthcare systems globally) are all spending $4,000 to $5,000 per capita per year on healthcare costs. The US is spending more like $11,000 to $12,000 ($3.6 to $3.8 trillion per year roughly). The US share of its GDP going to healthcare costs, has about tripled in 40 years, from ~6-7% to ~18-19% today. That's where most of the wage gains have gone, to a $1.4 trillion per year giant wealth transfer to the people working in all the layers of healthcare. The wage gains have been diverted to subsidize the existence of jobs and wages in healthcare that otherwise would not exist. Admin, doctors, nurses, insurance salespersons, pharma reps, scientists, shareholders, buildings, janitors, and the zillions of other jobs and costs (artificially high wages) in that system that otherwise wouldn't exist if you adjusted the US per capita spending to match other developed nations. Did you know the US has 3x to 4x (43 CT and 38 MRI units per million people) the number of CT and MRI systems per capita that Canada has (15 CT and 10 MRI units per million people), and about 2x to 3x the number that France has? An example of wage diversion to feed the healthcare monster. That provides jobs that shouldn't exist for healthcare professionals, jobs for repair & maintenance people, jobs for sales people, profit/revenue for GE & Toshiba and so on.
lsc 8y ago
>Your strong ties to the Bay Area suggest that you are probably involved in tech. Which is no doubt centred around the Bay Area, and pays less outside of the Bay Area no matter who you are. But what if all you knew was farming? Do you think you'd see a huge pay bump by moving your farm to the Bay Area (or any other major metropolis)? If I inherited a bunch of debt-free land and equipment from my dad rather than a bunch of tech skills and contacts? sure, things would be very different. But I didn't, and agriculture is less than 2% of the labor force, and most of those people are hired workers, not the owner-operators, which is usually what we mean by "farmer" rather than "farm hand" For that matter, the farmers of my famiy's ancestral lands? Both inherited family lands and are highly educated. Yeah, there's still physical work involved, but figuring out how to operate these million dollar machines they use? at least as compex as operating the computers I use; and figuring how to fertalize and otherwise maintain the soil quality? I'd argue is probably a lot more complex, and higher risk.
- jelliclesfarm 8y ago
  As long as one doesn’t own land and has to rely on hired labour, there is no point in farming near a city. As a hobby, yes. Otherwise, no.
  - lsc 8y ago
    >As long as one doesn’t own land and has to rely on hired labour, there is no point in farming near a city. As a hobby, yes. Otherwise, no. so, my understanding is that most of the farming that happens outside of CA, cereal crops and the like, is super capital intensive, but not very labor intensive. On the farm I was speaking of before that has been in my family for some time (though it has consolidated; there's one nuclear family that operates land that used to belong to a bunch of family units) - that one farm is mostly operated by one couple (and, of course, a whole bunch of equipment) mostly growing things like corn, soybeans and wheat. Of course, the sort of vegetables you see grown in California are a lot more labor intensive. I actually think your perception of rent vs buying land might be reversed? Land near cities is in high demand for speculation... for building houses on. So the purchase price would be higher than rural land. But if you are renting it out for agricultural use? Growing cereal crops near town isn't going to generate a whole lot more value than growing cereal crops in very rural areas, so I don't imagine the rent is that much different (though there's probably more "I can sell it to a developer" clauses in land near towns) - I mean, the thing is that a lot of places have zoning restrictions that make it really hard to convert ag land to residential use. Again, the equation is probably different if you are farming vegetables; I don't really care if my cereal grains are shipped halfway across the country, but I'm willing to pay a significant premium for local, fresh vegetables. On the other hand, unless you are farming fresh vegetables and charging a premium, there's no benefit to farming near a city, and even then, it's probably small. So, uh, were I able to, I'd probably delete my comment that you responded to, just 'cause the question was "would you see a bump by moving your farm to a urban area" not "could you make a decent living at farming, and would you need to be educated"
lsc 8y ago
>There are a lot of dubious claims about education though. I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt. Some even claim that gaining an education will result in earning more money, all while incomes have remained stagnant for decades upon decades and educational attainment has ballooned. How does one earn more money while also earning the same amount of money...? all incomes? are you seriously going to clam that incomes for tech workers and others of this (mostly highly-educated) caste haven't risen dramatically in the last three decades?
- randomdata 8y ago
  > all incomes? are you seriously going to clam that incomes for tech workers and others of this Tech workers make up, what, about 5% of the workforce at best? I know software developers only make up 0.8% of the workforce. We are talking about an exceedingly small group of people. And not all of them are doing well. There are a lot of low-paid tech workers around, especially if you look beyond the Bay Area and outside of software. The lowly network admin working at Mom and Pops in Nowheresville is probably not even making the median income. In the US, about 35% of the population graduate with a four year college degree or more, and 45% with a two year degree or more. That is a lot of people. Practically half of the population. They are in no way they are all seeing their incomes rise (beyond inflation). Incomes are stagnant and have been for many decades. There are always outliers who buck the mold, but on the whole incomes are not rising even for those with education. And why would they? It does not follow from any realistic economic model that incomes should increase.
  - lsc 8y ago
    >There are always outliers who buck the mold, but on the whole incomes are not rising even for those with education. And why would they? It does not follow from any realistic economic model that incomes should increase. My model is that technology has allowed us to produce more per unit effort; Even in my field, I can manage a whole lot more computers than I could when I started in the mid to late '90s. For that matter, even if I was still fixing desktop computers, if I'm fixing desktop computers for EEs this year who are massively more productive than they would have been in the late '90s because of improved technology, it's natural that I'd still get paid more, because even if I'm only saving those people the same number of work hours, those work hours produce more and thus there's more surplus to pay me. It seems totally reasonable that increased productivity could lead to increased wages. (I mean, there are a bunch of failure modes where it wouldn't, to... but I'm just saying, anyone who is even slightly ideologically capitalist or market oriented is going to argue that increased productivity drives increased income)

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

> But what if all you knew was farming? Do you think you'd see a huge pay bump by moving your farm to the Bay Area (or any other major metropolis)? This has been so common throughout history that there is even a name for it (rural flight): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_flight https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_flight As agriculture is increasingly mechanized, fewer farmers are needed. So it doesn’t really matter if all you know is farming, moving to the city is your best bet if you aren’t inheriting the family farm. That’s just how economics works.

Retric 8y ago
The remaining farmers can make very good money. The median wage for ranchers and other agricultural managers is $66,360/year and this is for generally low cost of living areas. It’s farm hands that that really benifit from moving to city’s.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  Yes, but the number of farmers significantly decreases every single year. What happens to those that are squeezed out? They have to be going somewhere....
  - Retric 8y ago
    Not really. There where ~2.2 million us farms in 1982. It dropped to ~2 million in 2002 but it’s still ~2 million today. Many of theses are more hobby projects than giant industrial operations. Even still giant subsidy’s keeps the farm sector from the kind of massive consolidation you see in most industries.
    - randomdata 8y ago
      > Even still giant subsidy’s keeps the farm sector from the kind of massive consolidation you see in most industries. The bulk of the massive subsidy received by farms is crop insurance premium assistance though. No doubt a huge benefit if you have a weather disaster, but not anything you see directly until you have a disaster, and that only provides stability in those freak years. I am not sure that alone is keeping farms from consolidating like other industries as most other industries don't have the same kind of instability from the weather. I would argue that in North America mega-farms, by and large, simply cannot compete with smaller farms. It takes farm expertise to run a farm and one person can only manage so much. Hiring more people with farm expertise is exceedingly difficult as anyone who has farming expertise would prefer to have their own business. If your thing is developing search engines, chances are you're going to have to align yourself with for Google or Microsoft for the network advantage. You have almost no chance of succeeding on your own in the search engine space at this point. But food is quite different. If you produce food, there is guaranteed to be a buyer for it. There is no real network advantage to working for someone else there like you see in other industries, so why let someone else take their cut off the profit of your labour?
      - Retric 8y ago
        Crop insurance is 8.5 billion out of $23 billion in subsidies directly given to farmers. Divide by 3.2 million farmers and that’s 7,200$ per year each.
randomdata 8y ago
I feel like you have missed some important nuance in my comment or misunderstood the context of our discussion. Rural flight says nothing about moving farms into the city. But, statistically, farmers make substantially more than most. Moving to the city (to find a new career) would not be one's best bet if farming is what they know.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  Being a farmer these days is capital intensive and heavily mechanized, so even if they make more than most, most can’t be farmers. Even farmers have trouble being farmers these days, because they have to keep up with an increasingly mechanized profession that needs fewer of them every year. Then most definitely, moving to the city might be your vest bet even if farming is the only thing you know.
  - randomdata 8y ago
    > Being a farmer these days is capital intensive and heavily mechanized, so even if they make more than most, most can’t be farmers. They are already farmers, so that's a moot point. How could you move your farm to the city if you did not have a farm to move? > Even farmers have trouble being farmers these days, because they have to keep up with an increasingly mechanized profession that needs fewer of them every year. Mechanization is causing attrition, but I am not convinced it is causing farms to fail. If you are established, it won't be mechanization that gets you. > Then most definitely, moving tk the city might be your vest bet even if farming is the only thing you know. Or you could just sell your business, retire off of the proceeds, and live wherever you want (which is probably not the city; I've never heard of a retired farmer keen to move to the city – in fact, rural areas are often thought of as retirement communities for former city dwellers). Like you said, it is a capital intensive business. There is an incredible amount of capital at your disposal.
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      This is very well studied and the effect is very real, see https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2018-04-04/family-farms-pushed-to-get-big-or-go-bust%3fcontext=amp https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.usnews.com/news/best-states... You only have as much capital as the bank will lend you, and you are often living year to year on whatever your income is (which you’ll need to use a lot to either pay down loans or save so you don’t have to take out loans). And if you are successful, you buy out your less successful neighbor to expand your farm, where does your neighbor go? Old farmers can probably retire, but what about young ones? They often just give up and move. This has been talked about a lot in the last decade, there is no big mystery or open question about it. Other countries have it even worse than America; eg Japan.

adventured 8y ago

> all while incomes have remained stagnant for decades upon decades and educational attainment has ballooned. How does one earn more money while also earning the same amount of money...? There are two issues that explain that. First, the stagnation period begins from an artificially high point. A point where US global economic dominance peaked in the ~20-25 years after WW2, because the other dominant powers were mostly busy rebuilding their decimated cities and infrastructure. The US was able to immediately swivel its industrial base to traditional economic output. It pushed the US share of global manufacturing to over 50%. That extraordinary share of global manufacturing output provided a vast, artificial over-abundance of blue collar jobs. That's a ridiculous comparison point to start from and impossible to replicate (short of blowing up the world again). Second, most of the compensation growth has gone into benefits that aren't counted in the salary figures that show income stagnation. Per capita healthcare costs have increased by ~$10,000 in 35-40 or so years (a six fold increase), and about ~40% of the US gets its healthcare through an employer. The median full-time wage is $50,000 in the US. The cost to insure a solo 35 or 40 year old earning that median full-time wage, has gone from $40-$60 per month in the early 1980s, to more like $500-$600 today at a minimum. If you're earning $80,000 as an engineer for example, your insurance compensation might cost the company more like $800 to $1,000 per month. A family of four - two full-time employed adults - earning $150,000 per year can easily be spending $25k-$30k per year on health insurance. If you have two people earning $90,000 together, with one child, their insurance cost is going to be $1,500 per month or more - $18,000 per year - representing the equivalent of 20% of their salary. All of our wage growth potential is going into that blackhole of healthcare cost expansion. The UK, Japan, Australia, Canada, France (elite healthcare systems globally) are all spending $4,000 to $5,000 per capita per year on healthcare costs. The US is spending more like $11,000 to $12,000 ($3.6 to $3.8 trillion per year roughly). The US share of its GDP going to healthcare costs, has about tripled in 40 years, from ~6-7% to ~18-19% today. That's where most of the wage gains have gone, to a $1.4 trillion per year giant wealth transfer to the people working in all the layers of healthcare. The wage gains have been diverted to subsidize the existence of jobs and wages in healthcare that otherwise would not exist. Admin, doctors, nurses, insurance salespersons, pharma reps, scientists, shareholders, buildings, janitors, and the zillions of other jobs and costs (artificially high wages) in that system that otherwise wouldn't exist if you adjusted the US per capita spending to match other developed nations. Did you know the US has 3x to 4x (43 CT and 38 MRI units per million people) the number of CT and MRI systems per capita that Canada has (15 CT and 10 MRI units per million people), and about 2x to 3x the number that France has? An example of wage diversion to feed the healthcare monster. That provides jobs that shouldn't exist for healthcare professionals, jobs for repair & maintenance people, jobs for sales people, profit/revenue for GE & Toshiba and so on.

lsc 8y ago

>Your strong ties to the Bay Area suggest that you are probably involved in tech. Which is no doubt centred around the Bay Area, and pays less outside of the Bay Area no matter who you are. But what if all you knew was farming? Do you think you'd see a huge pay bump by moving your farm to the Bay Area (or any other major metropolis)? If I inherited a bunch of debt-free land and equipment from my dad rather than a bunch of tech skills and contacts? sure, things would be very different. But I didn't, and agriculture is less than 2% of the labor force, and most of those people are hired workers, not the owner-operators, which is usually what we mean by "farmer" rather than "farm hand" For that matter, the farmers of my famiy's ancestral lands? Both inherited family lands and are highly educated. Yeah, there's still physical work involved, but figuring out how to operate these million dollar machines they use? at least as compex as operating the computers I use; and figuring how to fertalize and otherwise maintain the soil quality? I'd argue is probably a lot more complex, and higher risk.

jelliclesfarm 8y ago
As long as one doesn’t own land and has to rely on hired labour, there is no point in farming near a city. As a hobby, yes. Otherwise, no.
- lsc 8y ago
  >As long as one doesn’t own land and has to rely on hired labour, there is no point in farming near a city. As a hobby, yes. Otherwise, no. so, my understanding is that most of the farming that happens outside of CA, cereal crops and the like, is super capital intensive, but not very labor intensive. On the farm I was speaking of before that has been in my family for some time (though it has consolidated; there's one nuclear family that operates land that used to belong to a bunch of family units) - that one farm is mostly operated by one couple (and, of course, a whole bunch of equipment) mostly growing things like corn, soybeans and wheat. Of course, the sort of vegetables you see grown in California are a lot more labor intensive. I actually think your perception of rent vs buying land might be reversed? Land near cities is in high demand for speculation... for building houses on. So the purchase price would be higher than rural land. But if you are renting it out for agricultural use? Growing cereal crops near town isn't going to generate a whole lot more value than growing cereal crops in very rural areas, so I don't imagine the rent is that much different (though there's probably more "I can sell it to a developer" clauses in land near towns) - I mean, the thing is that a lot of places have zoning restrictions that make it really hard to convert ag land to residential use. Again, the equation is probably different if you are farming vegetables; I don't really care if my cereal grains are shipped halfway across the country, but I'm willing to pay a significant premium for local, fresh vegetables. On the other hand, unless you are farming fresh vegetables and charging a premium, there's no benefit to farming near a city, and even then, it's probably small. So, uh, were I able to, I'd probably delete my comment that you responded to, just 'cause the question was "would you see a bump by moving your farm to a urban area" not "could you make a decent living at farming, and would you need to be educated"

lsc 8y ago

>There are a lot of dubious claims about education though. I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt. Some even claim that gaining an education will result in earning more money, all while incomes have remained stagnant for decades upon decades and educational attainment has ballooned. How does one earn more money while also earning the same amount of money...? all incomes? are you seriously going to clam that incomes for tech workers and others of this (mostly highly-educated) caste haven't risen dramatically in the last three decades?

randomdata 8y ago
> all incomes? are you seriously going to clam that incomes for tech workers and others of this Tech workers make up, what, about 5% of the workforce at best? I know software developers only make up 0.8% of the workforce. We are talking about an exceedingly small group of people. And not all of them are doing well. There are a lot of low-paid tech workers around, especially if you look beyond the Bay Area and outside of software. The lowly network admin working at Mom and Pops in Nowheresville is probably not even making the median income. In the US, about 35% of the population graduate with a four year college degree or more, and 45% with a two year degree or more. That is a lot of people. Practically half of the population. They are in no way they are all seeing their incomes rise (beyond inflation). Incomes are stagnant and have been for many decades. There are always outliers who buck the mold, but on the whole incomes are not rising even for those with education. And why would they? It does not follow from any realistic economic model that incomes should increase.
- lsc 8y ago
  >There are always outliers who buck the mold, but on the whole incomes are not rising even for those with education. And why would they? It does not follow from any realistic economic model that incomes should increase. My model is that technology has allowed us to produce more per unit effort; Even in my field, I can manage a whole lot more computers than I could when I started in the mid to late '90s. For that matter, even if I was still fixing desktop computers, if I'm fixing desktop computers for EEs this year who are massively more productive than they would have been in the late '90s because of improved technology, it's natural that I'd still get paid more, because even if I'm only saving those people the same number of work hours, those work hours produce more and thus there's more surplus to pay me. It seems totally reasonable that increased productivity could lead to increased wages. (I mean, there are a bunch of failure modes where it wouldn't, to... but I'm just saying, anyone who is even slightly ideologically capitalist or market oriented is going to argue that increased productivity drives increased income)