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You can't really "distribute labor" in the sense you mean, as if people were units you allocate regardless of their own will. At best you can offer incentives t
by Noos 7y ago
You can't really "distribute labor" in the sense you mean, as if people were units you allocate regardless of their own will. At best you can offer incentives to take up caring positions, but there are barriers. Nursing and hospital work is high stress and high skill, while social work is low paid and frustrating. Even basic caring is generally distasteful work, like senior care or group home work with autistic or handicapped children.
People generally aren't going to rush to those kind of careers. Nursing is an exception, but it's a very demanding stressful line of work, where you have to filter out a lot of people to avoid serious, life threatening mistakes.
- esotericn 7y ago> social work is low paid and frustrating. You state this as if it's some sort of unalterable truth. We could produce a situation in which, right, you do social care, you get a home with a decent garden back and front. The sort of thing that happened en masse in the 60s. We just don't. Not for lack of money, for lack of will, political, social, whatever it is. It's exactly the same sort of problem that has highly skilled engineers wanking about making ads whilst they could be doing important R&D. Long hours aren't inherent, they come about because of artificially produced shortages.
- dantheman 7y agoThere are always shortages, it's just what you choose to be short on. There are only so many apartments of X size a 10 minute walk from Y, that have a view. There are real limitations. There can only be so many 2 acre beach front houses near city X. We make tradeoffs on these things -- now the one big problem is when people force that tradeoff on others. Like banning high density housing. If they want to buy all the land that's ok, but stopping someone else is fundamentally wrong.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- esotericn 7y agoThe number of people that enjoy those sorts of things in the UK is essentially negligible, though. That's not really what people are talking about when they discuss housing issues. The issue is more with the lack of decently sized and equipped flats, and terraced / semi detached family housing with small gardens reasonably close to transport links.
- dantheman 7y agoI completely agree -- why is new building constrained? Because those who currently own don't want things to change. In LA they just vetoed high density near train stations for exactly this reason.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoThat sort of thing all changed with the oil crisis and the UK's mostly still intact post-war consensus where both right and left sought to meet needs even when they had to increase services, housing etc, and the post-war Tory party chose not to re-privatise the NHS. Which brought the longest sustained boom the UK ever saw. Tory party had talked about re-privatising the NHS though in the early 50s. The seventies chaos stemming from 73 brought us to sorely needing some of the neoliberal, monetarist solution of Thatcherism. Everything had to pay, everything had to be reduced to economic choice. Mental health, happiness, social cohesion, community services etc were deemed unimportant. So we have very much reaped what they sowed. The first ten years were probably helpful to correct the damage of the seventies. The next 30 have been making it worse. New Labour improved some areas markedly, but mostly kept pushing in the wrong direction. Health and social care is purely and solely a drain. Nurses are paid accordingly. No account is taken of the knock-on effects of a long waiting list or poor care taking someone out of the workforce far longer, or creating larger and longer term issues... To my view of the world we are long overdue a correction.