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from an AMZN early investor. the company that pays the lowest wages and creates the greatest wage disparities ever seen. great example of why the pitchforks ar

from an AMZN early investor. the company that pays the lowest wages and creates the greatest wage disparities ever seen. great example of why the pitchforks are overdue. Even the rich who can see the writing on the wall are too greedy to do anything other than virtue signaling.

fastball 6y ago
Amazon certainly does not pay the lowest wages. And wage disparities are only bad where they don't make sense. But at AMZN, they do. AMZN has both some of the least skilled workers in the world, and also some of the most skilled workers in the world, which unsurprisingly demand vastly different rates. The requirements to be a warehouse worker at AMZN are basically: 1. Know how to read 2. Be physically fit. ...which is a pretty low bar. You don't even need to be clever with your hands or anything, so sweatshops in Bangladesh require more skill. Meanwhile, the people building infra at AMZN are some of the most intelligent, highest skilled people on earth. And I'm sorry, but until we live in a post-scarcity economy, the former group is always going to get paid very little, and the latter group is going to get paid a lot. Nothing else is tenable. You can ignore supply/demand with Communism, but Communism clearly doesn't work in practice as long as there is scarcity. Personally, I think UBI is a great solution to this problem. But the idea that AMZN is perpetrating an injustice by not paying unskilled, easily replaceable workers at anywhere close to the rate they pay highly-skilled, hard-to-replace workers is just silly.
- jboog 6y ago
  The low skilled workers are going to get paid very little because we choose to pay them very little. We as a society have decided that rather than increase the wealth of the very poor at the bottom of society, instead we want to increase the wealth of the ultra wealthy. Why does a person need tens of billions of dollars? Because they worked very hard or had a great idea? Why isn't $500 million enough instead of $50 billion when we have kids in this country and around the world who don't know where their next meal is coming from? Much of Western Europe decided on a much different route than the US took and they have much more egalitarian societies. The problem is that in the US we decided that the ultra wealthy are our betters and deserve as much capital as they can accumulate and the parasites at the bottom are inferior and deserve to toil for Bezos' pocket lint.
  - fastball 6y ago
    We don't "choose" to pay them little. They get paid very little because on an individual basis they provide very little value. This is just reality, and it will continue to be true until we have a post-scarcity economy. If we are making any choice at all, it is choosing to pay the lowest-skilled workers in our society more than they are owed by value delivered, because we have empathy and don't want people to starve to death if avoidable. If you set the scales, with one end being the raw value delivered to the rest of society by a warehouse worker at AMZN, and the other side of the scale being the value being delivered to that same worker from society (in the form of food, clothes, cars, entertainment, housing, etc)... well, the scales would not be balanced at all. Some European countries are more egalitarian because they have deliberately chosen to put their hand down more heavily on the scale in favor of the worker, but this does not change the economic realities of the situation. Relative prosperity continues to increase for everyone, all the time. Amenities once considered to be ridiculous extravagances in times past are now considered pedestrian and in some cases, "deserved". The other issue here is that practically nobody actually has tens of billions of dollars, Jeff Bezos included. He is worth $100B+ because he owns AMZN. If Jeff Bezos did not own such a large portion of AMZN, then arguably he would not have worked so hard to run it. If he had not worked so hard to run it (harder than you or I have ever worked, I'd bet, and I worked a 19H day yesterday), then it seems unlikely AMZN would be worth what it is today. And if it wasn't worth what it is today because Bezos hadn't been there, then we wouldn't even be having this discussion. There would be no "billions that no one man deserves!" Europe has plenty of billionaires too. They have fewer because they have produced fewer stratospherically successful companies.
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      All smokescreen. We choose what to pay executives (egregious amounts) but not the rank-and-file? Nonsense. Most of the money in the world is possessed by 100 people. Not a fiction, not sophistry about who has the money. It would be a terrible surprise to them and their bankers if they discovered they didn't actually have the money. Crediting a manager for running a business, but not the people that did the work (and they work as hard as Mr Bezos you can be sure), is an American fiction. If not Mr Bezos, then somebody else, or several others (those he put out of business simply by being earlier / bigger). Its very arguable that he has no special merit, other than being in the right place at the right time. Like the railroad magnates of the 1800's, who we now call 'robber barons'.
- logicprog 6y ago
  You're totally right on why wages are the way they are, and on Communism too. I'm not so sure about UBI, though. You'd lose a lot of the workforce that don't make a lot of money, right off the bat.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    That may not in itself be a bad thing. The scary thing about UBI is that we'd create an unhealthy dependence on the state. I could see it derailing. For all the talk about the US as the modern Roman empire, isn't that exactly what went wrong with it? Citizens dependent on UBI. And you can see similar things in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. I used to preach UBI but now I'm sceptical. I think minimum wage is a less dangerous tool.
    - logicprog 6y ago
      Agreed. My point was you lose a lot of the workforce that power the economy, so you end up losing a lot of what was funding the UBI in the first place (like, it's really expensive) so then how do you support it? And then, these people are dependent on the state and UBI... and then now we can't fund UBI? How well that's gonna go over! Plus, we probably won't get rid of the other social programs to fund UBI, so even the savings people are saying will happen most likely won't. No one will want to get rid of what we've already got. Minimum wage is less dangerous, agreed, but it feels like just pulling out the bottom rungs of the ladder, since it limits what contracts can be made, not really raising the people on the bottom up. Sure the overall effect on unemployment won't be much because not a lot of people actually are on the minimum wage, but young people and low skilled workers will have a harder time.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
throwaway13887 6y ago
Please stop using "virtue signaling" for "moral posturing". The first term is wrong: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/stop-saying-virtue-signalling https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/stop-saying-virtue-signalling
- romaaeterna 6y ago
  No. Moral posturing would imply hypocrisy. Virtue signaling describes the act of making a communication of ones own self-believed virtues. The article's argument about the word "signal" always involving sacrifice is incorrect on the face, and even if it were not, ignores the face that many acts of "virtue-signalling" do involve sacrifice. Consider not being the language police any longer.

fastball 6y ago

Amazon certainly does not pay the lowest wages. And wage disparities are only bad where they don't make sense. But at AMZN, they do. AMZN has both some of the least skilled workers in the world, and also some of the most skilled workers in the world, which unsurprisingly demand vastly different rates. The requirements to be a warehouse worker at AMZN are basically: 1. Know how to read 2. Be physically fit. ...which is a pretty low bar. You don't even need to be clever with your hands or anything, so sweatshops in Bangladesh require more skill. Meanwhile, the people building infra at AMZN are some of the most intelligent, highest skilled people on earth. And I'm sorry, but until we live in a post-scarcity economy, the former group is always going to get paid very little, and the latter group is going to get paid a lot. Nothing else is tenable. You can ignore supply/demand with Communism, but Communism clearly doesn't work in practice as long as there is scarcity. Personally, I think UBI is a great solution to this problem. But the idea that AMZN is perpetrating an injustice by not paying unskilled, easily replaceable workers at anywhere close to the rate they pay highly-skilled, hard-to-replace workers is just silly.

jboog 6y ago
The low skilled workers are going to get paid very little because we choose to pay them very little. We as a society have decided that rather than increase the wealth of the very poor at the bottom of society, instead we want to increase the wealth of the ultra wealthy. Why does a person need tens of billions of dollars? Because they worked very hard or had a great idea? Why isn't $500 million enough instead of $50 billion when we have kids in this country and around the world who don't know where their next meal is coming from? Much of Western Europe decided on a much different route than the US took and they have much more egalitarian societies. The problem is that in the US we decided that the ultra wealthy are our betters and deserve as much capital as they can accumulate and the parasites at the bottom are inferior and deserve to toil for Bezos' pocket lint.
- fastball 6y ago
  We don't "choose" to pay them little. They get paid very little because on an individual basis they provide very little value. This is just reality, and it will continue to be true until we have a post-scarcity economy. If we are making any choice at all, it is choosing to pay the lowest-skilled workers in our society more than they are owed by value delivered, because we have empathy and don't want people to starve to death if avoidable. If you set the scales, with one end being the raw value delivered to the rest of society by a warehouse worker at AMZN, and the other side of the scale being the value being delivered to that same worker from society (in the form of food, clothes, cars, entertainment, housing, etc)... well, the scales would not be balanced at all. Some European countries are more egalitarian because they have deliberately chosen to put their hand down more heavily on the scale in favor of the worker, but this does not change the economic realities of the situation. Relative prosperity continues to increase for everyone, all the time. Amenities once considered to be ridiculous extravagances in times past are now considered pedestrian and in some cases, "deserved". The other issue here is that practically nobody actually has tens of billions of dollars, Jeff Bezos included. He is worth $100B+ because he owns AMZN. If Jeff Bezos did not own such a large portion of AMZN, then arguably he would not have worked so hard to run it. If he had not worked so hard to run it (harder than you or I have ever worked, I'd bet, and I worked a 19H day yesterday), then it seems unlikely AMZN would be worth what it is today. And if it wasn't worth what it is today because Bezos hadn't been there, then we wouldn't even be having this discussion. There would be no "billions that no one man deserves!" Europe has plenty of billionaires too. They have fewer because they have produced fewer stratospherically successful companies.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    All smokescreen. We choose what to pay executives (egregious amounts) but not the rank-and-file? Nonsense. Most of the money in the world is possessed by 100 people. Not a fiction, not sophistry about who has the money. It would be a terrible surprise to them and their bankers if they discovered they didn't actually have the money. Crediting a manager for running a business, but not the people that did the work (and they work as hard as Mr Bezos you can be sure), is an American fiction. If not Mr Bezos, then somebody else, or several others (those he put out of business simply by being earlier / bigger). Its very arguable that he has no special merit, other than being in the right place at the right time. Like the railroad magnates of the 1800's, who we now call 'robber barons'.
logicprog 6y ago
You're totally right on why wages are the way they are, and on Communism too. I'm not so sure about UBI, though. You'd lose a lot of the workforce that don't make a lot of money, right off the bat.
- jacobush 6y ago
  That may not in itself be a bad thing. The scary thing about UBI is that we'd create an unhealthy dependence on the state. I could see it derailing. For all the talk about the US as the modern Roman empire, isn't that exactly what went wrong with it? Citizens dependent on UBI. And you can see similar things in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. I used to preach UBI but now I'm sceptical. I think minimum wage is a less dangerous tool.
  - logicprog 6y ago
    Agreed. My point was you lose a lot of the workforce that power the economy, so you end up losing a lot of what was funding the UBI in the first place (like, it's really expensive) so then how do you support it? And then, these people are dependent on the state and UBI... and then now we can't fund UBI? How well that's gonna go over! Plus, we probably won't get rid of the other social programs to fund UBI, so even the savings people are saying will happen most likely won't. No one will want to get rid of what we've already got. Minimum wage is less dangerous, agreed, but it feels like just pulling out the bottom rungs of the ladder, since it limits what contracts can be made, not really raising the people on the bottom up. Sure the overall effect on unemployment won't be much because not a lot of people actually are on the minimum wage, but young people and low skilled workers will have a harder time.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

throwaway13887 6y ago

Please stop using "virtue signaling" for "moral posturing". The first term is wrong: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/stop-saying-virtue-signalling https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/stop-saying-virtue-signalling

romaaeterna 6y ago
No. Moral posturing would imply hypocrisy. Virtue signaling describes the act of making a communication of ones own self-believed virtues. The article's argument about the word "signal" always involving sacrifice is incorrect on the face, and even if it were not, ignores the face that many acts of "virtue-signalling" do involve sacrifice. Consider not being the language police any longer.