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> my take is that our societies values are out of whack: the more your job benefits your community and the planet the less you will get paid, and vice versa. It

> my take is that our societies values are out of whack: the more your job benefits your community and the planet the less you will get paid, and vice versa. It's even worse for social services. There is no "what society values" at work here, only supply and demand. What you witness is the fact that jobs that have intrinsic meaning and are more fulfilling are paid less well, because employees are willing to make that compromise. You could say the increase in happiness is priced in. Same reason game devs have bad working conditions, people still wait in line to work on them.

Balgair 6y ago
I think you are right about the market effects, but wrong about the causes. The way I see it, it's not that the employees are willing to make the sacrifice per se, it's that there are just more job applicants total. If the supply is increased, the price will drop. It's not that people want to work for a lower wage and then make up for it in the quality of the work, it's that since the population is broader, you find more people willing to work for a lower wage. You get the less frequent edges of the Gaussian curves because you have more people. You see this in zoos, hospitals, elder care, etc. It's not a question of society being backwards, it's just a function of market based jobs. The cause is amoral and independent of the wishes of the people in the system, though the effects very much have moral relevance.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
acituan 6y ago
> There is no "what society values" at work here, only supply and demand That sounds as if supply and demand were laws of nature like gravity or speed of light. They are nothing but forces we create (i.e. purely anthropogenic), and appear god-like only because what society solely values right now is the normativity of the market (as opposed to historical normativities such as the state power, religion, morality and so on). > You could say the increase in happiness is priced in That sounds further like market essentialism. "If market is paying you less it means you must be compensated in externalities". If only markets were that good at pricing in externalities, we wouldn't have climate change problems for example. Markets are great tools for deciding the prices under specific conditions, but it is a grave misapplication to try and orient the entirety of human potential around them.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  > They are nothing but forces we create (i.e. purely anthropogenic), and appear god-like only because what society solely values right now is the normativity of the market (as opposed to historical normativities such as the state power, religion, morality and so on). What happens when you start to distort markets with top-down intervention is, in sum, decreased prosperity for all. Communism is just the most extreme example of this. The market has failure modes that need to be actively corrected, like pricing in externalities or preventing monopoly abuse. But governments usually err on the over-interventionist side. When you look at the world you can’t help but notice this pattern, it is really that obvious.
  - acituan 6y ago
    > But governments usually err on the over-interventionist side. When you look at the world you can’t help but notice this pattern, it is really that obvious. There can be 3 classes of errors with interventions; 1) intervening when it is not warranted (over-intervention), 2) not-intervening when required (under-intervening) and 3) intervening in a way that ends up not working out (intervention-outcome mismatch). I think most of the errors are type 3, which are most liable to mis-identified as "over-intervention", but they are not. Mismatched interventions do not prove that there is a magical essence to real-world markets that render them infallible, dynamical, adaptive, self-correcting systems. A simpler explanation to all this is that it is really hard to come up with the right interventions for the market, but also markets really need interventions when they need it. 60% of the time, they work everytime.
    - MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
      > I think most of the errors are type 3, which are most liable to mis-identified as "over-intervention", but they are not. The thing is, there is no reliable way to prevent these errors, which means in general it is better to not interfere. If we had a way to ensure good decisions, we wouldn’t need some of the institutions that we have in our modern states. One especially egregious example: California Assembly Bill 5. You could argue that this wasn’t just incompetence, but union corruption, costing many freelancers their livelihood. Another one was SF mayor London Breed‘s misguided attempt to regulate food delivery during the pandemic, which had the predictable result of cutting off regulated areas from service altogether. You cannot let people decide these things that have no personal accountability and suffer no downside from this madness. It sure would be nice if it worked, but it doesn’t. > 60% of the time, they work everytime. Citation needed.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Balgair 6y ago

I think you are right about the market effects, but wrong about the causes. The way I see it, it's not that the employees are willing to make the sacrifice per se, it's that there are just more job applicants total. If the supply is increased, the price will drop. It's not that people want to work for a lower wage and then make up for it in the quality of the work, it's that since the population is broader, you find more people willing to work for a lower wage. You get the less frequent edges of the Gaussian curves because you have more people. You see this in zoos, hospitals, elder care, etc. It's not a question of society being backwards, it's just a function of market based jobs. The cause is amoral and independent of the wishes of the people in the system, though the effects very much have moral relevance.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

acituan 6y ago

> There is no "what society values" at work here, only supply and demand That sounds as if supply and demand were laws of nature like gravity or speed of light. They are nothing but forces we create (i.e. purely anthropogenic), and appear god-like only because what society solely values right now is the normativity of the market (as opposed to historical normativities such as the state power, religion, morality and so on). > You could say the increase in happiness is priced in That sounds further like market essentialism. "If market is paying you less it means you must be compensated in externalities". If only markets were that good at pricing in externalities, we wouldn't have climate change problems for example. Markets are great tools for deciding the prices under specific conditions, but it is a grave misapplication to try and orient the entirety of human potential around them.

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
> They are nothing but forces we create (i.e. purely anthropogenic), and appear god-like only because what society solely values right now is the normativity of the market (as opposed to historical normativities such as the state power, religion, morality and so on). What happens when you start to distort markets with top-down intervention is, in sum, decreased prosperity for all. Communism is just the most extreme example of this. The market has failure modes that need to be actively corrected, like pricing in externalities or preventing monopoly abuse. But governments usually err on the over-interventionist side. When you look at the world you can’t help but notice this pattern, it is really that obvious.
- acituan 6y ago
  > But governments usually err on the over-interventionist side. When you look at the world you can’t help but notice this pattern, it is really that obvious. There can be 3 classes of errors with interventions; 1) intervening when it is not warranted (over-intervention), 2) not-intervening when required (under-intervening) and 3) intervening in a way that ends up not working out (intervention-outcome mismatch). I think most of the errors are type 3, which are most liable to mis-identified as "over-intervention", but they are not. Mismatched interventions do not prove that there is a magical essence to real-world markets that render them infallible, dynamical, adaptive, self-correcting systems. A simpler explanation to all this is that it is really hard to come up with the right interventions for the market, but also markets really need interventions when they need it. 60% of the time, they work everytime.
  - MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
    > I think most of the errors are type 3, which are most liable to mis-identified as "over-intervention", but they are not. The thing is, there is no reliable way to prevent these errors, which means in general it is better to not interfere. If we had a way to ensure good decisions, we wouldn’t need some of the institutions that we have in our modern states. One especially egregious example: California Assembly Bill 5. You could argue that this wasn’t just incompetence, but union corruption, costing many freelancers their livelihood. Another one was SF mayor London Breed‘s misguided attempt to regulate food delivery during the pandemic, which had the predictable result of cutting off regulated areas from service altogether. You cannot let people decide these things that have no personal accountability and suffer no downside from this madness. It sure would be nice if it worked, but it doesn’t. > 60% of the time, they work everytime. Citation needed.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]