38 ms·

Just out of curiosity, if there was shortage of coconut harvesters, why were they poor? Can't they demand more money for the task?

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
If you turn up thin with ribs showing I'd hazard a guess that puts you at a significant disadvantage in any negotiations.
brainless 6y ago
Most Indians, me including and people I know of, do not understand the concepts of pricing that Western countries talk about. Even now, in 2020, this comes up frequently in product pricing when I talk to founders in India who haven't seen the Western notion of pricing first hand.
- recuter 6y ago
  Please elaborate (If you can, I suppose - this is kind of blowing my mind).
  - brainless 6y ago
    I am not surprised it blows your mind. Pricing in the Western systems is all about finding out how high you can price so fewer people pay a lot more which offsets running a larger scale business to serve more customers at lower price points. So these systems have accepted that not everything is for everybody, and do not even make an effort to get things to people. US healthcare is a good example here. Countries with much large populations can not run that way, not everything at least. We are still learning to balance, which is why I want to adopt a region-based pricing for anything I build. Since customers from Western nations get a kick by paying more, I say, let them. Get and money and subsidize for the rest.
    - recuter 6y ago
      The US is not "The West". Price/market segmentation, which is what you're describing (by region) is not exclusive to India or "The East". "Finding out how high you can price" things is more of a strategy for veblen goods, it is certainly not how everything is priced nor exclusive to any geographic region... I don't think I'm following this at all. :)
    - kortilla 6y ago
      The west has prices for lower income groups as well via coupons and other distribution channels hidden away or made inconvenient for higher paying customers. Part of pricing is capturing as much of the demand curve as you reasonably can.
- munawwar 6y ago
  Also, remind me.. the pricing of coconuts are low as well right? so the labor costs needs to be capped for profitability. But overall it's still odd..
  - dolmen 6y ago
    The coconut price might be irrelevant if the coconut tree is in the garden of your home and a coconut fall might become a security issue.
- fsloth 6y ago
  Please elaborate! This sounds very interesting. Do you mean that there is some tradition based price and it's accepted as "unchanging", or something else?
- 411111111111111 6y ago
  There are a lot of people that don't understand it in the west as well. It's also not as easy as some people make it sound. After all, it's the perceived value of both parties making the trade and not the actual value that's important.
  - faeyanpiraat 6y ago
    Is there a difference though? If I perceive a “perceived” value, who perceives the “actual” value? Spreadsheets?
    - 411111111111111 6y ago
      Yes, take the original situation for example. The coconut harvester and the person employing him perceive the work to be of very low value. As such, the actually valuable work with high danger, which should've been paid appropriately is significantly underpaid. /edit: maybe its easier to relate in the context of the tech industry... while it has significantly less impact on the employees live its prevalent there as well, and in both directions. fresh graduates which get less then a third of a full employee while still producing basically the same value to the employer. (this obviously depends on the graduate, but surely everyone knows that people at the start of their career tend to be significantly underpaid). both the graduate and the employer just don't perceive their work to be as valuable. its just as easy to find the pendulum swinging in the other direction as well... people which might even effectively sabotage the work of others while still looking perfect to the person paying the bill, essentially increasing their perceived value to the person paying the bill while effectively reducing the actual throughput/quality.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        > but surely everyone knows that people at the start of their career tend to be significantly underpaid). both the graduate and the employer just don't perceive their work to be as valuable. If everyone knows this, then why isn’t there an employer taking advantage of this arbitrage opportunity to pay the new graduates more and use their “valuable” labor to generate valuable products for sale? The answer is that no one knows the exact numerical value of the “value” of someone’s labor. Hence we rely on the buyers and sellers’ making offers to each other and coming to an agreement. As long as there are many buyers and many sellers, working independently, the market value should become evident. Sometimes the buyer pays a little extra, sometimes the seller pays a little extra. It’s when there is no price transparency and insufficient number of buyers and sellers that the signal gets noisy.
- riffraff 6y ago
  Agriculture in Europe runs on underpaid, often illegal, immigration. There's pressure on the consumer side not to pay, say, a tomato more than a few cents, which means you either pay workers peanuts or you just don't harvest them. So, not that different I suppose.
- peteretep 6y ago
  > Western notion of pricing first hand Describing pricing according to demand as being the “Western notion of pricing” is one of the most bizarre things I’ve read on the internet recently. I say this as a resident of a South East Asian country where Chinese and Indian immigrant merchants have prospered plenty due to a keen sense of price and value.
- naruvimama 6y ago
  The west operates in over production and abundance, and perhaps the way the economics work in the west would be criminal in developing countries. Dumping food in landfills, milk in the fields or in the sea. Good groceries thrown into the garbage. It is optimised to maximise profits. Even though the overall efficiency from farm to table is very good.
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    ^ https://foodprint.org/issues/the-problem-of-food-waste/ https://foodprint.org/issues/the-problem-of-food-waste/
someonenice 6y ago
You increase the price and more competition turns up and you end up climbing less trees. So you end up poor again.
jeswin 6y ago
Most of them wouldn't have had formal education, which will make their negotiation skills weak. So there could be a prevailing rate based on poor pricing and general agreement of those rates (both on the supply and demand side). Additionally, this puts them in a different social bracket which is more used to taking orders than making fair demands. This of course is not unique to this particular trade. However, I don't think the skills were particularly in short supply especially back then (I am from Kerala, which translates to 'land of coconuts'). Ultimately the coconuts did get pulled although the workers weren't paid so well.
zerr 6y ago
I'd think, as with any other sector - there was a shortage of cheap labour.
hesarenu 6y ago
They do demand more. My parents house has 3 trees. The price per tree has increased. Its difficult to get people and if we get someone they usually agree to their price. This in city though not village. Its still a dangerous job. One of the guys who used to come to our house broke his ribs falling from tree.
- pvaldes 6y ago
  Palm thorns are letal. I don't have any problem with macaques being trained to do such dangerous job instead having humans doing it. They are much more fit for the job and have the right tools. I couldn't care less about what Petaheads, trying to collect money with sad histories, think about that. On the other hand, to say that caste system in India is an European thing, is the same as claiming that British introduced Hinduism in India. This is a very naive point of view IMAO.
distant_hat 6y ago
In India, dangerous stuff often pays less due to caste and other considerations. Manual sewage cleaners have a really high death rate in India and are paid peanuts.
- Bang2Bay 6y ago
  what 'caste and other consideration' are you talking about? are you saying some castes were not allowed to climb the trees? how much would you pay for a coconut?
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    Even in the West we consider some jobs off-limits to holders of certain offices. Imagine a SCOTUS judge cleaning sewers for money or shooting porn when the court is not in session. Caste works in a similar way, but is determined by birth.
    - Bang2Bay 6y ago
      I donot Think children of potus would suddenly become sewer cleaners either. is that determination by birth? Problem has been and is poverty. if british government treated india like england none of these problems would exist.
      - inglor_cz 6y ago
        British government treated English (and much worse, Irish) working class like dirt too. Poverty in 19th century Britain was indescribable, even though people like Dickens tried their best to put the images into writing for future generations. Victorian Britain was extremely classist.
        jsinai 6y ago
        However British government developed institutions in England and Ireland which eventually led to overall greater wealth and equality for most of the population. Whereas in India these institutions were systematically short-circuited to create inequality and a locus of power/wealth that favoured British colonialists.
onetimemanytime 6y ago
>>Just out of curiosity, if there was shortage of coconut harvesters, why were they poor? Can't they demand more money for the task? Because at some point, it's not viable to harvest them. We're not talking about thousand acre farms. But if you have a few trees and a coconut ends up costing you xx whatever, then F it, let them fall when it's too late.
manquer 6y ago
During 1970's time frame that OP is talking about, it is largely the effect of thousands of years caste based discrimination that denied education and basic rights for a big chunk of the population. Today it is problem of economics. Coconut trees typically grow in state of Kerala, a lot of the population there work in the Middle East oil economies , the pay is considerably better there. Paying competitively does not make enough money to be worth the effort. Coconuts outside the big cities event today are dirt cheap you can get a dozen for something like $1. Kerala is not easy place to be a immigrant, It is big semi urban region - think like American suburbs. There are hardly any cities where immigrants can get affordable housing, this is because lot of the money the state makes comes from remittances from middle east, they don't feel the need to migrate to the city for better jobs. In recent times there has been some immigration into the state from North Eastern part of India especially in the food and construction sectors - housing is on-site or the restaurant is in the city.
- Bang2Bay 6y ago
  so are you saying india was economically flourishing in the 1970s and today suddenly there is poverty that you would not pay the tree climber? how much did you make in the 1970s selling coconuts? Re 1? equivalent to 1/50th on the US dollar?
  - manquer 6y ago
    Huh? I said today there are better jobs abroad what has that do with poverty ? . It doesn't matter how rich or poor the farmer is. If coconuts sell at some price and he has to compete with middle eastern job market he won't pay if he cant get returns on his efforts.
- kumarvvr 6y ago
  >Coconuts outside the big cities event today are dirt cheap you can get a dozen for something like $1 Nah. Even in most rural places, coconuts are now priced at around 50 cents each.
  - manquer 6y ago
saberdancer 6y ago
I'm guessing that while there is a shortage, coconuts are so low value that no one will pay them more. So they tend to be hard to find but paid poorly.
usrusr 6y ago
Guessing up an explanation from half a planet away: if there are more palm trees than harvesting capacity, but harvesting capacity is sufficient for coconut demand, soft influence on harvesting capacity allocation will determine which coconuts get harvested. In a perfect market this would still balance out at maximising harvester income (on a low level but still), but it's easy to see that the market wouldn't be that perfect.
gamma_kappa 6y ago
As with any traditional profession in India, tree climbing is caste based and caste is based on birth. A persons profession is decided based on which family they are born into. In every village or town, there will be a family who does this job generation after generation. The castes who perform low level jobs such as tree climbing, weaving, farm labor etc. are collectively known as the Shudras. Shudras are the lowest level in the caste pyramid and were historically oppressed and were denied basic rights such as education. Being illiterate and unorganized, they don't have any negotiating power, which is the reason for lower pay. They also had no choice because they were told that they were "born" to do this work. The reason for shortage of harvesters is that, the latest generation does not want to take up the family job because of poor pay and low status. The younger generation wants to get educated and move to big cities to find better jobs, thanks to the progressive reforms and loosening of the caste system in the recent decades, at-least in urban areas. The current generation of tree climbers will probably be the last or second last generation who does this job.
thinkloop 6y ago
Two guesses: - There are a lot of alternatives to coconuts so if they become too expensive at market, people will buy other fruit, putting a ceiling on potential harvesting costs. If no one will do it at the price, better to just not pick them. - There might not be an actual shortage, but since harvesting is a specialty craft that the whole business is beholden to, and too seasonal to hire in-house, the harvesters have lots of temporary power and scheduling optimization requirements between farms that makes it feel like there is a shortage. Kind'of like swimming pool builders in spring.

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago

If you turn up thin with ribs showing I'd hazard a guess that puts you at a significant disadvantage in any negotiations.

brainless 6y ago

Most Indians, me including and people I know of, do not understand the concepts of pricing that Western countries talk about. Even now, in 2020, this comes up frequently in product pricing when I talk to founders in India who haven't seen the Western notion of pricing first hand.

recuter 6y ago
Please elaborate (If you can, I suppose - this is kind of blowing my mind).
- brainless 6y ago
  I am not surprised it blows your mind. Pricing in the Western systems is all about finding out how high you can price so fewer people pay a lot more which offsets running a larger scale business to serve more customers at lower price points. So these systems have accepted that not everything is for everybody, and do not even make an effort to get things to people. US healthcare is a good example here. Countries with much large populations can not run that way, not everything at least. We are still learning to balance, which is why I want to adopt a region-based pricing for anything I build. Since customers from Western nations get a kick by paying more, I say, let them. Get and money and subsidize for the rest.
  - recuter 6y ago
    The US is not "The West". Price/market segmentation, which is what you're describing (by region) is not exclusive to India or "The East". "Finding out how high you can price" things is more of a strategy for veblen goods, it is certainly not how everything is priced nor exclusive to any geographic region... I don't think I'm following this at all. :)
  - kortilla 6y ago
    The west has prices for lower income groups as well via coupons and other distribution channels hidden away or made inconvenient for higher paying customers. Part of pricing is capturing as much of the demand curve as you reasonably can.
munawwar 6y ago
Also, remind me.. the pricing of coconuts are low as well right? so the labor costs needs to be capped for profitability. But overall it's still odd..
- dolmen 6y ago
  The coconut price might be irrelevant if the coconut tree is in the garden of your home and a coconut fall might become a security issue.
fsloth 6y ago
Please elaborate! This sounds very interesting. Do you mean that there is some tradition based price and it's accepted as "unchanging", or something else?
411111111111111 6y ago
There are a lot of people that don't understand it in the west as well. It's also not as easy as some people make it sound. After all, it's the perceived value of both parties making the trade and not the actual value that's important.
- faeyanpiraat 6y ago
  Is there a difference though? If I perceive a “perceived” value, who perceives the “actual” value? Spreadsheets?
  - 411111111111111 6y ago
    Yes, take the original situation for example. The coconut harvester and the person employing him perceive the work to be of very low value. As such, the actually valuable work with high danger, which should've been paid appropriately is significantly underpaid. /edit: maybe its easier to relate in the context of the tech industry... while it has significantly less impact on the employees live its prevalent there as well, and in both directions. fresh graduates which get less then a third of a full employee while still producing basically the same value to the employer. (this obviously depends on the graduate, but surely everyone knows that people at the start of their career tend to be significantly underpaid). both the graduate and the employer just don't perceive their work to be as valuable. its just as easy to find the pendulum swinging in the other direction as well... people which might even effectively sabotage the work of others while still looking perfect to the person paying the bill, essentially increasing their perceived value to the person paying the bill while effectively reducing the actual throughput/quality.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      > but surely everyone knows that people at the start of their career tend to be significantly underpaid). both the graduate and the employer just don't perceive their work to be as valuable. If everyone knows this, then why isn’t there an employer taking advantage of this arbitrage opportunity to pay the new graduates more and use their “valuable” labor to generate valuable products for sale? The answer is that no one knows the exact numerical value of the “value” of someone’s labor. Hence we rely on the buyers and sellers’ making offers to each other and coming to an agreement. As long as there are many buyers and many sellers, working independently, the market value should become evident. Sometimes the buyer pays a little extra, sometimes the seller pays a little extra. It’s when there is no price transparency and insufficient number of buyers and sellers that the signal gets noisy.
riffraff 6y ago
Agriculture in Europe runs on underpaid, often illegal, immigration. There's pressure on the consumer side not to pay, say, a tomato more than a few cents, which means you either pay workers peanuts or you just don't harvest them. So, not that different I suppose.
peteretep 6y ago
> Western notion of pricing first hand Describing pricing according to demand as being the “Western notion of pricing” is one of the most bizarre things I’ve read on the internet recently. I say this as a resident of a South East Asian country where Chinese and Indian immigrant merchants have prospered plenty due to a keen sense of price and value.
naruvimama 6y ago
The west operates in over production and abundance, and perhaps the way the economics work in the west would be criminal in developing countries. Dumping food in landfills, milk in the fields or in the sea. Good groceries thrown into the garbage. It is optimised to maximise profits. Even though the overall efficiency from farm to table is very good.
- searchableguy 6y ago
  ^ https://foodprint.org/issues/the-problem-of-food-waste/ https://foodprint.org/issues/the-problem-of-food-waste/

someonenice 6y ago

You increase the price and more competition turns up and you end up climbing less trees. So you end up poor again.

jeswin 6y ago

Most of them wouldn't have had formal education, which will make their negotiation skills weak. So there could be a prevailing rate based on poor pricing and general agreement of those rates (both on the supply and demand side). Additionally, this puts them in a different social bracket which is more used to taking orders than making fair demands. This of course is not unique to this particular trade. However, I don't think the skills were particularly in short supply especially back then (I am from Kerala, which translates to 'land of coconuts'). Ultimately the coconuts did get pulled although the workers weren't paid so well.

zerr 6y ago

I'd think, as with any other sector - there was a shortage of cheap labour.

hesarenu 6y ago

They do demand more. My parents house has 3 trees. The price per tree has increased. Its difficult to get people and if we get someone they usually agree to their price. This in city though not village. Its still a dangerous job. One of the guys who used to come to our house broke his ribs falling from tree.

pvaldes 6y ago
Palm thorns are letal. I don't have any problem with macaques being trained to do such dangerous job instead having humans doing it. They are much more fit for the job and have the right tools. I couldn't care less about what Petaheads, trying to collect money with sad histories, think about that. On the other hand, to say that caste system in India is an European thing, is the same as claiming that British introduced Hinduism in India. This is a very naive point of view IMAO.

distant_hat 6y ago

In India, dangerous stuff often pays less due to caste and other considerations. Manual sewage cleaners have a really high death rate in India and are paid peanuts.

Bang2Bay 6y ago
what 'caste and other consideration' are you talking about? are you saying some castes were not allowed to climb the trees? how much would you pay for a coconut?
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  Even in the West we consider some jobs off-limits to holders of certain offices. Imagine a SCOTUS judge cleaning sewers for money or shooting porn when the court is not in session. Caste works in a similar way, but is determined by birth.
  - Bang2Bay 6y ago
    I donot Think children of potus would suddenly become sewer cleaners either. is that determination by birth? Problem has been and is poverty. if british government treated india like england none of these problems would exist.
    - inglor_cz 6y ago
      British government treated English (and much worse, Irish) working class like dirt too. Poverty in 19th century Britain was indescribable, even though people like Dickens tried their best to put the images into writing for future generations. Victorian Britain was extremely classist.
      - jsinai 6y ago
        However British government developed institutions in England and Ireland which eventually led to overall greater wealth and equality for most of the population. Whereas in India these institutions were systematically short-circuited to create inequality and a locus of power/wealth that favoured British colonialists.

onetimemanytime 6y ago

>>Just out of curiosity, if there was shortage of coconut harvesters, why were they poor? Can't they demand more money for the task? Because at some point, it's not viable to harvest them. We're not talking about thousand acre farms. But if you have a few trees and a coconut ends up costing you xx whatever, then F it, let them fall when it's too late.

manquer 6y ago

During 1970's time frame that OP is talking about, it is largely the effect of thousands of years caste based discrimination that denied education and basic rights for a big chunk of the population. Today it is problem of economics. Coconut trees typically grow in state of Kerala, a lot of the population there work in the Middle East oil economies , the pay is considerably better there. Paying competitively does not make enough money to be worth the effort. Coconuts outside the big cities event today are dirt cheap you can get a dozen for something like $1. Kerala is not easy place to be a immigrant, It is big semi urban region - think like American suburbs. There are hardly any cities where immigrants can get affordable housing, this is because lot of the money the state makes comes from remittances from middle east, they don't feel the need to migrate to the city for better jobs. In recent times there has been some immigration into the state from North Eastern part of India especially in the food and construction sectors - housing is on-site or the restaurant is in the city.

Bang2Bay 6y ago
so are you saying india was economically flourishing in the 1970s and today suddenly there is poverty that you would not pay the tree climber? how much did you make in the 1970s selling coconuts? Re 1? equivalent to 1/50th on the US dollar?
- manquer 6y ago
  Huh? I said today there are better jobs abroad what has that do with poverty ? . It doesn't matter how rich or poor the farmer is. If coconuts sell at some price and he has to compete with middle eastern job market he won't pay if he cant get returns on his efforts.
kumarvvr 6y ago
>Coconuts outside the big cities event today are dirt cheap you can get a dozen for something like $1 Nah. Even in most rural places, coconuts are now priced at around 50 cents each.
- manquer 6y ago

saberdancer 6y ago

I'm guessing that while there is a shortage, coconuts are so low value that no one will pay them more. So they tend to be hard to find but paid poorly.

usrusr 6y ago

Guessing up an explanation from half a planet away: if there are more palm trees than harvesting capacity, but harvesting capacity is sufficient for coconut demand, soft influence on harvesting capacity allocation will determine which coconuts get harvested. In a perfect market this would still balance out at maximising harvester income (on a low level but still), but it's easy to see that the market wouldn't be that perfect.

gamma_kappa 6y ago

As with any traditional profession in India, tree climbing is caste based and caste is based on birth. A persons profession is decided based on which family they are born into. In every village or town, there will be a family who does this job generation after generation. The castes who perform low level jobs such as tree climbing, weaving, farm labor etc. are collectively known as the Shudras. Shudras are the lowest level in the caste pyramid and were historically oppressed and were denied basic rights such as education. Being illiterate and unorganized, they don't have any negotiating power, which is the reason for lower pay. They also had no choice because they were told that they were "born" to do this work. The reason for shortage of harvesters is that, the latest generation does not want to take up the family job because of poor pay and low status. The younger generation wants to get educated and move to big cities to find better jobs, thanks to the progressive reforms and loosening of the caste system in the recent decades, at-least in urban areas. The current generation of tree climbers will probably be the last or second last generation who does this job.

thinkloop 6y ago

Two guesses: - There are a lot of alternatives to coconuts so if they become too expensive at market, people will buy other fruit, putting a ceiling on potential harvesting costs. If no one will do it at the price, better to just not pick them. - There might not be an actual shortage, but since harvesting is a specialty craft that the whole business is beholden to, and too seasonal to hire in-house, the harvesters have lots of temporary power and scheduling optimization requirements between farms that makes it feel like there is a shortage. Kind'of like swimming pool builders in spring.