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> Economists cant seem wrap their head around the idea that being a front line worker being exposed directly to sick people during a pandemic seems to be worth

• jmcgough 5y ago
  Sadly many people will comment on the headline before they read the article.
  • gordon_freeman 5y ago
    I have seen a lot of quality discussion on HN comment section even if the comment does not align with the article completely. Usually the comments are related to the topic of the article and not completely to the article written itself. Which is how it should be otherwise we would just have pretty narrowed down comment section.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • Sol- 5y ago
    Well, the article is behind a paywall. Since HN tolerates such articles (and has no culture of expecting OP to provide a way around the paywall apparently), I feel like it's somewhat the fault of HN here. Nothing encourages discussion about headlines only as paywalled articles.
  • ununoctium87 5y ago
    That's what happens in the age of paywalls
  • lowmagnet 5y ago
    Maybe the site has NewsGuard and a lot of people are unable to read it without giving up privacy to do so.
• neilwilson 5y ago
  But the economist doesn’t mention poor quality and insufficiently paid jobs - which should be eliminated by competitive pressure. Which is the actual problem. Firms can’t get workers because they don’t actually have a sustainable job to offer. In a functioning capitalist system encouraging those firms to die would be seen as positive. Firms should have to compete for labour. Not getting labour and the existential risk that poses to firms drives automation and innovation. They are capitalists supposedly. Deploy some capital, or close and get out the way so somebody else will. Venerating individual businesses stops capitalism working. It’s time to give up believing firms have a right to exist and that they are doing anybody a favour by existing. Let competition do its job of getting rid of the bad and encouraging the good.
  • test6554 5y ago
    It sounds a bit like the're saying benefits are the lever we control to balance between one disaster and another. On one side there is inflation which ruins the economic recovery (too generous benefits) and on the other side you have mass suffering (too stingy benefits). As the primary driver of the shortage (the fear of COVID) goes down, we also need to scale back benefits while maintaining that delicate balance between too generous and too stingy. And we can't stop decreasing benefits until people begin to accept those less desirable jobs again. Failure to do this would push us over into inflation.
    • oblio 5y ago
      And here I was thinking that undesirable jobs have to pay more to attract employees. Instead, because the power relationship between companies and employees is imbalanced towards companies, who can afford to not hire a few employees while individual employees can't afford to starve, these employees have to accept suffering for a pittance because hey, there's a slight risk of inflation (while companies have been bailed out to the tune of a few trillion).
      • kwhitefoot 5y ago
        > the power relationship between companies and employees is imbalanced towards companies, This is why low wage workers should unionise.
• AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  "overgenerous benefits" - from the ivory tower
  • test6554 5y ago
    The benefits are designed to be only as generous as they need to be to ensure that all of the least desirable (though necessary) jobs in society are filled. It's not about feeding and clothing everyone who needs it. It's about seeing if there are any jobs out there that people feel are beneath them and if you find any, lower the floor a bit until the jobs don't look so bad.
    • headmelted 5y ago
      You’re saying that on Hacker News though, which means you’re probably well (i.e. expensively) educated with good prospects and an income significantly north of the minimum wage being offered in these jobs. lower the floor a bit until the jobs don't look so bad Surely you can see how this reply reads as “let them eat cake”? (And thats the most polite way to put it I could think of).
      • davidgould 5y ago
        >reply reads as “let them eat cake” I don't think that was the parents intent. I read it as descriptive of how the system currently functions, not as justification for it being that way. I've been thinking about this, how a society can get necessary work done without forcing some people to choose between doing it or starving. Perhaps if everyone was guaranteed to be fed, to be housed, and to have medical care, then the market would find a fair price for collecting garbage or cleaning floors.
  • solveit 5y ago
    Again, the article says it was not so. A hypothesis is explored and found lacking.
    • eyelovewe 5y ago
• Spooky23 5y ago
  I’d argue it’s the philosophy of owners of low-wage businesses. My favorite is the owner of a liquor store in my area. I indirectly know the guy — they are printing money from the pandemic, expanded the business across storefronts to keep up with demand, operate 4 delivery trucks, etc. The guy gets on TV complaining that he has to pay $17 to hire drivers.
  • polskibus 5y ago
    I see that in software business too, some psychological biases are at work here. It's usually because he used to pay $12 at some point, which he remembers better than other times, thinks it was just yesterday. Moreover, people and most of all business owners, don't like to be coerced to accept higher market price like that, if the work efficiency and quality of work did not improve. Same if you go to a shop and suddenly have to pay X% more for a toothbrush and don't really have a choice (alternative is to shop around but it costs time and money). I think USA is still in a very good position compared to other countries as it is still seen as one of the best places to emigrate to. Other countries have it much worse and declining demographics will kill them faster.
    • blfr 5y ago
      people and most of all business owners, don't like to be coerced to accept higher market price like that, if the work efficiency and quality of work did not improve This is a very good observation. And smaller business owners often really don't get the increases in efficiency because they skimp on tools and aren't great managers. So it's a double whammy of increasing costs and not getting the increase of efficiency that larger companies enjoy. Basically, they're on the receiving end of Baumol's cost disease. And because more expensive labor forces increases in efficiency (more tech, better organization), cheap labor is by far the worst drug for the economy, covering up for stagnation and exploitation.
    • tormeh 5y ago
      Simple price anchoring mixed with entitlement, I'd say. Not unique to business owners at all, but extra aggravating when it's an employer.
• mrslave 5y ago
  > Furthermore, I expect approximately zero economists to not "wrap their head around the idea that being a front line worker being exposed directly to sick people during a pandemic seems to be worth more money than when there wasn't a pandemic." Profit > People
• random314 5y ago
  There is a presumption amongst a lot of software engineers that they are the smartest people around and every other field can be corrected and revolutionized if they spent 5 minutes at it. It follows, therefore, that economists are stupid and couldn't possibly think of everything they did. I have seen them being dismissive of mathematicians as well. I think only physicists are spared their scorn. Even within software engineers they consider themselves the smartest. They are also simultaneously dismissive of Google's interview process, if they fail it; while respecting Googles engineering prowess. No wonder this is the most upvoted response.
  • II2II 5y ago
    > It follows, therefore, that economists are stupid and couldn't possibly think of everything they did. There are times when perspectives from the outside should be considered and be given the dignity of a credible response. Even though that appears to be happening more often now that a microscopic virus has thrust a grand social experiment upon us, it has been all too rare in the past. It is also worth noting that software engineers are far from the only ones going unheard when speaking up. Many outside the discipline have done so when the reality of economics didn't reflect their reality.
    • random314 5y ago
      If this is an oblique reference to a covid19 lab leak, you must know that the possibility of a leak was pushed forth by virologists, not software engineers or trumpsters. Just like in this thread, software engineers can only add negative value to fields outside their area of expertise if they show up to instruct instead of showing up to learn.
      • II2II 5y ago
        For the record, no. My position on lab leak speculation is it is highly politicized and counter productive. The reference to a grand social experiment was purely in the context of our response to the pandemic, rather than speculation about the origins of the virus.
• zuminator 5y ago
  GP would be more accurate if it replaced the word "economists" with "employers."
  • foxpurple 5y ago
    Employers know as well. They just want to portray a situation where it looks like people are too lazy to work so that welfare can be decreased.
• ratsforhorses 5y ago
  Please delete my question once it has been answered but " why is your low-quality comment at the top of the comments" could it be that your sane reply attracted the attention to get him to the top? and btw how can I sort by new?
• qualudeheart 5y ago
  I wouldn’t call covid benefits over generous and i’m an extreme libertarian
• keeganpoppen 5y ago
  that is, in fact, the quality of discussion these days, unfortunately...
• II2II 5y ago
  > The article says this...? It analyzes three possible causes: overgenerous benefits (the covid stimulus), fear of COVID, and inefficiencies in job-seeking. It goes on to suggest that overgenerous benefits are probably not the reason and that the latter two causes are probably more important. The article didn't have anything to say about those who work multiple part time jobs, which I suspect is important. Getting paid 50% more to work half as much will leave many low income workers in a precarious position. Worse yet, the threat of job loss (either due to mandated closures or a business failing) introduces the risk of being denied benefits should they be needed again.
• anchpop 5y ago
  It’s kind of sad how almost none of the replies to your comment are even related to anything you said. It’s almost strange to read. All of them except one or two seem to just be people who had their own message they wanted to say and replied to you because your comment is close to the top. The only exception is the commenter who implied you were an out of touch ivory-tower academic because you called the pandemic benefits overgenerous. It’s the only reply whose author seems to have actually read your comment and it doesn’t even make an argument, only calls you names. To answer your question as to why the top comment was someone just bullying economists based on a misinterpretation of the headline, the reason is because the left was never inherently more pro-science than the right. For a long time, the right denied climate change and the left embraced it because the right was representing coal miners who felt like their jobs were at risk and the left was representing environmentalists who appreciated having a rock-solid justification for why we needed to switch to forms of energy production that emit less carbon (which usually means they pollute less). This got converted in the cultural conciseness to the left “following the science” and the right distrusting it and thinking they’re smarter or more knowledgeable than people whose job it is to study the topic at hand. But that want why, it was just because the obvious prescription coming from science was bad for the population the right represented and good for the population the left represented. (If you still feel the reason the left supported climate change is because they believe what scientists tell them, why does the left broadly oppose nuclear?) Now, the cultural battleground is moving from climate change and social issues like gay marriage where the science is either neutral or on the side of the left, to economic issues where it’s not so clear cut. For example, there’s wide agreement among economists that the corporate tax is one of the most distortionary and least efficient taxes, and should ideally be reduced to very low rates if not zero. Yet this is broadly ignored on the left, who want to instead make “corporations pay their fair share”, as of whatever you intuitively feel is a corporation’s fair share is the economically optimal corporate tax rate. Economists are also not united in supporting a federal $15 minimum wage. (Actually if I remember correctly the majority opposite it.) If the left was truly pro-science, they’d ask economists what they thought the minimum wage should be, possibly fund studies to help determine the socially optimal amount, then implement whatever number they say. But that’s not how the number was chosen and now since there’s disagreement among economists about whether it’s a good idea, the left needs to justify why they suddenly know better than the people whose job it is to study this stuff, and that manifests as calling all economists stupid or in the pocket of big business whenever the topic comes up. Obviously this post wasn’t about minimum wage, but what I’m trying to communicate is that economists are now seen by the left (mostly the young online left) as agents of the enemy, and many see it as their prerogative to make sure nobody has a good impression of them. In their circles everyone knows that, while you should follow the science, these economists either don’t really know what they’re talking about or are being actively deceptive and so their opinions can be safely disregarded. How else can you explain why the GP comment felt the need to call economists stupid before even reading the article to figure out what they had to say?