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But the economist doesn’t mention poor quality and insufficiently paid jobs - which should be eliminated by competitive pressure. Which is the actual problem.

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.
    - oblio 5y ago
      Most companies practice union busting.
      - ikrenji 5y ago
        well lets outlaw union busting and actually enforce it -> problem solved
        Qwertious 5y ago
        Ah, but that's why companies employ political lobbying.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Moderate inflation doesn't ruin economic recovery. Italy and Greece both had low or shrinking inflation since 2016 and their economies are down the gutter. The rest of the EU that has reasonable inflation is doing very well with 2%+ growth well above inflation.
- andrewjl 5y ago
  > Failure to do this would push us over into inflation. Can you explain why you think this would happen?
intended 5y ago
Personally I am surprised that the idea of pure capitalism is still preached at all. I don’t understand why. No one is in a capitalist system. Democracies ensure that - politicians will act to ensure the interest of their supporters. As a result there will always be tariffs, subsidies or tax breaks to support different types of commercial work. Is it just a rhetorical tool? Some times it reads as if people are actually arguing based on a pure capitalist model and it’s confusing.
- imtringued 5y ago
  Mostly because capitalism can afford to make mistakes. If the government makes a mistake then everyone will have to live with that mistake. If a company makes a mistake, it has the risk of going bankrupt. Of course pure capitalism is not realistic nor desirable in practice.
- ianleeclark 5y ago
  > No one is in a capitalist system. We are all in a capitalist system. Capitalism doesn't mean free markets, it has a much wider definition than that, and doesn't require free markets.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    His previous sentence mentions "pure capitalism" which makes the one you quoted make more sense. No one lives in a purely capitalist system, but it is hel up as an ideal. Which is bizarre, as it would be a pretty hellish thing to live under. There's a very good reason why our capitalism is hybridused with democracy and state run services. And attempts since the late 80s/90s to move closer to a purely capitalist system seem to mainly have caused greater inequality and inefficiency.
    - ianleeclark 5y ago
      > His previous sentence mentions "pure capitalism" which makes the one you quoted make more sense. I read it as, "why talk about pure capitalism when we're not even in capitalism?" I've seen far more conflation of the two by commenters on HN than not, so maybe that's clouding my reading.
rjzzleep 5y ago
Talking about economists. Personally I can't wrap my head around why the person that provides the food and the basic services I need so I don't starve, or otherwise die of basic needs doesn't deserve at least as much as an economist who's basically the same as a modern day fortune teller or someone who builds the next gen photo/video sharing app.
- dgb23 5y ago
  Because we get payed based on perceived value on the market and not based on utility, importance and certainly not based on positive impact. All of these things are incredibly hard to measure and I don't think there is a reasonable objective way to evaluate them. The more people are willing and able to do a job, the less is the perceived marked value, especially if they are not organized in unions to assert their interests. Now from what I know unions are generally frowned upon in the US for some reason or another (perhaps because of their obsession with capitalist ideology), and reports say that large corporations are actively oppressing the formation of unions. So what is left is simply trying to avoid work and perhaps hoping that some companies will come around and provide reasonable working conditions and pay or to start businesses themselves, while trying to survive the bullying tactics of said companies.
  - socialdemocrat 5y ago
    This has always bothering me: that people think the money you make and the contribution you make to society is the same. Sometimes it is completely detached. There are jobs which pay in a enormous amount of money but which create negative value to society. It is interesting, that in free-market economics, you get many of the same effects as in nature and evolution. There will always be parasites. The problem today, are all the people so convinced of the perfection of free-market economics, that they will insist that even the parasites somehow serves a purpose.
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      That's because the money you make is a defined by your position in a competitive political hierarchy. Your "contribution" is defined entirely by political status. The more power you have over others, the more money you make. That's the real "free market" definition of value. There's a reason climate damage and other critically important side-effects of market dysfunction are dismissed as ignorable "externalities". They have little or no immediate political effect and no independent political agency. Therefore in market terms their value is either zero or negative. The physical reality is that the game board is on fire and unless something changes the entire game will be over soon.
mschuster91 5y ago
> 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. Unfortunately - similar as with housing - most people currently don't have a meaningful choice between having a job or not or paying through their nose for rent or not, which is something that way too many employers and landlords exploit as a natural consequence of a captive market. The obvious solution would be a livable minimum wage and government provided housing or at the very least severe rent control and building out of infrastructure in rural areas, but all of that is often simply decried as communist.
- neilwilson 5y ago
  Minimum wage doesn't help in a system that is designed to produce fewer jobs than people that want to work. If you have 20 dogs and 19 bones, then one dog is always going to have to go without no matter what happens. We don't need a minimum wage. We need a minimum job - the ability to sell your labour hours for a given price.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > We don't need a minimum wage. We need a minimum job - the ability to sell your labour hours for a given price. Alternatively, we could look at what our ancestors dreamed of: utilizing automation to reduce the individual workload for everyone and spread it over more people. A future that is not 5x9-5 is possible. 4 workdays of 6h each with a 30min break at halftime would be a starter. We would however first need to re-define our culture that derives much of our sense of "self worth" from our employment status, and we would need to think about which jobs we actually want as society... IMO we could cut out a large part of the plague that is advertising, most of the insurance industry (very easy: forcibly fuse all kinds of insurance provider into a single non-profit government entity - added benefit, rates could get massively lower due to less overhead) and likely all of far-distance truck transportation by expanding rail coverage and capacity.
    - squiggleblaz 5y ago
wonnage 5y ago
Somewhere around 70% of restaurants fail within 5 years, which seems like a reasonable amount of competitive pressure to eliminate bad restaurant jobs, which obviously hasn't been the case. The market won't solve this.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

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.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Most companies practice union busting.
    - ikrenji 5y ago
      well lets outlaw union busting and actually enforce it -> problem solved
      - Qwertious 5y ago
        Ah, but that's why companies employ political lobbying.
imtringued 5y ago
Moderate inflation doesn't ruin economic recovery. Italy and Greece both had low or shrinking inflation since 2016 and their economies are down the gutter. The rest of the EU that has reasonable inflation is doing very well with 2%+ growth well above inflation.
andrewjl 5y ago
> Failure to do this would push us over into inflation. Can you explain why you think this would happen?

intended 5y ago

Personally I am surprised that the idea of pure capitalism is still preached at all. I don’t understand why. No one is in a capitalist system. Democracies ensure that - politicians will act to ensure the interest of their supporters. As a result there will always be tariffs, subsidies or tax breaks to support different types of commercial work. Is it just a rhetorical tool? Some times it reads as if people are actually arguing based on a pure capitalist model and it’s confusing.

imtringued 5y ago
Mostly because capitalism can afford to make mistakes. If the government makes a mistake then everyone will have to live with that mistake. If a company makes a mistake, it has the risk of going bankrupt. Of course pure capitalism is not realistic nor desirable in practice.
ianleeclark 5y ago
> No one is in a capitalist system. We are all in a capitalist system. Capitalism doesn't mean free markets, it has a much wider definition than that, and doesn't require free markets.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  His previous sentence mentions "pure capitalism" which makes the one you quoted make more sense. No one lives in a purely capitalist system, but it is hel up as an ideal. Which is bizarre, as it would be a pretty hellish thing to live under. There's a very good reason why our capitalism is hybridused with democracy and state run services. And attempts since the late 80s/90s to move closer to a purely capitalist system seem to mainly have caused greater inequality and inefficiency.
  - ianleeclark 5y ago
    > His previous sentence mentions "pure capitalism" which makes the one you quoted make more sense. I read it as, "why talk about pure capitalism when we're not even in capitalism?" I've seen far more conflation of the two by commenters on HN than not, so maybe that's clouding my reading.

rjzzleep 5y ago

Talking about economists. Personally I can't wrap my head around why the person that provides the food and the basic services I need so I don't starve, or otherwise die of basic needs doesn't deserve at least as much as an economist who's basically the same as a modern day fortune teller or someone who builds the next gen photo/video sharing app.

dgb23 5y ago
Because we get payed based on perceived value on the market and not based on utility, importance and certainly not based on positive impact. All of these things are incredibly hard to measure and I don't think there is a reasonable objective way to evaluate them. The more people are willing and able to do a job, the less is the perceived marked value, especially if they are not organized in unions to assert their interests. Now from what I know unions are generally frowned upon in the US for some reason or another (perhaps because of their obsession with capitalist ideology), and reports say that large corporations are actively oppressing the formation of unions. So what is left is simply trying to avoid work and perhaps hoping that some companies will come around and provide reasonable working conditions and pay or to start businesses themselves, while trying to survive the bullying tactics of said companies.
- socialdemocrat 5y ago
  This has always bothering me: that people think the money you make and the contribution you make to society is the same. Sometimes it is completely detached. There are jobs which pay in a enormous amount of money but which create negative value to society. It is interesting, that in free-market economics, you get many of the same effects as in nature and evolution. There will always be parasites. The problem today, are all the people so convinced of the perfection of free-market economics, that they will insist that even the parasites somehow serves a purpose.
  - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
    That's because the money you make is a defined by your position in a competitive political hierarchy. Your "contribution" is defined entirely by political status. The more power you have over others, the more money you make. That's the real "free market" definition of value. There's a reason climate damage and other critically important side-effects of market dysfunction are dismissed as ignorable "externalities". They have little or no immediate political effect and no independent political agency. Therefore in market terms their value is either zero or negative. The physical reality is that the game board is on fire and unless something changes the entire game will be over soon.

mschuster91 5y ago

> 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. Unfortunately - similar as with housing - most people currently don't have a meaningful choice between having a job or not or paying through their nose for rent or not, which is something that way too many employers and landlords exploit as a natural consequence of a captive market. The obvious solution would be a livable minimum wage and government provided housing or at the very least severe rent control and building out of infrastructure in rural areas, but all of that is often simply decried as communist.

neilwilson 5y ago
Minimum wage doesn't help in a system that is designed to produce fewer jobs than people that want to work. If you have 20 dogs and 19 bones, then one dog is always going to have to go without no matter what happens. We don't need a minimum wage. We need a minimum job - the ability to sell your labour hours for a given price.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > We don't need a minimum wage. We need a minimum job - the ability to sell your labour hours for a given price. Alternatively, we could look at what our ancestors dreamed of: utilizing automation to reduce the individual workload for everyone and spread it over more people. A future that is not 5x9-5 is possible. 4 workdays of 6h each with a 30min break at halftime would be a starter. We would however first need to re-define our culture that derives much of our sense of "self worth" from our employment status, and we would need to think about which jobs we actually want as society... IMO we could cut out a large part of the plague that is advertising, most of the insurance industry (very easy: forcibly fuse all kinds of insurance provider into a single non-profit government entity - added benefit, rates could get massively lower due to less overhead) and likely all of far-distance truck transportation by expanding rail coverage and capacity.
  - squiggleblaz 5y ago

wonnage 5y ago

Somewhere around 70% of restaurants fail within 5 years, which seems like a reasonable amount of competitive pressure to eliminate bad restaurant jobs, which obviously hasn't been the case. The market won't solve this.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]