10 ms·

The incredible wealth disparity in this country is quite disturbing. And one look at the data confirms that reality. Half of workers barely make enough to get b

by geogra4 15y ago

The incredible wealth disparity in this country is quite disturbing. And one look at the data confirms that reality. Half of workers barely make enough to get by. And I assure you that a very large portion of those making under the median probably get poor benefits/heathcare (if they get them at all)

rdtsc 15y ago
A lot employees in retail for example had their hours cut just enough to they become legally 'part-time' employees. This lets business off the hook from providing benefits like health care and other things. So these people go and get a second or even third job, all part time. They might work 60 hours / week but they are all close to minimum wage and at the first visit to the hospital they basically end up in bankruptcy. Once you are in bankruptcy it can become more difficult to get jobs because shady employers often check credit history during the application process. Why? For the fuck of it, as part of the background check. So then there is this black mark on it. There is not even a single thing that is wrong and we just fix that and bam! we are back up. Minimum wage is low, no single payer health system, our graduates are not competitive enough, housing is still expensive in major cities, there is just a lot of people just barely keeping their heads above the water. Not sure what the fix is and not saying there is a direct casual relationship between any of the things above or others, but it is obvious that he situation quite bad.
hugh3 15y ago
The real problem is that there's a huge disparity in talent. The worst of us are worth a whole lot less than the best of us. The question is: what do we do about that?
- williamcotton 15y ago
  None of my talents matter if the office building I work in wasn't maintained. None of my talents matter if the electricity that powers the servers I need wasn't generated and the systems of delivery weren't maintained. None of my talents matter if the roads and public transport I rely upon to get to work weren't maintained. None of my talents matter if the hardware I work with wasn't assembled and quality checked. Etc, etc.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    Sure. But if someone is earning $26K a year, then this means that their labour isn't worth any more than twenty-six thousand dollars to anyone else. Money is, after all, a medium of exchange, and if your labour is only worth $26K this means you're contributing very little of any value to society... barely enough value to account for the baseline amount of wealth (food etc) which every one of us destroys each year just in order to stay alive. People who only make $26K a year need to take a good hard look at themselves and say "How can I make the value of my labour higher, so that I'm contributing more than a minimal amount to society?" If they'd start thinking about the problem in the right way, they might be able to solve it.
    - hackinthebochs 15y ago
      > If someone is earning $26K a year, then this means that their labour isn't worth any more than twenty-six thousand dollars to anyone else. This is trivially true. >if your labour is only worth $26K this means you're contributing very little of any value to society This is way, way wrong. This is a very pervasive error in reasoning. Just because someone is only willing to pay X amount for your labor, doesn't mean that labor is worth X amount to society. When there are a lot of people willing to perform said labor, that pushes down the monetary value of that labor. This is completely independent of its value to society. If I knew some magic incantation that would cure cancer, this action would be invaluable to society. But if I taught 1 million people how to perform it, the cure for cancer's value to society does not decrease. The problem is that people conflate value in the moral sense with monetary worth. Thus when someone's labor can only bring in 26K a year in the marketplace, somehow its seen as a moral failing on their part. It serves to transfer the burden of finding a place in society completely on the individual, instead of where it belongs; on society as a whole.
      - prodigal_erik 15y ago
        By the time a million people have learned the incantation, the value of teaching it to one more person is much lower, because it was already pretty easy to find one. No matter how important the labor is, at some point we have enough people doing it, and the pay is supposed to be a signal that attracts people to other needs which aren't being met.
- grhino 15y ago
  A lot of what people consider "talent" is arguably due to the right upbringing and social connections.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    And would it be less unfair if instead of uprbringing and connections, it were due to genetics?
  - MrWestley 15y ago
    I don't understand what your point is. People are products of how they were raised and who they know as a result.
- lsc 15y ago
  man, that's about the most arrogant way you could put it. I mean, at it's root, I think there is a valid question, "what do we do with unskilled laborers?" The thing is, how much money you make? usually has more to do with how much money you are involved with than anything else. Now, sure, if you are highly skilled, you have a better chance of scoring the jobs involving more money, but that doesn't weigh any heavier than connections, certainly after you pass the bar of basic competence, from what I've seen. People working for top-end consulting companies, from what I've seen, are not on average much more skilled than people working at ISPs or smaller companies. There is a 'shadow IT' industry where people do, essentially, our jobs for $10-$15/hr. Some of these people are quite good, (and often 'real IT' companies that pay real wages will snatch people out of this 'shadow IT' industry.) It's interesting to watch this happen; usually one person in the "shadow IT" industry will get a real job, and then the good people that one person knows? over the next few years they will get real jobs through this one person who got a job. I mean, you need a certain minimum level of skill to be considered, and beyond that, the better you are the more social bullshit people will overlook, but a lot of it really is 'who you know, not what you know.' I know a bit about this, because I worked my way up through the 'shadow IT' industry into 'real IT' and now I run a company that is somewhere in between 'shadow IT' and 'real IT' From what I've seen, the difference between working for peanuts in the 'shadow IT' industry and working for six figures in the 'real IT' industry, once you pass a certain minimum skill level, has more to do with who you know, and how confidently you can present at interviews than anything else. I can't tell you about several times where I was picked over people that I knew were vastly technically better than I was. As for the real question you are asking, "what do we do with unskilled laborers?" well, there are two problems. first, there just isn't enough work to go around at minimum wage right now. Next, we live in a country where basic medical care is unaffordable on minimum wage. I think both problems would be solved if we could find something higher-value for low-skilled people to do. I mean, sure, education maybe could help? but personally, I doubt it. I didn't go to school, and economically speaking, I am doing much better than people I know who did. I think most of the wage/education correlation you see has to do with the correlation between going to college and having well-off parents. I mean, I've gotten a job through parental contacts (I mean, only one, but it was in the depth of the dot-com bust. I /really/ needed that job.) and almost all my other jobs through contacts that I earned myself; and yeah, I didn't go to college, but I had access to a computer, compilers, programming books, and training from a real live programmer and a real live sysadmin from the age of four on. I was privileged in the same way that most people who go to college are privileged.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
Luckily, the recession is causing the wealth disparity to decrease. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/the-1-aint-what-it-used-to-be/247011/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/the-1-ai...
- MrWestley 15y ago
  Yes, but this isn't a good thing. The solution isn't to make the rich poor. It is to make sure everyone else can make more.
  - tomkarlo 15y ago
    Nobody's suggesting making the rich poor. Increasing taxes by 10 or 20% on someone making over 250K a year will cost them another $800 or so a month in taxes. To say that's making the rich "poor" is, frankly, offensive to people who actually are poor. It's great to say we should enact policy that makes everyone richer. But it's basically saying something everyone can be in favor of because it has no concrete meaning. Taxing the rich more so that everyone else can get better education and healthcare will make "everyone richer" in that it should raise per-capita GDP, but I don't think that's what you mean.

by geogra4 15y ago

rdtsc 15y ago

A lot employees in retail for example had their hours cut just enough to they become legally 'part-time' employees. This lets business off the hook from providing benefits like health care and other things. So these people go and get a second or even third job, all part time. They might work 60 hours / week but they are all close to minimum wage and at the first visit to the hospital they basically end up in bankruptcy. Once you are in bankruptcy it can become more difficult to get jobs because shady employers often check credit history during the application process. Why? For the fuck of it, as part of the background check. So then there is this black mark on it. There is not even a single thing that is wrong and we just fix that and bam! we are back up. Minimum wage is low, no single payer health system, our graduates are not competitive enough, housing is still expensive in major cities, there is just a lot of people just barely keeping their heads above the water. Not sure what the fix is and not saying there is a direct casual relationship between any of the things above or others, but it is obvious that he situation quite bad.

hugh3 15y ago

The real problem is that there's a huge disparity in talent. The worst of us are worth a whole lot less than the best of us. The question is: what do we do about that?

williamcotton 15y ago
None of my talents matter if the office building I work in wasn't maintained. None of my talents matter if the electricity that powers the servers I need wasn't generated and the systems of delivery weren't maintained. None of my talents matter if the roads and public transport I rely upon to get to work weren't maintained. None of my talents matter if the hardware I work with wasn't assembled and quality checked. Etc, etc.
- hugh3 15y ago
  Sure. But if someone is earning $26K a year, then this means that their labour isn't worth any more than twenty-six thousand dollars to anyone else. Money is, after all, a medium of exchange, and if your labour is only worth $26K this means you're contributing very little of any value to society... barely enough value to account for the baseline amount of wealth (food etc) which every one of us destroys each year just in order to stay alive. People who only make $26K a year need to take a good hard look at themselves and say "How can I make the value of my labour higher, so that I'm contributing more than a minimal amount to society?" If they'd start thinking about the problem in the right way, they might be able to solve it.
  - hackinthebochs 15y ago
    > If someone is earning $26K a year, then this means that their labour isn't worth any more than twenty-six thousand dollars to anyone else. This is trivially true. >if your labour is only worth $26K this means you're contributing very little of any value to society This is way, way wrong. This is a very pervasive error in reasoning. Just because someone is only willing to pay X amount for your labor, doesn't mean that labor is worth X amount to society. When there are a lot of people willing to perform said labor, that pushes down the monetary value of that labor. This is completely independent of its value to society. If I knew some magic incantation that would cure cancer, this action would be invaluable to society. But if I taught 1 million people how to perform it, the cure for cancer's value to society does not decrease. The problem is that people conflate value in the moral sense with monetary worth. Thus when someone's labor can only bring in 26K a year in the marketplace, somehow its seen as a moral failing on their part. It serves to transfer the burden of finding a place in society completely on the individual, instead of where it belongs; on society as a whole.
    - prodigal_erik 15y ago
      By the time a million people have learned the incantation, the value of teaching it to one more person is much lower, because it was already pretty easy to find one. No matter how important the labor is, at some point we have enough people doing it, and the pay is supposed to be a signal that attracts people to other needs which aren't being met.
grhino 15y ago
A lot of what people consider "talent" is arguably due to the right upbringing and social connections.
- hugh3 15y ago
  And would it be less unfair if instead of uprbringing and connections, it were due to genetics?
- MrWestley 15y ago
  I don't understand what your point is. People are products of how they were raised and who they know as a result.
lsc 15y ago
man, that's about the most arrogant way you could put it. I mean, at it's root, I think there is a valid question, "what do we do with unskilled laborers?" The thing is, how much money you make? usually has more to do with how much money you are involved with than anything else. Now, sure, if you are highly skilled, you have a better chance of scoring the jobs involving more money, but that doesn't weigh any heavier than connections, certainly after you pass the bar of basic competence, from what I've seen. People working for top-end consulting companies, from what I've seen, are not on average much more skilled than people working at ISPs or smaller companies. There is a 'shadow IT' industry where people do, essentially, our jobs for $10-$15/hr. Some of these people are quite good, (and often 'real IT' companies that pay real wages will snatch people out of this 'shadow IT' industry.) It's interesting to watch this happen; usually one person in the "shadow IT" industry will get a real job, and then the good people that one person knows? over the next few years they will get real jobs through this one person who got a job. I mean, you need a certain minimum level of skill to be considered, and beyond that, the better you are the more social bullshit people will overlook, but a lot of it really is 'who you know, not what you know.' I know a bit about this, because I worked my way up through the 'shadow IT' industry into 'real IT' and now I run a company that is somewhere in between 'shadow IT' and 'real IT' From what I've seen, the difference between working for peanuts in the 'shadow IT' industry and working for six figures in the 'real IT' industry, once you pass a certain minimum skill level, has more to do with who you know, and how confidently you can present at interviews than anything else. I can't tell you about several times where I was picked over people that I knew were vastly technically better than I was. As for the real question you are asking, "what do we do with unskilled laborers?" well, there are two problems. first, there just isn't enough work to go around at minimum wage right now. Next, we live in a country where basic medical care is unaffordable on minimum wage. I think both problems would be solved if we could find something higher-value for low-skilled people to do. I mean, sure, education maybe could help? but personally, I doubt it. I didn't go to school, and economically speaking, I am doing much better than people I know who did. I think most of the wage/education correlation you see has to do with the correlation between going to college and having well-off parents. I mean, I've gotten a job through parental contacts (I mean, only one, but it was in the depth of the dot-com bust. I /really/ needed that job.) and almost all my other jobs through contacts that I earned myself; and yeah, I didn't go to college, but I had access to a computer, compilers, programming books, and training from a real live programmer and a real live sysadmin from the age of four on. I was privileged in the same way that most people who go to college are privileged.

yummyfajitas 15y ago

Luckily, the recession is causing the wealth disparity to decrease. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/the-1-aint-what-it-used-to-be/247011/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/the-1-ai...

MrWestley 15y ago
Yes, but this isn't a good thing. The solution isn't to make the rich poor. It is to make sure everyone else can make more.
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  Nobody's suggesting making the rich poor. Increasing taxes by 10 or 20% on someone making over 250K a year will cost them another $800 or so a month in taxes. To say that's making the rich "poor" is, frankly, offensive to people who actually are poor. It's great to say we should enact policy that makes everyone richer. But it's basically saying something everyone can be in favor of because it has no concrete meaning. Taxing the rich more so that everyone else can get better education and healthcare will make "everyone richer" in that it should raise per-capita GDP, but I don't think that's what you mean.