8 ms·

The same is true of almost any shortage. You can almost always get what you want, for a price. Whether that price makes economic sense for a business to pay is

The same is true of almost any shortage. You can almost always get what you want, for a price. Whether that price makes economic sense for a business to pay is a different question.

phenkdo 4y ago
Absolutely! The "no shortage if you pay enough" slogan is a double-edged sword. - Is there a housing shortage if you pay enough? or - is there a health-care shortage if you pay enough? : : on & on.
- paskozdilar 4y ago
  So every shortage is just money shortage.
  - ivoras 4y ago
    Money is basically just a way to motivate other people to do something for you :D We as a civilisation obviously CAN build houses, utilities, hairdressers, space rockets, grow food, etc. - the question is simply "why" (in the literal, low-level sense: why would I do that for you? even if the economy at large would benefit from it, I just don't feel like working today, and besides, I don't know you well enough). And money (and capitalism in general) is a flawed, crude, but so far the only way the "why" gets answered for the majority of people. Another way of making someone do something for you, obviously, is to be very, very persuasive.
    - nicoburns 4y ago
      Money is a way of measuring how much economic power someone (or some legal entity) has accrued. If you have money, then you can get someone to do something for YOU. Whether the economy at large will benefit from it depends entirely on whether those with money spend it wisely. This tends to work out reasonably well so long as (monetary) wealth is relatively evenly-spread. But not always. And of course, money in contemporary society is not that evenly spread.
      - t0suj4 4y ago
        Money is primarily measuring of how much their time other people were willing to sacrifice for the service or goods offered by the subject.
        sokoloff 4y ago
        Warren Buffett's short interview snippet agreeing with that point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et7IVFOhtIE&t=131s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et7IVFOhtIE&t=131s From the same interview, he shares some thoughts on reasons for a debtor country to strongly favor inflation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et7IVFOhtIE&t=408s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et7IVFOhtIE&t=408s
      - ghaff 4y ago
        >money in contemporary society is not that evenly spread. No. Although on average it's more evenly spread in the West than in some other countries. There are a lot of personal services that are fairly common in some countries (drivers, personal chefs, etc.) that aren't really affordable except as a time-bounded or occasional thing to anyone who isn't very wealthy in the US, say.
    - nradov 4y ago
      This is why successful startup founders are often as persuasive as cult leaders.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Wrong. The "if you pay enough" is related to the available resources. There is real housing shortage when people on minimum income cannot afford a house. There is real health care shortage when people on minimum income cannot afford health care. There NO labor shortage when many big companies belong to billionaires that get wealthier every day (even during Covid). Small companies might survive or die but large companies are the ones driving salary expectations the most. Those big companies obviously CAN pay more. The owners are not going to sleep under a bridge anytime soon.
  - simonh 4y ago
    On the first three points yes absolutely. The argument that you can always pay more to get what you need fails when you literally can't pay any more. Somebody will lose out. That's what shortage means, there literally isn't enough to go around to everyone. Now for some things that might be ok. If there's a shortage of Superyachts and not every oligarch can get one or afford one, I'm not going to loose sleep over that. But if it's housing or health care as you say yes, shortages and inflation absolutely mean some go without. The exact same argument applies to employers hiring workers, the question is are workers like Superyachts where a shortage or inflating prices are not a problem in the grand scheme of things, or are they like houses and health care where a shortage is a serious problem. I think it very much varies depending on the sector of the economy affected. On your fourth point, not every business is run by a billionaire getting ever wealthier. Half of employees work for small businesses, and 60% of new businesses fail in the first 3 years. The world isn't composed only of oligarchs and minimum wage workers. Is a shortage of butlers and chauffeurs a problem? No. Their employers can pay them more or go without. Does a shortage of nurses matter? Absolutely, but most jobs are somewhere in between in importance and value to society. Some goods and services that the poorest in society depend on are labour intensive and wages compose a high proportion of the costs. Shortages of workers in those sectors and inflating wage costs translate into higher prices that can disproportionately hurt those least able to pay more.
    - goodpoint 4y ago
      > Some goods and services that the poorest in society depend on are labour intensive and wages compose a high proportion of the costs As you said, "some", and you are further restricting the fraction with "the poorest in society depend on". But the article is about "US labor shortage", in general. And the market, in general, is very heavily influenced by big players. > Shortages of workers in those sectors and inflating wage costs translate into higher prices that can disproportionately hurt those least able to pay more. So, what's your point?
ben_w 4y ago
That only works in the small scale — company X can’t find the staff, or person Y can’t find a home, but if they had more money they could. In the scale of nations, adding more money without increasing supply is called “inflation”: if there was a shortage before, it’s still there even if everyone has an extra thousand currency units per month, per day, or per hour.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  I think you mean adding more money without increasing demand is called inflation
  - ianai 4y ago
    Without increasing supply*
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      Both are defined as exactly the same value... Edit: And from the downvote to disagree reaction, looks like people not only get their terms from economics without looking their meaning, but seem to be also incredibly confident on it.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        I did not downvote, but the flaw in your reasoning is that while microeconomics defines supply and demand to intersect at equilibrium, it does not require those curves to stay unchanged. The argument of "if you add more money without increasing [demand|supply], the equilibrium price will change" has a different meaning depending on which of those words you choose, even though at both the old and new equilibrium, the curves will intersect.
        marcosdumay 4y ago
        Well, they don't intersect "at equilibrium", they are the same, with the only possible addition of some noise with average 0 due to accounting delays. In microeconomics you can cut your data and ignore parts of them, so they can become different, but the thread up there is taking about markets, not single entities. The argument does not change if you trade supply into demand. In fact, demand and supply are not good quantities to put on it at all, because both are defined for a set price, so if you add more money and keep them unchanged, the equilibrium price doesn't change. The entire inflation event happens because they change. Both sides of the disagreement up there are logical consequences of looking at half of that issue and trying to get a full picture from it.
BurningFrog 4y ago
Right. On a market with free pricing "shortages" manifests as raised prices. Which serve as a signal to increase supply, providing a self healing mechanism. The type of shortages where buyers have to wait in line, are picked by lottery etc, only appear when prices are fixed.
- atq2119 4y ago
  Of course, that doesn't mean that price fixing is always a bad idea. We're just so used to not having to deal with genuine shortages that most people don't even consider what can happen when there's a true shortage of essential goods like food.
- woodruffw 4y ago
  Except for inelastic (including periodic) markets, which are many of our markets. For example, you can't self-heal the supply of fresh peaches if there are no more fresh peaches left in the season.
  - samatman 4y ago
    There is an existing market solution to this, which is futures. Unless you sell onions (loooooong story) futures exist to insulate farmers from some of the fluctuation in markets and provide price signals for future planting (which is on the order of years, iirc 10 for a peach tree to become fully productive). It doesn't work perfectly and in fact can't. But it's there and it functions. Edit to add the other half of this: someone looking to buy a peach wants to eat a piece of fresh fruit or make a dessert, a season of high prices might mean they make more apple crumble and less peach cobbler. It's not the end of the world. There were many years when I was in the black cherry buying market for roughly six weeks a year, because I couldn't afford to eat them over four bucks a pound.
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      Right! I didn't mean to imply that there weren't market solutions, only that they have somewhat absurd consequences on their tail ends (pure supply economics creates an "infinite" price for "none" peaches, futures can make markets less stable if you treat them as the speculative instruments that they fundamentally are.) Futures are probably the right choice. But they're fundamentally derivatives that paper over underlying supply and demand; their chief function is to shift who gets to raise prices and when, not to conjure more peaches.
chrisseaton 4y ago
> You can almost always get what you want, for a price. But there isn’t an infinite supply of qualified people.
- Spivak 4y ago
  But the labor shortage that this is taking about isn’t about qualified people, it’s about a shortage of people willing to work for given (low) price. There is no solution to this shortage other than simply subsidizing the cost of labor that does not increase human suffering. Because the only thing that will make someone more wiling to accept shit wages is desperation.
ineedasername 4y ago
Ability to pay matters though too, so in one sense what you say is true but it may also be irrelevant in terms of solving the problem. If the market-clearing wage for a given job at certain types of businesses is $30/hour but previously paid $25/hour that might be okay. But if it's a type of business heavy on labor costs with tight margins it might not be possible to pay $30. Raising prices is one possible answer but demand may be inelastic and business dries up at increased prices. We can argue that such businesses had unsustainable models, but that wasn't true 2.5 years ago, even if inflation has made it true today. So perfectly reasonable business models that were paying reasonable wages are, suddenly, no longer viable and maybe they collapse. I don't have a good answer for this. If they were business models that don't work if you pay a living wage I've seen some people say "well those were always bad businesses and deserve to be trimmed off the economy." For jobs a tier or two up that in this position because of recent economic trends it's not so simple. "Let them fail" seems like a neat free market solution but it also wreaks havoc on the economy with lots of people hurt and contagion spreading to other businesses as more people lose jobs, and a death spiral begins. But what's the alternative to "let them fail"? UBI? I'm in favor of experimenting in that area but I'm not convinced it's a silver bullet.
- verve_rat 4y ago
  No one owes anyone else a viable business. If it is not viable in current market conditions then the business owners have to adapt or shut up shop. Tough bickies.
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    I agree no one is owed, and I hope the tone of my post did not imply otherwise: it wasn't my intention. But there are negative consequences to those failures of a business that bleed over into other areas, impacting businesses that may otherwise have been healthy, or bleed to the economy as a whole. In that way, it's less about what is or isn't owed to a business and more about whether external actions could be taken that keep the entire system from weakening. Take baby formula: Abbot isn't owed a functional formula plant, or government assistance to bring one back online, but not having it online impacts hundreds of thousand of babies, specifically those with special nutritional needs. Abbot screwed up an doesn't deserve tax payer money or special considerations or stop gap measures, not in the narrow sense of getting it's business in order. Bt the alternative hurts people in a very immediate & real sense. External intervention is less about helping the business and more about saving the health of many thousands of babies. That, however, is a much different circumstance than the labor shortage. I just offer it as an example where what's "owed" is not the only and maybe not even the primary issue. In the labor shortage though I just don't see a clear external action that could save collateral damage. There are no good solutions.
bobsmooth 4y ago
My company paid out 2 billion in stock buybacks last year but we had to threaten to unionize to get a decent cost of living increase. Greed and the devaluing of the modern worker is the obvious answer.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- robin_reala 4y ago
  Did you stop the unionisation process after you got your one-time benefit?
- IMTDb 4y ago
  I assume here that your point is that your company should use that money to pay higher wages instead of using it for stocks buyback. The two question that needs to be answered are - With two more billions in wages, how much more/better would have employees worked ? Would that have had a meaningful impact on the stock price ? - Can these two billions be considered reliable income ? If next year is less good, how easy would it be to reduce wages, if those we increased last year ? The main issue when discussing wages increase is that once they are agreed, they become a de facto mandatory cost, forever. If you have had a good year and have some extra cash, but aren't sure how much of that you can replicate consistently in the next decade, increasing wages is a very bad idea as that one time good news becomes a recurring cost that can put your company in danger down the road. If you want to do that, you can only send a small fraction of said money every year. Let's take an example: HCBS announced a 2 billion stock buyback in Oct 2021. Let's assume they use that amount on wage increase. All of it. They need to sustain that wage increase for 10 years until salaries are back to "normal", so they can "give away" $200 millions per year. They have 226,000 employees. So that amounts to employee cost by $884/year/employee. After tax, costs etc, that will amount to something around $50 / month of "in hand" money. It's cool, but not really the life changing event you might have expected. And I don't think that $50 per month of additional salary will translate in any significant productivity gains that will impact the stock in any meaningful manner.
  - 4y ago
binarymax 4y ago
You can generalize many problems in a way that makes discussion around the specific topic at hand difficult. Sure, price of stuff can be a problem. But talking about wages and people and empathy is specific and worthy of discussion…so dismissing this because of other problems is not helpful nor productive.
js8 4y ago
> The same is true of almost any shortage. This is symptomatic of neoliberal reductionism. We shouldn't treat labor as any other commodity. Apples do not care what their market price is, but workers (humans) do, in fact, high wages are an important component of human well-being. The economy should ultimately serve needs of humans, not the other way around.
- nradov 4y ago
  If everyone gets higher wages then prices all go up due to inflation and then workers are back where they started. What you really want isn't higher wages per se, but rather reduced income inequality (Gini coefficient).
- fennecfoxen 4y ago
  If you want high wages and human well-being, your decisions about how to allocate society's limited resources need to be made in a way that respects the consequences of those decisions. When you don't, the results are ugly. Because of its centrality and importance, we should be more rigorous about how we approach the economics of the labor market, not less. That's not "neoliberal reductionism". It's the universal laws of economics: the readily-foreseeable consequences of our political decisions and regulations that define the allocation of society's limited resources. When instead we are too-precious about how we treat labor (disrespecting fundamental economics in the name of justice and equity, living in ignorance of the consequences), then we will find stagnation instead of growth, higher rates of unemployment, more inequality, and more poverty.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  All commodity prices are ultimately labor cost. No one else than people get paid! The cost of apples depend on the labor cost of apple pickers and farmers, etc. As a consumer it's easy to think of apples as something that "just appears" in the store. If you feel argumentative, that view is a way of dehumanizing the people working in the apple supply chain.
  - Aerroon 4y ago
    >All commodity prices are ultimately labor cost. No one else than people get paid! And this is why allocating resources to improving the efficiency of human labor is so important. If a person can be get twice the amount of work done then the fruit of that labor is going to eventually be cheaper for everyone else.

The same is true of almost any shortage. You can almost always get what you want, for a price. Whether that price makes economic sense for a business to pay is a different question.

phenkdo 4y ago

Absolutely! The "no shortage if you pay enough" slogan is a double-edged sword. - Is there a housing shortage if you pay enough? or - is there a health-care shortage if you pay enough? : : on & on.

paskozdilar 4y ago
So every shortage is just money shortage.
- ivoras 4y ago
  Money is basically just a way to motivate other people to do something for you :D We as a civilisation obviously CAN build houses, utilities, hairdressers, space rockets, grow food, etc. - the question is simply "why" (in the literal, low-level sense: why would I do that for you? even if the economy at large would benefit from it, I just don't feel like working today, and besides, I don't know you well enough). And money (and capitalism in general) is a flawed, crude, but so far the only way the "why" gets answered for the majority of people. Another way of making someone do something for you, obviously, is to be very, very persuasive.
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    Money is a way of measuring how much economic power someone (or some legal entity) has accrued. If you have money, then you can get someone to do something for YOU. Whether the economy at large will benefit from it depends entirely on whether those with money spend it wisely. This tends to work out reasonably well so long as (monetary) wealth is relatively evenly-spread. But not always. And of course, money in contemporary society is not that evenly spread.
    - t0suj4 4y ago
      Money is primarily measuring of how much their time other people were willing to sacrifice for the service or goods offered by the subject.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        Warren Buffett's short interview snippet agreeing with that point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et7IVFOhtIE&t=131s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et7IVFOhtIE&t=131s From the same interview, he shares some thoughts on reasons for a debtor country to strongly favor inflation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et7IVFOhtIE&t=408s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et7IVFOhtIE&t=408s
    - ghaff 4y ago
      >money in contemporary society is not that evenly spread. No. Although on average it's more evenly spread in the West than in some other countries. There are a lot of personal services that are fairly common in some countries (drivers, personal chefs, etc.) that aren't really affordable except as a time-bounded or occasional thing to anyone who isn't very wealthy in the US, say.
  - nradov 4y ago
    This is why successful startup founders are often as persuasive as cult leaders.
goodpoint 4y ago
Wrong. The "if you pay enough" is related to the available resources. There is real housing shortage when people on minimum income cannot afford a house. There is real health care shortage when people on minimum income cannot afford health care. There NO labor shortage when many big companies belong to billionaires that get wealthier every day (even during Covid). Small companies might survive or die but large companies are the ones driving salary expectations the most. Those big companies obviously CAN pay more. The owners are not going to sleep under a bridge anytime soon.
- simonh 4y ago
  On the first three points yes absolutely. The argument that you can always pay more to get what you need fails when you literally can't pay any more. Somebody will lose out. That's what shortage means, there literally isn't enough to go around to everyone. Now for some things that might be ok. If there's a shortage of Superyachts and not every oligarch can get one or afford one, I'm not going to loose sleep over that. But if it's housing or health care as you say yes, shortages and inflation absolutely mean some go without. The exact same argument applies to employers hiring workers, the question is are workers like Superyachts where a shortage or inflating prices are not a problem in the grand scheme of things, or are they like houses and health care where a shortage is a serious problem. I think it very much varies depending on the sector of the economy affected. On your fourth point, not every business is run by a billionaire getting ever wealthier. Half of employees work for small businesses, and 60% of new businesses fail in the first 3 years. The world isn't composed only of oligarchs and minimum wage workers. Is a shortage of butlers and chauffeurs a problem? No. Their employers can pay them more or go without. Does a shortage of nurses matter? Absolutely, but most jobs are somewhere in between in importance and value to society. Some goods and services that the poorest in society depend on are labour intensive and wages compose a high proportion of the costs. Shortages of workers in those sectors and inflating wage costs translate into higher prices that can disproportionately hurt those least able to pay more.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    > Some goods and services that the poorest in society depend on are labour intensive and wages compose a high proportion of the costs As you said, "some", and you are further restricting the fraction with "the poorest in society depend on". But the article is about "US labor shortage", in general. And the market, in general, is very heavily influenced by big players. > Shortages of workers in those sectors and inflating wage costs translate into higher prices that can disproportionately hurt those least able to pay more. So, what's your point?

ben_w 4y ago

That only works in the small scale — company X can’t find the staff, or person Y can’t find a home, but if they had more money they could. In the scale of nations, adding more money without increasing supply is called “inflation”: if there was a shortage before, it’s still there even if everyone has an extra thousand currency units per month, per day, or per hour.

hackernewds 4y ago
I think you mean adding more money without increasing demand is called inflation
- ianai 4y ago
  Without increasing supply*
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Both are defined as exactly the same value... Edit: And from the downvote to disagree reaction, looks like people not only get their terms from economics without looking their meaning, but seem to be also incredibly confident on it.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      I did not downvote, but the flaw in your reasoning is that while microeconomics defines supply and demand to intersect at equilibrium, it does not require those curves to stay unchanged. The argument of "if you add more money without increasing [demand|supply], the equilibrium price will change" has a different meaning depending on which of those words you choose, even though at both the old and new equilibrium, the curves will intersect.
      - marcosdumay 4y ago
        Well, they don't intersect "at equilibrium", they are the same, with the only possible addition of some noise with average 0 due to accounting delays. In microeconomics you can cut your data and ignore parts of them, so they can become different, but the thread up there is taking about markets, not single entities. The argument does not change if you trade supply into demand. In fact, demand and supply are not good quantities to put on it at all, because both are defined for a set price, so if you add more money and keep them unchanged, the equilibrium price doesn't change. The entire inflation event happens because they change. Both sides of the disagreement up there are logical consequences of looking at half of that issue and trying to get a full picture from it.

BurningFrog 4y ago

Right. On a market with free pricing "shortages" manifests as raised prices. Which serve as a signal to increase supply, providing a self healing mechanism. The type of shortages where buyers have to wait in line, are picked by lottery etc, only appear when prices are fixed.

atq2119 4y ago
Of course, that doesn't mean that price fixing is always a bad idea. We're just so used to not having to deal with genuine shortages that most people don't even consider what can happen when there's a true shortage of essential goods like food.
woodruffw 4y ago
Except for inelastic (including periodic) markets, which are many of our markets. For example, you can't self-heal the supply of fresh peaches if there are no more fresh peaches left in the season.
- samatman 4y ago
  There is an existing market solution to this, which is futures. Unless you sell onions (loooooong story) futures exist to insulate farmers from some of the fluctuation in markets and provide price signals for future planting (which is on the order of years, iirc 10 for a peach tree to become fully productive). It doesn't work perfectly and in fact can't. But it's there and it functions. Edit to add the other half of this: someone looking to buy a peach wants to eat a piece of fresh fruit or make a dessert, a season of high prices might mean they make more apple crumble and less peach cobbler. It's not the end of the world. There were many years when I was in the black cherry buying market for roughly six weeks a year, because I couldn't afford to eat them over four bucks a pound.
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    Right! I didn't mean to imply that there weren't market solutions, only that they have somewhat absurd consequences on their tail ends (pure supply economics creates an "infinite" price for "none" peaches, futures can make markets less stable if you treat them as the speculative instruments that they fundamentally are.) Futures are probably the right choice. But they're fundamentally derivatives that paper over underlying supply and demand; their chief function is to shift who gets to raise prices and when, not to conjure more peaches.

chrisseaton 4y ago

> You can almost always get what you want, for a price. But there isn’t an infinite supply of qualified people.

Spivak 4y ago
But the labor shortage that this is taking about isn’t about qualified people, it’s about a shortage of people willing to work for given (low) price. There is no solution to this shortage other than simply subsidizing the cost of labor that does not increase human suffering. Because the only thing that will make someone more wiling to accept shit wages is desperation.

ineedasername 4y ago

Ability to pay matters though too, so in one sense what you say is true but it may also be irrelevant in terms of solving the problem. If the market-clearing wage for a given job at certain types of businesses is $30/hour but previously paid $25/hour that might be okay. But if it's a type of business heavy on labor costs with tight margins it might not be possible to pay $30. Raising prices is one possible answer but demand may be inelastic and business dries up at increased prices. We can argue that such businesses had unsustainable models, but that wasn't true 2.5 years ago, even if inflation has made it true today. So perfectly reasonable business models that were paying reasonable wages are, suddenly, no longer viable and maybe they collapse. I don't have a good answer for this. If they were business models that don't work if you pay a living wage I've seen some people say "well those were always bad businesses and deserve to be trimmed off the economy." For jobs a tier or two up that in this position because of recent economic trends it's not so simple. "Let them fail" seems like a neat free market solution but it also wreaks havoc on the economy with lots of people hurt and contagion spreading to other businesses as more people lose jobs, and a death spiral begins. But what's the alternative to "let them fail"? UBI? I'm in favor of experimenting in that area but I'm not convinced it's a silver bullet.

verve_rat 4y ago
No one owes anyone else a viable business. If it is not viable in current market conditions then the business owners have to adapt or shut up shop. Tough bickies.
- ineedasername 4y ago
  I agree no one is owed, and I hope the tone of my post did not imply otherwise: it wasn't my intention. But there are negative consequences to those failures of a business that bleed over into other areas, impacting businesses that may otherwise have been healthy, or bleed to the economy as a whole. In that way, it's less about what is or isn't owed to a business and more about whether external actions could be taken that keep the entire system from weakening. Take baby formula: Abbot isn't owed a functional formula plant, or government assistance to bring one back online, but not having it online impacts hundreds of thousand of babies, specifically those with special nutritional needs. Abbot screwed up an doesn't deserve tax payer money or special considerations or stop gap measures, not in the narrow sense of getting it's business in order. Bt the alternative hurts people in a very immediate & real sense. External intervention is less about helping the business and more about saving the health of many thousands of babies. That, however, is a much different circumstance than the labor shortage. I just offer it as an example where what's "owed" is not the only and maybe not even the primary issue. In the labor shortage though I just don't see a clear external action that could save collateral damage. There are no good solutions.

bobsmooth 4y ago

My company paid out 2 billion in stock buybacks last year but we had to threaten to unionize to get a decent cost of living increase. Greed and the devaluing of the modern worker is the obvious answer.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
robin_reala 4y ago
Did you stop the unionisation process after you got your one-time benefit?
IMTDb 4y ago
I assume here that your point is that your company should use that money to pay higher wages instead of using it for stocks buyback. The two question that needs to be answered are - With two more billions in wages, how much more/better would have employees worked ? Would that have had a meaningful impact on the stock price ? - Can these two billions be considered reliable income ? If next year is less good, how easy would it be to reduce wages, if those we increased last year ? The main issue when discussing wages increase is that once they are agreed, they become a de facto mandatory cost, forever. If you have had a good year and have some extra cash, but aren't sure how much of that you can replicate consistently in the next decade, increasing wages is a very bad idea as that one time good news becomes a recurring cost that can put your company in danger down the road. If you want to do that, you can only send a small fraction of said money every year. Let's take an example: HCBS announced a 2 billion stock buyback in Oct 2021. Let's assume they use that amount on wage increase. All of it. They need to sustain that wage increase for 10 years until salaries are back to "normal", so they can "give away" $200 millions per year. They have 226,000 employees. So that amounts to employee cost by $884/year/employee. After tax, costs etc, that will amount to something around $50 / month of "in hand" money. It's cool, but not really the life changing event you might have expected. And I don't think that $50 per month of additional salary will translate in any significant productivity gains that will impact the stock in any meaningful manner.
- 4y ago

binarymax 4y ago

You can generalize many problems in a way that makes discussion around the specific topic at hand difficult. Sure, price of stuff can be a problem. But talking about wages and people and empathy is specific and worthy of discussion…so dismissing this because of other problems is not helpful nor productive.

js8 4y ago

> The same is true of almost any shortage. This is symptomatic of neoliberal reductionism. We shouldn't treat labor as any other commodity. Apples do not care what their market price is, but workers (humans) do, in fact, high wages are an important component of human well-being. The economy should ultimately serve needs of humans, not the other way around.

nradov 4y ago
If everyone gets higher wages then prices all go up due to inflation and then workers are back where they started. What you really want isn't higher wages per se, but rather reduced income inequality (Gini coefficient).
fennecfoxen 4y ago
If you want high wages and human well-being, your decisions about how to allocate society's limited resources need to be made in a way that respects the consequences of those decisions. When you don't, the results are ugly. Because of its centrality and importance, we should be more rigorous about how we approach the economics of the labor market, not less. That's not "neoliberal reductionism". It's the universal laws of economics: the readily-foreseeable consequences of our political decisions and regulations that define the allocation of society's limited resources. When instead we are too-precious about how we treat labor (disrespecting fundamental economics in the name of justice and equity, living in ignorance of the consequences), then we will find stagnation instead of growth, higher rates of unemployment, more inequality, and more poverty.
BurningFrog 4y ago
All commodity prices are ultimately labor cost. No one else than people get paid! The cost of apples depend on the labor cost of apple pickers and farmers, etc. As a consumer it's easy to think of apples as something that "just appears" in the store. If you feel argumentative, that view is a way of dehumanizing the people working in the apple supply chain.
- Aerroon 4y ago
  >All commodity prices are ultimately labor cost. No one else than people get paid! And this is why allocating resources to improving the efficiency of human labor is so important. If a person can be get twice the amount of work done then the fruit of that labor is going to eventually be cheaper for everyone else.