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Employing Others Is Linked to Wealth and Wellbeing

• Hnrobert42 3y ago
  Correlation ≠ causality
• softjobs 3y ago
  Initially I read that as "Exploiting others"...
  • eli_gottlieb 3y ago
    Well yes, in the strict sense, that's what it says: you are better off extracting labor from others via the wage relation. You could swear the headline was written by a doctrinaire Marxist.
    • thyrsus 3y ago
      Is that not presumed by capitalists as well? It appears to me the difference between the two lies in the expectations (Marxist: bad outcome; capitalist: good outcome) and the degree to which moral judgements adhere (ironically, the putative "scientific" Marxists seem more moralist than the capitalists).
      • anon373839 3y ago
        Certainly not with the baggage that words like "exploiting" and "extracting" carry. Capitalism is rooted in the idea of comparative advantage and gains from trade: I give you this, you give me that, and we're both better off than if we hadn't done it. Of course, that's the lofty, textbook ideal. Plenty of capital owners actually do want to extract and exploit. To me, that's not the intent of capitalism, but rather a propensity that needs to be curtailed with strong legal/regulatory incentives.
        • ajmurmann 3y ago
          What does "exploit" mean in this context? Are we just referring to pay market price for labor as "exploit" or is this about abusive bosses?
          • anon373839 3y ago
            Hard to define, but I was thinking along the lines of taking advantage of the other party, perhaps through means that are (or should be) illegal. A few examples: - Baiting a prospective employee with lies about the earning/advancement potential [illegal] - Pressuring an employee to perform work off the clock (this is often done by setting performance standards that are unattainable without overtime work, while simultaneously "forbidding" overtime) [illegal] - Using information you know about an employee (such as their inability to switch jobs because of personal circumstances) to low-ball their pay [not illegal, just sleazy] - Manipulating the circumstances around incentive-based pay so that the employee performs the incentivized work but doesn't end up qualifying for the bonus [illegal, depending] - Interfering with an employee's career growth/marketability so they won't be able to command higher pay [not illegal, just sleazy] Edit: I suppose the theme here is seeking to capture more of the value of someone's labor in ways that undermine their ability to negotiate the best deal for themselves. It undermines the whole idea of people freely negotiating for a mutually beneficial relationship.
        • int_19h 3y ago
          > I give you this, you give me that, and we're both better off than if we hadn't done it. A fair deal is when both are better off by the same amount, which is not a typical situation with wage labor in capitalism. And a deal that isn't fair is an exploitative one. Capitalism doesn't really have an "intent". It's just an economic system with unbounded private ownership of capital, hence the name. However, there are certain things that inherently follow from that notion, to wit: because the ability to extract economic rent is proportional to the amount of capital owned, all else being equal, past a certain amount of rent extracted there is a positive feedback loop. Or, simply put, large businesses - and their ultimate form, monopolies - are the natural outcome of capitalism. And since larger businesses have a higher imbalance of power wrt both their employees and their customers, it results in deals (for both products and labor) that are less and less fair - and thus more and more exploitative. Thus, capitalism is also inherently exploitative. And you can certainly counter that by things like strong trade unions and rigorously enforced anti-trust legislation, but it's kinda like putting a motor on a boat that's rowing upstream - it helps, but why are you going in that direction in the first place?
• lr4444lr 3y ago
  There's gotta be a lot of survivorship bias here: many people whose businesses failed and had to go back to wage labor, or who simply lack the motivation to even try to pursue their own occupational freedom would be expected to feel more disgruntled.
  • hermitcrab 3y ago
    Yes. Having a business with employees fail must be so much more painful than having a business with no employees fail.
    • devonsolomon 3y ago
      Im not sure new entrepreneurs quite appreciate the gravity of having family livelihoods dependent on your decisions. The toll is also much worse in developing nations where the demand in the job market is low. Business failure then could mean people being long-term or permanently out of work. Entrepreneurship is a massive driver of employment in developed markets (especially VC backed). Ironically, entrepreneurs in developing markets may be dissuaded from employing so not to carry this risk.
      • em-bee 3y ago
        do you have any reference to that? because i don't have that impression at all. what risks do you have when employing, other than spending more money? if you stop earning money you can let people go. i did that without problems. in a weak job market, entrepreneurship is often the only option. developing countries have some of the highest numbers of self-employed people. since there is no job security either, the risk of failure is not really relevant, because often the alternative is unemployment. and they are very aware of their families depending on them. that's why they are doing it.
• bawolff 3y ago
  > Self-employed adults tend to have the lowest scores That kind of surprised me.
  • warcher 3y ago
    Wondering how that gets measured— the gig economy could skew this by a lot. In general it’s a tough road no matter the paycheck though.
    • floating-io 3y ago
      There's a lot of things here that make me wonder what is being measured -- and what isn't being measured. Examples: Age is a factor. How many "self employed" people are young up-and-comers who do not yet have the resume to actually make good money as contractors? What percentage of the "self employed" workforce is that? That's just one example. Type of business is another. A one-person house cleaning business is likely to make a lot less money than a one-person niche SaaS company. After thinking about it a bit, this stinks of "we have a conclusion, here's how we manipulated the data to support it."
  • m463 3y ago
    I wonder if it has to do with dependence <-> independence <-> interdepenence like the 7 habits book
  • metalspoon 3y ago
    In my country, it looks like companies encourage poor people to go self-employed because it'd be easier to take advantage of them. Rich people also don't self-employ. They just hijack companies through cronyism and such.
• jamilton 3y ago
  Seems kinda "no duh" to me. An non-employer owner is essentially employing themselves, right, having to do the work of an employee, just with the added work and benefits of being the owner. An employer-owner does not have to do the work of an employee, and is likely able to employee people to deal with the added work of ownership, leaving only the benefits. The median for non-employer owner being 24k while the median for employee is 62k is surprising, I would expect the owner to be above or comparable. I guess there's a lot of unsuccessful one-person businesses. Looking at the full report, the median household income for NEO is 100k, and 110k for employee, and wealth for NEO is 5k higher. So there's something else going on there.
  • cpncrunch 3y ago
    Yeah, I think the study is clouded by all the struggling 1-person businesses. As someone running a fairly successful 1-person business, I have to say that my wellbeing seems to be higher than the small employer owners that I know, due to all the hassles they have dealing with employees.
    • SoftTalker 3y ago
      A teacher or a kid who paints houses in the summer is a 1-person business. They file a Schedule C but they may just make a few thousand dollars a year from their "business". I don't think income statistics on "one-owner businesses" are particularly meaningful without some more breakdown.
  • tstrimple 3y ago
    Non-employer owner includes folks who rent property as their "business". I'm sure there are tons of folks who are semi-retired and just renting out part of their property to cover most of their ongoing expenses. These folks wouldn't have a business in the sense they are trying to maximize profits. Just doing enough to maintain their existing lifestyle. I could see myself doing the same or similar. Starting a business with the goal of growing it to the point of just sustaining my family's lifestyle to bridge the gap to retirement. Once we own this house and our kids become self-sufficient, our monthly expenses can drop quite drastically and we'll be able to sustain ourselves off of something much more modest than my current salary. Giving boat tours on the great lakes while fixing up a small cabin or something like that. Also considered a camp site / cabin rentals. Something that gives me an excuse to get outside more and moving around but rarely involves urgency and deadlines. All things which can earn some money, but unless I really grind at it they really aren't designed to grow too much.
• yau8edq12i 3y ago
  Rich people have employees and live better. News at 11.
• repomies69 3y ago
  Yeah, as an employer I made much more money. It was also very stressful, as managing people can be quite a hassle. I much prefer being self-employed without employees.
  • hermitcrab 3y ago
    Yep. I've been running a 1-man software business for 19 years. I could have taken on employees and made more money, but made a conscious decision not to. I don't regret it.
    • grujicd 3y ago
      You could also fail completely if employed some people. Adding employees doesn’t necessarily equate with adding revenue, but 100% equates with adding cost. As a fellow solo business owner for 19 years (hi!) I’m sure you understand this, but few posters on this topic seem to to think that additional employee is a guaranteered profit. It’s especially dangerous when bad times come and you’re reluctant to lay off people.
      • hermitcrab 3y ago
        Absolutely. My main product is an event seating planner (PerfectTablePlan) and my sales basically went to zero during the pandemic. So glad I didn't have any staff to pay/fire.
        • 082349872349872 3y ago
          One useful take away from the time I was bored enough to let MLM people attempt to pitch me: "the only thing worse than having a business with only one employee is having a business with more than one employee"
• devonsolomon 3y ago
  Tempting to deduce that employing people will make you happier and wealthier: it wont. It will just kill your business faster and reduce the chance you show up in a Gallup poll as a business owner at all. People who have employees and haven’t yet gone out of business are likely to have a good product and business model. Having a good business model is likely to make you wealthier than not having yet found a good business model. “We interviewed a 100 bananas and found that the ripe ones were yellow”
  • rjzzleep 3y ago
    > “We interviewed a 100 bananas and found that the ripe ones were yellow” I had to google to see if this was from somewhere else, but seems like no. Thank you for this wonderful comment. EDIT: one of the most toxic part of VC culture is that growth is measured by headcount growth.
    • gizmo 3y ago
      Most startups can’t hang on to their explosive revenue/user growth without also growing headcount. There are plenty of bad VCs out there but there are also plenty of founders who postpone recruitment because it’s a drag.
  • kaliqt 3y ago
    Agreed. I made a lot of mistakes hiring out my first set of employees, turns out that people are incredibly difficult to handle and manage, even when they are on a payroll.
  • catlikesshrimp 3y ago
    "That poll is biased" according to Red Dacca and the hairy banana. (Those bananas do exist)
  • barfbagginus 3y ago
    It seems like employing others without failing is the condition they find is linked to higher happiness and wealth, rather than just trying to employ. I'm okay with that insight. Employing others is riskier, but gives happiness and wealth advantages to the tiny 2% that succeed. A question I have: of the 2%, what fraction comes from money and privilege, what fraction comes from the middle class, and what fraction comes from the lower class? I think class matters here. I think we'd also find class has to do with employer success rate as well. Another Q: if and when we have a Queer Autonomous Communist Revolution, what happens to that bourgeois 2%? Gulag driven re-education, right? C'mon, Queer Autonomous Gulags! (/S, but not fully)
• abofh 3y ago
  Yes. Employing others to produce more than you pay them is fundamentally how business works. Doing so successfully is indeed linked to wealth. Further research into the wetness of water needed, but I'm sure these crack researchers can handle it.
  • credit_guy 3y ago
    > Employing others to produce more than you pay them is fundamentally how business works. I detect some snark. Whenever you pay someone to get something, and you do it on your free will, not being coerced, you perceive that you get is worth more than what you pay. Otherwise, why would you do it, in a free society. This is universal. It happens when you buy a car, when you dine at a restaurant, when you book an airplane ticket, and yes, when you pay someone for their labor. I do pay a cleaning lady, and she comes once every two weeks and cleans my apartment. Is this exploitation? My guess is that you'll say that yes, I'm exploiting her. And also that water is wet.
    • Wool2662 3y ago
      Free society... People buy a car because they have to work. They have to work because they don't want to starve. Following your logic keeping slaves is not exploitative. You pay them in not being whipped and maybe even food. They are free to decline your offer and die at any time.
      • credit_guy 3y ago
        For what it’s worth, my cleaning lady is in no danger of starvation. She has a vacation home, and I don’t.
• H3r3t1k 3y ago
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• H3r3t1k4l 3y ago
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• H3r3t1k4l 3y ago
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• konschubert 3y ago
  Ice cream consumption linked toml the prevalence of sunscreen
• barfbagginus 3y ago
  I'm struggling to understand the difference between self employed workers/contractors, an non-employer owners - specifically, which am I? Some facts: - I own a CAD design service - I don't employ others (but this might be changing, see details below) - I don't work on contract - I only have one customer, for four years now - My revenue is around 30k/yr Considerations: I'm almost an employee for my customer. However I deliver work at a price I choose, and let the demand curve determine the resulting volume. This let's me survive on 4 to 8 hours of labor a week. This accommodation is necessary due to disability challenges I face, and would be hard to secure as an employee. I'm like a long term contractor for the customer. I charge more than their employees and get work only when there is overflow work. But I'm not on a contract or 1099 - the customer just sends me work and I invoice for it. Any contract between us is verbal, having to do with expectations on quality, lead time, and confidentiality. I could say I'm self employed, but the service has around 10K LOC of Python and C# CAD plugins I wrote to make us much faster and higher quality than ordinary workers here. I'm working on turning those tools into a product - so I own some IP and innovative processes that might make me an owner. I could say I'm a non-employer owner, but then I should be happier and more thriving! Jokes aside, I'm also working to build an efficient training curriculum for my tools, and am currently onboarding an intern - a promising CS grad student with a knack for both CAD design and algorithm design. I hope to sell work to new clients and upgrade the intern into an employee once they drive revenue, and into a worker-owner if they start helping me develop our tools. Ultimately I want the company to be a worker owned commune. So I could be transitioning into an employer? So which am I? Should I consider myself a non-employer owner making an effort to become an employer? Or am I just a self employed bum, which is what I feel like? Feel free to ask questions!
  • em-bee 3y ago
    in an EU country you would most likely be forced to be an employee because it looks like you have a dependent relationship with your customer/employer. your disability makes that even more so. (protections for disabled employees are very strong in the EU) 1099 obviously does not apply, but even if it is just verbal, you are on a contract. but you are also building something to make you more independent, which is good. as for your last question, it really depends on how you like to work. i try to hire people because i like to work with others in a team. but my ability to hire depends on my success at getting contracts. i try to hire people who will benefit from working with me even though there is a higher risk that i can't keep them when i don't get new projects. ironically this works well in both a strong and a weak job market. in a strong job market i do not need to worry about letting go people because they will easily find another job. in a weak market the people i hire often don't have another option anyways. and if they do want to leave because they find something more stable then i am happy for them. what i don't do is get people to quit their existing job in order to work for me. you should make an effort to achieve your goals. whether that means becoming an employer depends on how well that aligns with your goals.
• deleted 3y ago
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