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There are so many underlying changes to the established relationship between Labor and Capital in the US that would be a necessary part of keeping jobs here tha

by runako 10mo ago

There are so many underlying changes to the established relationship between Labor and Capital in the US that would be a necessary part of keeping jobs here that it would effectively make us a completely different country. For example -- suppose one could snap one's fingers and "bring back" millions of manufacturing jobs. What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning? Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed. Similarly, if we want widespread prosperity, there is no reason service jobs should not be "good jobs." There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery. We have jobs, we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity. If we re-shore jobs, what would make anyone think we would treat those jobs differently?

andrewmcwatters 10mo ago
What’s your point? Say everything you just said again, but with software engineering and Indians, instead of manufacturing and the Chinese, or textiles and Vietnam and Pakistan. There’s no reason American cars need to exist either, they basically all perform worse dollar-for-dollar, feature-for-feature, than foreign cars. In fact, let’s offshore everything. There’s no reason not to use Filipinos for McDonald’s and In-n-Out drive-thru speakers. Let’s all adopt Chinese tang ping. Lay down and die. Treat every effort of labor as replaceable and void of respect. If China and India wanted to wage effortless war with the US all it would have to do is stop exporting goods and labor to us.
- andrewmcwatters 10mo ago
  [dead]
- runako 10mo ago
  Please read my comment again. This time, consider that our laws and regulations are not laws of physics or axioms of mathematics and are therefore able to be changed. The comment will make more sense in that light.
luma 10mo ago
Service jobs are hard to export, it's just moving money around inside your country. Riveting is a job that produces goods that can be exported for incoming cash, elderly care isn't.
- khuey 10mo ago
  Depends on the service. Call center work was easy to export.
  - tharkun__ 10mo ago
    I don't think that's how your parent meant this. It wasn't about the labour part and whether that is exportable in the off-shoring sense. It's about the product being exportable (in the sense of being able to sell it for money outside of your country) vs. just having people within your own economy doing "left pocket <-> right pocket". And even with that, you can sell a waiter's service to other countries. You just have to first make them come - it's called tourism and comes with a whole lot of other jobs / supply chain(s) as well. Some of which can themselves be off-shored!
- malvim 10mo ago
  That is a fundamental distinction, yes. But the notion that exporting brings wealth to a country is… kinda not really the case anymore. If that wealth is ending up in very few people’s hands, and if said people are wealthy enough that they keep their money offshore (which is the case a lot of the time), what is the big difference in making something you can export?
- gruez 10mo ago
  > Riveting is a job that produces goods that can be exported for incoming cash, elderly care isn't. Where's the distinction between "moving money around inside your country" and "goods that can be exported for incoming cash"? If you go to mcdonalds to buy a burger instead of making it yourself, is that also "moving money around inside your country"? What about paying some carpenter to make a chair rather than making it yourself? Should we just cancel all jobs that can't plausibly produce stuff that can exported?
stuffn 10mo ago
> What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning Your entire political statement aside manufacturing was always a good job. I’m not sure if you realize what kind of skilled labor went into manufacturing: 1. Machining 2. Tool and Die 3. Welding 4. Etc Hell when I was working in construction I was making 20 dollars an hour at 18. That’s good money, and at the time if I would’ve stuck to it I would’ve been able to afford a decent life. My stint as a machinist while backbreaking at times was a good highly rewarding job. Now, to address your political point. Yes, jobs should pay a living wage. Unfortunately even with such “wage suppression” America is still one of the most expensive countries to live in. We subsidize global food, drugs, etc. I can only agree with your point if we simultaneously become an export economy, and reduce or remove all global subsidy. But the party who supports raising wages also supports near limitless spending on the less fortunate countries. You cannot have both.
- wvenable 10mo ago
  "The United States provides over 40% of the world's humanitarian aid, and spends around 1% of its budget on foreign aid, including military aid. Surveys suggest that Americans believe 20% of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, and that 59% of Americans believe the government spends too much on foreign aid" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14169 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14169
  - stuffn 10mo ago
    Wikipedia isn’t a primary source. Your entire point can be disregarded.
    - Timon3 10mo ago
      Do you have a primary source showing that "the party who supports raising wages also supports near limitless spending on the less fortunate countries"?
    - ericjmorey 10mo ago
      Your unwillingness to read the primary sources linked in the Wikipedia article because they show how you're flat out wrong indicates that your entire thought process can be disregarded at no cost. https://www.euronews.com/2025/01/29/us-freeze-on-foreign-aid-funding-is-a-death-sentence-for-people-in-need-ngos-warn https://www.euronews.com/2025/01/29/us-freeze-on-foreign-aid... https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-foreign-aid-does-the-us-provide/country/united-states/ https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-foreign-aid-does-the-u...
afavour 10mo ago
Manufacturing in particular... it's very easy for folks to say we should bring those jobs back to the US but people are often shocked when confronted with the prices of items manufactured in the US. I don't say that to dismiss the thought but it would be a lot more difficult for folks to swallow than they think it would be.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 10mo ago
  That's why I don't like to blame corporations for outsourcing. The consumers outsource every time they select for cost.
  - miltonlost 10mo ago
    That's why I do blame corporations for outsourcing. The companies outsource every time they select for more profit for their owners and not for sharing among the workers.
    - giardini 9mo ago
      And if corporate officers don't select for more profit then their stock goes down, shareholders become unhappy, officers could lose their jobs and the corporation could even fail b/c they have competitors and their competitors will likely select for more profit. Its called "capitalism".
  - afavour 10mo ago
    I'm not aware of that many times where I've had a choice. I could get a nice, expensive dress shirt made in the US but for general clothing it's extremely difficult to buy domestic. Frankly, a lot of the corporations are still to blame because they're the ones actively concentrating wealth at the top. If I had more disposable income I'd buy more made in the US products but my budget simply doesn't allow it.
    - bluGill 10mo ago
      Clothing is one of the hardest things to automate production of. We have had the "women at a sewing machine" since about 1850. Bring that 1850 women to 2026 with the latest computerized sewing machine and she would be equally productive as she was back then in an hour, and even after working that machine for a decade would not be much faster than she was. We can do a few fancy stitches today that she would have had to do by hand with the machine - but mostly we do them less know even though the machines are faster.
brightball 10mo ago
Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the manufacturer with them. The area where I live, Greenville, SC used to be the textile capital of the world and then became essentially destitute when the entire industry offshored. BMW and Michelin locating their US HQ here essentially rebuilt this entire corner of the state with jobs and associated supply chains. Now, Greenville is booming with a more diverse economy but all that manufacturing is the root system of prosperity here.
- christophilus 10mo ago
  Yep. I live here, too, and it's a great place. My primary concern is that we're pretty reliant on just those two companies. If they decide to leave or make major changes, the impact on me (even though I work remotely as a software engineer) would be huge. I hope we manage to diversify.
- 0xbadcafebee 10mo ago
  > Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the manufacturer with them. Not really... Manufacturing today is a global process and the entire supply chain is usually spread around the world. One example for a cotton shirt (https://apps.npr.org/tshirt/ https://apps.npr.org/tshirt/): the cotton is grown in Mississippi. It's then shipped to Indonesia to spin the cotton into yarn. The yarn is shipped to Bangladesh for rough cut and sewing. The shirt is shipped to Colombia for final assembly. And finally it's shipped to the USA for purchase. Move any one of those steps to the USA, and the other steps may still be located elsewhere. Same is true of other items, like cars. Ford may "manufacture" in the US, but the parts and tooling are sourced from elsewhere. It can't manufacture the chips here, because the tooling and process are exclusive to Taiwan. Even if you bought the plant and moved it here, the making of the tools and the processes are still specific to Taiwan. And some steps may be impossible to "bring home", either because some other country has all the raw materials, or all the expertise, or local laws prohibit some part of the process being done here.
  - mc32 10mo ago
    Then why is Germany bemoaning and suffering from their Mittelstand jobs going to Eastern Europe and Asia?
phkahler 10mo ago
>> We have jobs, we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity. I read an article years ago talking about a man that worked as a janitor for a US public school. He was just getting by on whatever that job paid. Someone (school board, business person, IDK) said if he wanted to make more money he should get more education himself, or learn some new skills so he'd be worth more and could get a "better" job. And hey, I'm all for some amount of meritocracy and all that but... If he did improve himself and get a better job the school would presumably find someone else to be the janitor for similar pay. The bottom line is that they expect an able-bodied adult to work a job that most people look down on for barely a living wage. At some point it's not about him needing to upskill it's about expectations about who gets paid how much, and America expects a lot of people to "make a living" at just above poverty wages. I'm not sure how you change that, to some extent employers can't pay more because it's become structural and they don't actually have the money to pay those jobs more. So I have to agree with parent poster: >> There are so many underlying changes to the established relationship between Labor and Capital in the US that would be a necessary part of keeping jobs here that it would effectively make us a completely different country.
- _DeadFred_ 10mo ago
  It used to be 'America, land of the free' and we hero worshiped homeless dudes who happened to chase after cattle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy Now it's 'America, land of the greed' and fox news talking heads say homeless dudes should just be executed. Fox News host Brian Kilmeade saying that homeless people should receive "involuntary lethal injections" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phYOrM3SNV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phYOrM3SNV8
  - giardini 9mo ago
    _DeadFred_ says: "Fox News host Brian Kilmeade saying that homeless people should receive "involuntary lethal injections" Yeah, that kind of thought crossed my mind when a homeless guy, unhappy that I wouldn't let him sponge my car's windshield, grabbed my lhs rear view mirror with both hands and broke it (the mirror no longer responds to its dashboard control). But the moment quickly passed, leaving me only with a new item for my to-fix list. FWIW we still worship cowboys. They differ greatly from today's urban homeless.
psunavy03 10mo ago
"We" have not "decided" anything other than collectively making decisions about what we are willing to pay for a given service. That ultimately is what sets wages. The only reason software development pays so well is because the market will bear it, and the market isn't some cabal of fat cats in top hats, monocles, and tails (or hoodies and Patagonia for that matter). It's the collective decisions of 330 million people.
- almosthere 10mo ago
  The largest reason software development costs a lot is that a cabal of people had been desperately trying to lock out smaller companies from having access to software engineering resources at such a cheap rate and eventually get taken out. I get that from another perspective your answer is also correct, but the reality is the large pay is really so that EA's blockbuster video game sells and a small upstart of 45 software people that want to make their own amazing game does not beat them. Those 45 people will take the paycheck rather than collectively start a game company now. What happens next no one is sure, but I can tell you, that if the amount of cheap software surfaces because 1 man army companies take out TeamViewer, Photoshop, Jira, etc... because of LLMs - then those wages will drop, and drop fast and it has nothing to do with the 330 million people "having a say".
- runako 10mo ago
  We make decisions through purchasing, yes. There are also hundreds/thousands of elections annually through which we collectively set policy directions. Contrary to belief, politicians are responsive to voters over long periods of time. So over time, the policies that are continually ratified do reflect our collective choices. And for at least the last several decades, yes we have collectively decided through our policy directions that there are classes of jobs whose holders are not deserving of material prosperity.
duxup 10mo ago
Even with a good labor representation, is making cheap tshirts a job people want to do / a good job? I’m not convinced it is, or that it lasts.
- foobarian 10mo ago
  I bet many people would find that job a lot more appealing than risking your life doing shopping gigs under time pressure, without even getting health insurance.
  - duxup 10mo ago
    I’m not convinced that Tshirt job would exist long or in quantities that matters.
  - bpt3 10mo ago
    How exactly is doing instacart runs "risking your life" without using a definition for that term that involves any task where you're required to leave your house?
naasking 10mo ago
> What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning? They wouldn't all come back, many of them would be automated to keep costs down. Fortunately, this would also be good for us since automated systems require engineers to design them and technicians to maintain them.
scythe 10mo ago
I think that "good jobs" is a red herring for manufacturing jobs. The important question is whether they have positive externalities. According to one argument (which I'm reconstructing), working one manufacturing job improves dexterity and spatial reasoning, as well as motivating workers to learn basic math and science. These (may) continue to provide benefits to the economy after the worker leaves the position, hence being unpriced. How we manage this at a policy level is not obvious. (OTOH, there is also an argument that manufacturing has an important negative externality — pollution)
bcrosby95 10mo ago
The service economy has a few problems. The first is that much of it is optional. Stuff like fast food. People can do without it much easier than doing without a washing machine. The second is, for many services, such as child care and elderly care, most adults are terrible at assessing quality. This creates a race to the bottom much like you see in manufacturing, making the jobs low wage. Because humans are humans you can't really point to a specific consequence of this either.
loeg 10mo ago
Manufacturing jobs were only "good jobs" in comparison to the alternatives available at the time. The other options in the US have gotten better in the last 50 years. As much as people hate on service industry jobs, they're much less physically dangerous than working in a mid-20th century manufacturing plant.
closeparen 10mo ago
A line cook makes no more burgers per hour, a hairdresser delivers no more or better haircuts, and a daycare worker watches no more children concurrently than they could have 25 years ago. Meanwhile the Magnificent 7 have emerged. Baumol effects might have raised wages a bit, sure. How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene? The whole concept of buying services from people is either that their time is worth less than yours, or they have special skills that you need and lack. “No such thing as unskilled labor,” ok, but you are definitely get sorting on how useful people’s skills are and how difficult they are to substitute or replicate.
- epicureanideal 10mo ago
  > Baumol effects might have raised wages a bit, sure. How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene? Supply and demand? If the population of hairdressers was small, so they could charge more and more, then their wages could keep up as a percentage. And that would be possible if for example so many people moved into high productivity work that only a small percentage remained in low automation work. But if you have a constant influx of new hairdressers or a constant influx of people willing to do low automation work, that doesn’t happen.
  - closeparen 10mo ago
    That’s the Baumol effect. The rising tide does lift all boats to an extent, but not the same extent.
    - epicureanideal 10mo ago
      I agree, I’m just saying the extent is influenced heavily by the increasing availability of workers at the lower end of the automation distribution.
- ericjmorey 10mo ago
  The line cook is relatively as valuable as they were in the past, they're just being out leveraged by people asserting a self-centered entitlement mentality.
dylan604 10mo ago
> Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed. There's something to be said that the labor movement was destroyed by eliminating the need for the labor. Bringing the labor back would see the labor movement return.
- runako 10mo ago
  People still work, so this is a very bizarre comment to make.
  - dylan604 10mo ago
    Not really sure how you come to the conclusion that I was under the notion that nobody is working. Union membership has been in decline for decades. Labor jobs have been leaving the country for decades. Bring back the labor jobs that the unions represent and the union membership will go back up as well. The labor jobs that still remain are what's left of the union membership.
    - runako 10mo ago
      > Bring back the labor jobs that the unions represent Please research which are the largest unions in the US. I'm curious why union representation would work for labor jobs, but not for the millions of jobs* represented by unions now. * These are all "labor jobs," because otherwise you're not talking about a job
      - dylan604 9mo ago
        Most people referring to "labor jobs" are manual labor and not some laborious butt in a chair behind a keyboard banging code all day. While there are unions for the tech industry, the entertainment industry, and other non-labor industries, labor is pretty well understood in its meaning even if you don't understand it.
        runako 9mo ago
NickC25 10mo ago
>we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity. We've also decided that labor needs to be taxed more heavily than capital, which is fucking stupid. Taxing the lower end of society who actually works at a higher rate than wealthy people is just so shortsighted.
- Analemma_ 10mo ago
  I think even more important than the difference in taxation is the difference in freedom of movement. There are heavy restrictions on labor moving between countries, capital has no restrictions at all (except kinda in China) and can move instantly to wherever it is most useful, i.e. wherever has the most human rights violations and lowest wages. We need to eliminate this asymmetry: either get rid of all restrictions on freedom of personal movement and selling ones labor, or lock down the flow of capital with serious capital controls.
- theLiminator 10mo ago
  It'd be a very interesting thought experiment to completely redefine the economic and fiscal plan of the US. It'd be interesting if we greatly reduced personal income taxes in the majority of cases. Removed corporate income tax (the idea being corporate income tax hurts all equity owners, whereas we specifically want to target the very wealthy), and then implemented a progressive wealth tax that kicks in starting at 7.5M or something (maybe something like 1.5% from 7.5M-15M, 2.0% from 15M-50M, and then 3% from 50M+, this could be done more smoothly if desired). We'd need to penalize capital flight with something (something like a 40% exit tax or something). The IRS would have to be greatly empowered to support this, net worth declarations would all be declared by the tax filer, and if audited and found to be incorrect, the IRS will purchase the asset at 70% of its declared value (or some other better mechanism can be thought of to ensure that NW is declared accurately). We'd also simplify the tax code in all other cases, removing all forms of credit/deductions/etc on income. This will free up IRS audit resources to focus on declared net worth fraud. Remove all forms of non-sin tariffs entirely. Get rid of entitlements taxes and spend and replace it with a negative income tax that is calculated to provide a very base level of existence that never disincentives work. Then remove government backed student loans, but make them treated the same as other loans (ie. students can declare bankruptcy). Kids should also get a 5k per annum payment that's held in trust by the government that's invested into the US total market that gets linearly released to them from the age of 18-30. I also propose that we remove all consumption taxes that aren't a sin tax. Ie. keep taxes on alcohol, gas, etc. Implement a very high luxury goods tax. Then completely change the medical system to be more similar to Singapore with mandatory copays of something like $20-50 (to prevent abuse), but also provide universal coverage with the government setting prices with pharma/providers. Dissolve the ability of states to collect taxes and provide federal funding per head. Standardize/centralize all stuff like the DMV. Ie. have a single federal agency to de-duplicate work. I don't think this stuff is viable at all (would require dramatic tweaks), but it'd be a very interesting thought experiment to see how something that tries to encourage business friendliness, the strength of the income earning population, and incentives capital effiency (over tax effiency) and investment does. I really think that the fundamental market forces of capitalism are very powerful, we just need to change the incentives structure so that the benefits aren't captured strictly by the ultra wealthy.
_DeadFred_ 10mo ago
Every healthcare post: 'this isn't the biggest cost in healthcare' 'this isn't going to fix things' Every jobs post: "this doesn't fix X" 'this isn't the biggest issue'. And the republicans keep dog walking straight to their goals while we talk about the best arrangement for deck chairs.
- stanleykm 10mo ago
  Because nobody actually wants to talk about the core of the problem or how to address it. They see different, seemingly unrelated problems depending on what their priorities are. The democrats are also not on the side of actually solving the problem.
detourdog 10mo ago
I think with the advancement of manufacturing techniques the future is in small run manufacturing. Manufacturing won’t return with a few companies employing thousands of people. My thinking is that manufacturing will return with thousands of companies employing around 10 people. The future will be more customized solving detailed problems with unique specification.
flerchin 10mo ago
Riveting ends in a real item that can often be used to produce further economic value. Elder care is not analogous to this, and the economic value is only what the elder can pay for it.
BenoitEssiambre 10mo ago
Note that the "Labor vs Capital" distinction mostly means "workers vs retirees". The reason more money goes to capital these days is not necessarily that each retiree is getting more but that in an aging population, there's more retirees so it takes more resources diverted from workers to support this larger non working population. This problem can be solved with more babies 20 years ago or more immigration of workers now to share the burden (unless AI makes everything weird).
- stanleykm 10mo ago
  I undestand what you are saying but retirees are not what people mean when they talk about Capital. They are talking about executives, fund managers, billionaires, and so on. People who actually control much of our society. Yes many of the funds are managing the retirements of working people but that does not necessarily need to be the case, nor do those retirees have any active ownership of the companies those funds invest in.
  - BenoitEssiambre 9mo ago
    Right but the majority of people holding significant amounts of capital is retirees or people saving for retirement. There is a small minority of people wealthy for other reasons. It doesn't really make sense to strongly associate these people to "capital" since they are a small minority of capital holders.
- runako 10mo ago
  There's been a lot written on Labor vs Capital, so I will just suggest you research the topic because you are not on target here.
  - BenoitEssiambre 9mo ago
    Do you have a link? What I've seen in most discussions is obscuring of the fact that the majority of "capital" is directly or indirectly retirees or people saving for retirement. Those in the top 5% wealthiest often need to survive on that wealth for decades so it's not as if they have per year spending power that is that high. You too will be at your top percentile wealthiest of your life when you are nearing retirement.
largbae 10mo ago
Market forces are what cause different jobs to pay different amounts. Welders don't get paid high wages out of charity or respect, they get it because welders with sufficient skills are rare, so if you don't pay up you won't get your welding done. If service jobs can be differentiated (e.g. by training and licensing) then scarcity can be created.
- potato3732842 10mo ago
  >e.g. by training and licensing For best results buy a political or ten and then enjoy the profit of having government violence chase away much of the "maybe not just as good but good enough for a lot of the demand that's out there" competition that doesn't have your training or license or belong to your professional group or whatever. And the best part is the public pays for the privilege of having supply be constrained because the state forces that constrain it are not paid by those who benefit but by the taxpayer. Something something privatize profits something something socialize cost centers.
adastra22 10mo ago
> Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed. This is a widely believed narrative, but not necessarily true. The competing narrative that better living and working conditions arise from better technology and cheaper energy is just as supported by the data. Perhaps even more so because it also explains the post-1971 decline.
- filleduchaos 10mo ago
  This seems like a non sequitur to me. What does (general) better living and working conditions arising from better technology and cheaper energy have to do with which jobs are considered "good" and "bad"?
- monocasa 10mo ago
  How does the explanation without labor power dynamics explain the post-1971 decline? Electricity is cheaper inflation adjusted than it was then, and technology has certainly progressed since 1971.
  - adastra22 10mo ago
    And working conditions are better now than 50 years ago too.
edude03 10mo ago
> There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery. There kind of is - it's the same reason B2B SaaS tend to make more money than B2C - it's easy (easier) to sell someone something if they can make money from it. If I can pay you Y to rivet some sheet metal together and sell the finished product for Y * 10, that's a much better outcome for me (economically) than paying someone to take care of my elderly parents. In fact, maybe I'm not mean, maybe _I_ don't make enough money to afford to pay someone to take care of my elderly parents.
- runako 10mo ago
  Economic rules are all subject to externalities like the effects of taxes, regulations, etc. I mean there is no rule in the sense that some of the jobs that are poverty wage in the US are not poverty wage in other countries due to the impact of regulation. It's a policy choice to allow Walmart pay full-time employees so little that taxpayers have to subsidize their food. We are free to make different choices.
tracker1 10mo ago
To some extent, the pay rate for a lot of jobs comes down the available candidate pool for those jobs. The easier/simpler a job is for anyone to step into, the more likely it is to have a lower pay associated with it. As an addition, regarding service jobs, a lot of the times, you get what you put in... at this point, most customer service interactions I've generally seen have been poor at best. Craftsmanship, pride in work, and just caring about doing a good job just aren't concerns a lot of the workforce has at this point. That's not to excuse efforts to offset employee pay into a forced tipping culture. Neither does it excuse efforts to use foreign labor as a lower paid under-class either... I think jobs for foreign workers should have pay floors that force them to be more expensive than domestic labor. If there really isn't a supply, or they really are that skilled, then pay up. Part of the problem is the idea of fiscal duty has been tunnel visioned into what the next quarter looks like over anything resembling longer term health of a company and the communities they operate in. Not to mention VC corporations swallowing industry sectors and "extractive value" to the point those sectors collapse altogether. Govt has largely sold out to corporate interests over the people's best interests and they are emphatically NOT the same... govt policy should be to encourage or even require competition in practice. Shared essential infrastructure should require dual/multi-sourcing with a healthy portion required to be domestically supplied as well. I truly believe that it's in everyone's best interests to refocus beyond the next quarter, and I don't mean woke lip service... just actually considering organizational and community concerns. If we/they don't do it, communism will only grow and take over.
ctoth 10mo ago
> There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery. There is, in fact. Baumol's Cost Disease, and it's a real bitch. Manufacturing has compounding productivity gains - one worker today produces vastly more than one worker in 1950. Elderly care doesn't. You can't make a caregiver 10x more productive through better tooling. The productivity ceiling is fixed by the nature of the work. Wages across sectors compete for workers. So service-sector wages only rise when they have to bid workers away from high-productivity sectors. This predicts: service wages are borrowed from productivity gains elsewhere in the economy. This doesn't mean we shouldn't want caregivers paid well. It means wanting isn't a mechanism. The mechanism is productivity growth in tradeable sectors pulling wages up economy-wide.
- MetaWhirledPeas 10mo ago
  > It means wanting isn't a mechanism. Well we still have demand in the equation. If demand for service workers grows, so will their compensation. (And so will the cost for those services.) So the possibility is there. People with more disposable income (the high-productivity ones I guess) demand more services. The question will be whether that demand will grow sufficiently to raise the compensation to where we want it to be. What I also don't know is how we will respond to service jobs being automated. "Premium" service usually shuns automation. Will we have fewer fast food workers and more massage therapists?
  - spdionis 10mo ago
    And then you get to the reason why everyone complains childcare is expensive.
- SgtBastard 10mo ago
  Thank you, I learnt a new term today.
- runako 10mo ago
  I thought about addressing this in the original post, but I want to address part of your response: > one worker today produces vastly more than one worker in 1950. Elderly care doesn't Indeed, this is a core component of Capital vs Labor issue I mentioned. Productivity increases, workers generate more value, but Capital's share of the results increases nonetheless. The change in this relationship is why I would expect a reinvigorated manufacturing sector to be dominated by Bad Jobs instead of the Good Jobs everybody hopes for. (There's also a measurement issue in comparing those two. The benefits of e.g. caregiving are measured by the ability of other workers to be productive. For ex if a high-wage worker has to stay home to care for someone, then they are not doing high-wage work, which reduces the overall GDP potential of the country.)
pixelready 10mo ago
It’s almost entirely a leverage problem. Insofar as we rely on the labor marketplace as the primary “prosperity” distribution mechanism for the majority of people the power balance between labor and capital will determine the average person’s level of prosperity. The following increase the leverage of labor: collective action, high competition between firms, near-zero (actual) unemployment rate, strong labor laws. The following increase leverage of capital: monopoly, monopsony, cartel action, high unemployment rate, weak labor laws. Obviously the cost of converting wealth into tangible “prosperity” is an additional factor, so inflation of the cost of goods and services will factor in. So if we wish to promote broad prosperity over ultra concentrated wealth we need to address the above factors: enforce anti-trust, break up firms as needed, promote labor protections and organizing, make taxes more progressive than regressive, make stock buybacks illegal again. The hyper mobility, political ties (with low national loyalty) of the capital class make this difficult but not impossible. We will probably have to de-emphasize some sticky cultural memes around individual merit and everyone “deserving their fate” to accomplish the above. A surge of empathetic humanism would likely do wonders for the mental health crisis as a bonus.
- giardini 9mo ago
  pixelready says "A surge of empathetic humanism would likely do wonders for the mental health crisis as a bonus." Empathetic humanism isn't likely to do much for a schizophrenic or alcoholic.
  - pixelready 9mo ago
    If we were more invested in each other’s well being, especially if we had more capacity to put that care into action, wouldn’t that improve the support network surrounding those suffering from chronic mental health conditions?
    - giardini 9mo ago
      Have you ever dealt with an alcoholic when he's drunk or a schizophrenic when he's acting out? You use the word "suffering" as if they had no part in their own condition. I'm reminded of Duke, the skinhead in "Repo Man" who, as he dies, says "I blame society!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3b5Q7b8YXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3b5Q7b8YXo
kjshsh123 10mo ago
I think you should read up on comparative advantage and the roy model of labor. Forced onshoring is likely to hurt US productivity and large wage gaps arise because of self-selection driven by correlations in productivity across jobs.
rayiner 10mo ago
Jobs aren’t good or not because they government declares it so by fiat, there’s substantive differences between different kinds of jobs. “Service jobs” are bad because they typically require little skill, just a human body physically present in the U.S. In contrast, many people will never be good riveters. They lack the strength, coordination, and stamina to do the job. Similarly, many people cannot be plumbers or electricians. Those are jobs that require intelligence and skill.
- runako 10mo ago
  This is exactly what I mean. Reading this, one would make certain incorrect assumptions about pay in service jobs based on imperfect knowledge of skills required. One might assume service jobs in general do not require any skills at all beyond the capability to slightly warm a room. The famous counterpoint is obviously "teacher" with its starting salary in the $20 range, but that's too easy so I will start with phlebotomist (starting under $15/hr). And I'll toss in chef (~$22/hr-$25/hr in my city) as an alternate to suggest that even in service industries skill matters (because there is a range here).

by runako 10mo ago

andrewmcwatters 10mo ago

What’s your point? Say everything you just said again, but with software engineering and Indians, instead of manufacturing and the Chinese, or textiles and Vietnam and Pakistan. There’s no reason American cars need to exist either, they basically all perform worse dollar-for-dollar, feature-for-feature, than foreign cars. In fact, let’s offshore everything. There’s no reason not to use Filipinos for McDonald’s and In-n-Out drive-thru speakers. Let’s all adopt Chinese tang ping. Lay down and die. Treat every effort of labor as replaceable and void of respect. If China and India wanted to wage effortless war with the US all it would have to do is stop exporting goods and labor to us.

andrewmcwatters 10mo ago
[dead]
runako 10mo ago
Please read my comment again. This time, consider that our laws and regulations are not laws of physics or axioms of mathematics and are therefore able to be changed. The comment will make more sense in that light.

luma 10mo ago

Service jobs are hard to export, it's just moving money around inside your country. Riveting is a job that produces goods that can be exported for incoming cash, elderly care isn't.

khuey 10mo ago
Depends on the service. Call center work was easy to export.
- tharkun__ 10mo ago
  I don't think that's how your parent meant this. It wasn't about the labour part and whether that is exportable in the off-shoring sense. It's about the product being exportable (in the sense of being able to sell it for money outside of your country) vs. just having people within your own economy doing "left pocket <-> right pocket". And even with that, you can sell a waiter's service to other countries. You just have to first make them come - it's called tourism and comes with a whole lot of other jobs / supply chain(s) as well. Some of which can themselves be off-shored!
malvim 10mo ago
That is a fundamental distinction, yes. But the notion that exporting brings wealth to a country is… kinda not really the case anymore. If that wealth is ending up in very few people’s hands, and if said people are wealthy enough that they keep their money offshore (which is the case a lot of the time), what is the big difference in making something you can export?
gruez 10mo ago
> Riveting is a job that produces goods that can be exported for incoming cash, elderly care isn't. Where's the distinction between "moving money around inside your country" and "goods that can be exported for incoming cash"? If you go to mcdonalds to buy a burger instead of making it yourself, is that also "moving money around inside your country"? What about paying some carpenter to make a chair rather than making it yourself? Should we just cancel all jobs that can't plausibly produce stuff that can exported?

stuffn 10mo ago

> What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning Your entire political statement aside manufacturing was always a good job. I’m not sure if you realize what kind of skilled labor went into manufacturing: 1. Machining 2. Tool and Die 3. Welding 4. Etc Hell when I was working in construction I was making 20 dollars an hour at 18. That’s good money, and at the time if I would’ve stuck to it I would’ve been able to afford a decent life. My stint as a machinist while backbreaking at times was a good highly rewarding job. Now, to address your political point. Yes, jobs should pay a living wage. Unfortunately even with such “wage suppression” America is still one of the most expensive countries to live in. We subsidize global food, drugs, etc. I can only agree with your point if we simultaneously become an export economy, and reduce or remove all global subsidy. But the party who supports raising wages also supports near limitless spending on the less fortunate countries. You cannot have both.

wvenable 10mo ago
"The United States provides over 40% of the world's humanitarian aid, and spends around 1% of its budget on foreign aid, including military aid. Surveys suggest that Americans believe 20% of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, and that 59% of Americans believe the government spends too much on foreign aid" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14169 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14169
- stuffn 10mo ago
  Wikipedia isn’t a primary source. Your entire point can be disregarded.
  - Timon3 10mo ago
    Do you have a primary source showing that "the party who supports raising wages also supports near limitless spending on the less fortunate countries"?
  - ericjmorey 10mo ago
    Your unwillingness to read the primary sources linked in the Wikipedia article because they show how you're flat out wrong indicates that your entire thought process can be disregarded at no cost. https://www.euronews.com/2025/01/29/us-freeze-on-foreign-aid-funding-is-a-death-sentence-for-people-in-need-ngos-warn https://www.euronews.com/2025/01/29/us-freeze-on-foreign-aid... https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-foreign-aid-does-the-us-provide/country/united-states/ https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-foreign-aid-does-the-u...

afavour 10mo ago

Manufacturing in particular... it's very easy for folks to say we should bring those jobs back to the US but people are often shocked when confronted with the prices of items manufactured in the US. I don't say that to dismiss the thought but it would be a lot more difficult for folks to swallow than they think it would be.

2OEH8eoCRo0 10mo ago
That's why I don't like to blame corporations for outsourcing. The consumers outsource every time they select for cost.
- miltonlost 10mo ago
  That's why I do blame corporations for outsourcing. The companies outsource every time they select for more profit for their owners and not for sharing among the workers.
  - giardini 9mo ago
    And if corporate officers don't select for more profit then their stock goes down, shareholders become unhappy, officers could lose their jobs and the corporation could even fail b/c they have competitors and their competitors will likely select for more profit. Its called "capitalism".
- afavour 10mo ago
  I'm not aware of that many times where I've had a choice. I could get a nice, expensive dress shirt made in the US but for general clothing it's extremely difficult to buy domestic. Frankly, a lot of the corporations are still to blame because they're the ones actively concentrating wealth at the top. If I had more disposable income I'd buy more made in the US products but my budget simply doesn't allow it.
  - bluGill 10mo ago
    Clothing is one of the hardest things to automate production of. We have had the "women at a sewing machine" since about 1850. Bring that 1850 women to 2026 with the latest computerized sewing machine and she would be equally productive as she was back then in an hour, and even after working that machine for a decade would not be much faster than she was. We can do a few fancy stitches today that she would have had to do by hand with the machine - but mostly we do them less know even though the machines are faster.

brightball 10mo ago

Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the manufacturer with them. The area where I live, Greenville, SC used to be the textile capital of the world and then became essentially destitute when the entire industry offshored. BMW and Michelin locating their US HQ here essentially rebuilt this entire corner of the state with jobs and associated supply chains. Now, Greenville is booming with a more diverse economy but all that manufacturing is the root system of prosperity here.

christophilus 10mo ago
Yep. I live here, too, and it's a great place. My primary concern is that we're pretty reliant on just those two companies. If they decide to leave or make major changes, the impact on me (even though I work remotely as a software engineer) would be huge. I hope we manage to diversify.
0xbadcafebee 10mo ago
> Manufacturing jobs bring the entire supply chain of the manufacturer with them. Not really... Manufacturing today is a global process and the entire supply chain is usually spread around the world. One example for a cotton shirt (https://apps.npr.org/tshirt/ https://apps.npr.org/tshirt/): the cotton is grown in Mississippi. It's then shipped to Indonesia to spin the cotton into yarn. The yarn is shipped to Bangladesh for rough cut and sewing. The shirt is shipped to Colombia for final assembly. And finally it's shipped to the USA for purchase. Move any one of those steps to the USA, and the other steps may still be located elsewhere. Same is true of other items, like cars. Ford may "manufacture" in the US, but the parts and tooling are sourced from elsewhere. It can't manufacture the chips here, because the tooling and process are exclusive to Taiwan. Even if you bought the plant and moved it here, the making of the tools and the processes are still specific to Taiwan. And some steps may be impossible to "bring home", either because some other country has all the raw materials, or all the expertise, or local laws prohibit some part of the process being done here.
- mc32 10mo ago
  Then why is Germany bemoaning and suffering from their Mittelstand jobs going to Eastern Europe and Asia?

phkahler 10mo ago

>> We have jobs, we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity. I read an article years ago talking about a man that worked as a janitor for a US public school. He was just getting by on whatever that job paid. Someone (school board, business person, IDK) said if he wanted to make more money he should get more education himself, or learn some new skills so he'd be worth more and could get a "better" job. And hey, I'm all for some amount of meritocracy and all that but... If he did improve himself and get a better job the school would presumably find someone else to be the janitor for similar pay. The bottom line is that they expect an able-bodied adult to work a job that most people look down on for barely a living wage. At some point it's not about him needing to upskill it's about expectations about who gets paid how much, and America expects a lot of people to "make a living" at just above poverty wages. I'm not sure how you change that, to some extent employers can't pay more because it's become structural and they don't actually have the money to pay those jobs more. So I have to agree with parent poster: >> There are so many underlying changes to the established relationship between Labor and Capital in the US that would be a necessary part of keeping jobs here that it would effectively make us a completely different country.

_DeadFred_ 10mo ago
It used to be 'America, land of the free' and we hero worshiped homeless dudes who happened to chase after cattle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboy Now it's 'America, land of the greed' and fox news talking heads say homeless dudes should just be executed. Fox News host Brian Kilmeade saying that homeless people should receive "involuntary lethal injections" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phYOrM3SNV8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phYOrM3SNV8
- giardini 9mo ago
  _DeadFred_ says: "Fox News host Brian Kilmeade saying that homeless people should receive "involuntary lethal injections" Yeah, that kind of thought crossed my mind when a homeless guy, unhappy that I wouldn't let him sponge my car's windshield, grabbed my lhs rear view mirror with both hands and broke it (the mirror no longer responds to its dashboard control). But the moment quickly passed, leaving me only with a new item for my to-fix list. FWIW we still worship cowboys. They differ greatly from today's urban homeless.

psunavy03 10mo ago

"We" have not "decided" anything other than collectively making decisions about what we are willing to pay for a given service. That ultimately is what sets wages. The only reason software development pays so well is because the market will bear it, and the market isn't some cabal of fat cats in top hats, monocles, and tails (or hoodies and Patagonia for that matter). It's the collective decisions of 330 million people.

almosthere 10mo ago
The largest reason software development costs a lot is that a cabal of people had been desperately trying to lock out smaller companies from having access to software engineering resources at such a cheap rate and eventually get taken out. I get that from another perspective your answer is also correct, but the reality is the large pay is really so that EA's blockbuster video game sells and a small upstart of 45 software people that want to make their own amazing game does not beat them. Those 45 people will take the paycheck rather than collectively start a game company now. What happens next no one is sure, but I can tell you, that if the amount of cheap software surfaces because 1 man army companies take out TeamViewer, Photoshop, Jira, etc... because of LLMs - then those wages will drop, and drop fast and it has nothing to do with the 330 million people "having a say".
runako 10mo ago
We make decisions through purchasing, yes. There are also hundreds/thousands of elections annually through which we collectively set policy directions. Contrary to belief, politicians are responsive to voters over long periods of time. So over time, the policies that are continually ratified do reflect our collective choices. And for at least the last several decades, yes we have collectively decided through our policy directions that there are classes of jobs whose holders are not deserving of material prosperity.

duxup 10mo ago

Even with a good labor representation, is making cheap tshirts a job people want to do / a good job? I’m not convinced it is, or that it lasts.

foobarian 10mo ago
I bet many people would find that job a lot more appealing than risking your life doing shopping gigs under time pressure, without even getting health insurance.
- duxup 10mo ago
  I’m not convinced that Tshirt job would exist long or in quantities that matters.
- bpt3 10mo ago
  How exactly is doing instacart runs "risking your life" without using a definition for that term that involves any task where you're required to leave your house?

naasking 10mo ago

> What would lead one to conclude those would be the kind of "good jobs" everyone is envisioning? They wouldn't all come back, many of them would be automated to keep costs down. Fortunately, this would also be good for us since automated systems require engineers to design them and technicians to maintain them.

scythe 10mo ago

I think that "good jobs" is a red herring for manufacturing jobs. The important question is whether they have positive externalities. According to one argument (which I'm reconstructing), working one manufacturing job improves dexterity and spatial reasoning, as well as motivating workers to learn basic math and science. These (may) continue to provide benefits to the economy after the worker leaves the position, hence being unpriced. How we manage this at a policy level is not obvious. (OTOH, there is also an argument that manufacturing has an important negative externality — pollution)

bcrosby95 10mo ago

The service economy has a few problems. The first is that much of it is optional. Stuff like fast food. People can do without it much easier than doing without a washing machine. The second is, for many services, such as child care and elderly care, most adults are terrible at assessing quality. This creates a race to the bottom much like you see in manufacturing, making the jobs low wage. Because humans are humans you can't really point to a specific consequence of this either.

loeg 10mo ago

Manufacturing jobs were only "good jobs" in comparison to the alternatives available at the time. The other options in the US have gotten better in the last 50 years. As much as people hate on service industry jobs, they're much less physically dangerous than working in a mid-20th century manufacturing plant.

closeparen 10mo ago

A line cook makes no more burgers per hour, a hairdresser delivers no more or better haircuts, and a daycare worker watches no more children concurrently than they could have 25 years ago. Meanwhile the Magnificent 7 have emerged. Baumol effects might have raised wages a bit, sure. How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene? The whole concept of buying services from people is either that their time is worth less than yours, or they have special skills that you need and lack. “No such thing as unskilled labor,” ok, but you are definitely get sorting on how useful people’s skills are and how difficult they are to substitute or replicate.

epicureanideal 10mo ago
> Baumol effects might have raised wages a bit, sure. How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene? Supply and demand? If the population of hairdressers was small, so they could charge more and more, then their wages could keep up as a percentage. And that would be possible if for example so many people moved into high productivity work that only a small percentage remained in low automation work. But if you have a constant influx of new hairdressers or a constant influx of people willing to do low automation work, that doesn’t happen.
- closeparen 10mo ago
  That’s the Baumol effect. The rising tide does lift all boats to an extent, but not the same extent.
  - epicureanideal 10mo ago
    I agree, I’m just saying the extent is influenced heavily by the increasing availability of workers at the lower end of the automation distribution.
ericjmorey 10mo ago
The line cook is relatively as valuable as they were in the past, they're just being out leveraged by people asserting a self-centered entitlement mentality.

dylan604 10mo ago

> Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed. There's something to be said that the labor movement was destroyed by eliminating the need for the labor. Bringing the labor back would see the labor movement return.

runako 10mo ago
People still work, so this is a very bizarre comment to make.
- dylan604 10mo ago
  Not really sure how you come to the conclusion that I was under the notion that nobody is working. Union membership has been in decline for decades. Labor jobs have been leaving the country for decades. Bring back the labor jobs that the unions represent and the union membership will go back up as well. The labor jobs that still remain are what's left of the union membership.
  - runako 10mo ago
    > Bring back the labor jobs that the unions represent Please research which are the largest unions in the US. I'm curious why union representation would work for labor jobs, but not for the millions of jobs* represented by unions now. * These are all "labor jobs," because otherwise you're not talking about a job
    - dylan604 9mo ago
      Most people referring to "labor jobs" are manual labor and not some laborious butt in a chair behind a keyboard banging code all day. While there are unions for the tech industry, the entertainment industry, and other non-labor industries, labor is pretty well understood in its meaning even if you don't understand it.
      - runako 9mo ago

NickC25 10mo ago

>we have just decided that the people working those jobs are not deserving of prosperity. We've also decided that labor needs to be taxed more heavily than capital, which is fucking stupid. Taxing the lower end of society who actually works at a higher rate than wealthy people is just so shortsighted.

Analemma_ 10mo ago
I think even more important than the difference in taxation is the difference in freedom of movement. There are heavy restrictions on labor moving between countries, capital has no restrictions at all (except kinda in China) and can move instantly to wherever it is most useful, i.e. wherever has the most human rights violations and lowest wages. We need to eliminate this asymmetry: either get rid of all restrictions on freedom of personal movement and selling ones labor, or lock down the flow of capital with serious capital controls.
theLiminator 10mo ago
It'd be a very interesting thought experiment to completely redefine the economic and fiscal plan of the US. It'd be interesting if we greatly reduced personal income taxes in the majority of cases. Removed corporate income tax (the idea being corporate income tax hurts all equity owners, whereas we specifically want to target the very wealthy), and then implemented a progressive wealth tax that kicks in starting at 7.5M or something (maybe something like 1.5% from 7.5M-15M, 2.0% from 15M-50M, and then 3% from 50M+, this could be done more smoothly if desired). We'd need to penalize capital flight with something (something like a 40% exit tax or something). The IRS would have to be greatly empowered to support this, net worth declarations would all be declared by the tax filer, and if audited and found to be incorrect, the IRS will purchase the asset at 70% of its declared value (or some other better mechanism can be thought of to ensure that NW is declared accurately). We'd also simplify the tax code in all other cases, removing all forms of credit/deductions/etc on income. This will free up IRS audit resources to focus on declared net worth fraud. Remove all forms of non-sin tariffs entirely. Get rid of entitlements taxes and spend and replace it with a negative income tax that is calculated to provide a very base level of existence that never disincentives work. Then remove government backed student loans, but make them treated the same as other loans (ie. students can declare bankruptcy). Kids should also get a 5k per annum payment that's held in trust by the government that's invested into the US total market that gets linearly released to them from the age of 18-30. I also propose that we remove all consumption taxes that aren't a sin tax. Ie. keep taxes on alcohol, gas, etc. Implement a very high luxury goods tax. Then completely change the medical system to be more similar to Singapore with mandatory copays of something like $20-50 (to prevent abuse), but also provide universal coverage with the government setting prices with pharma/providers. Dissolve the ability of states to collect taxes and provide federal funding per head. Standardize/centralize all stuff like the DMV. Ie. have a single federal agency to de-duplicate work. I don't think this stuff is viable at all (would require dramatic tweaks), but it'd be a very interesting thought experiment to see how something that tries to encourage business friendliness, the strength of the income earning population, and incentives capital effiency (over tax effiency) and investment does. I really think that the fundamental market forces of capitalism are very powerful, we just need to change the incentives structure so that the benefits aren't captured strictly by the ultra wealthy.

_DeadFred_ 10mo ago

Every healthcare post: 'this isn't the biggest cost in healthcare' 'this isn't going to fix things' Every jobs post: "this doesn't fix X" 'this isn't the biggest issue'. And the republicans keep dog walking straight to their goals while we talk about the best arrangement for deck chairs.

stanleykm 10mo ago
Because nobody actually wants to talk about the core of the problem or how to address it. They see different, seemingly unrelated problems depending on what their priorities are. The democrats are also not on the side of actually solving the problem.

detourdog 10mo ago

I think with the advancement of manufacturing techniques the future is in small run manufacturing. Manufacturing won’t return with a few companies employing thousands of people. My thinking is that manufacturing will return with thousands of companies employing around 10 people. The future will be more customized solving detailed problems with unique specification.

flerchin 10mo ago

Riveting ends in a real item that can often be used to produce further economic value. Elder care is not analogous to this, and the economic value is only what the elder can pay for it.

BenoitEssiambre 10mo ago

Note that the "Labor vs Capital" distinction mostly means "workers vs retirees". The reason more money goes to capital these days is not necessarily that each retiree is getting more but that in an aging population, there's more retirees so it takes more resources diverted from workers to support this larger non working population. This problem can be solved with more babies 20 years ago or more immigration of workers now to share the burden (unless AI makes everything weird).

stanleykm 10mo ago
I undestand what you are saying but retirees are not what people mean when they talk about Capital. They are talking about executives, fund managers, billionaires, and so on. People who actually control much of our society. Yes many of the funds are managing the retirements of working people but that does not necessarily need to be the case, nor do those retirees have any active ownership of the companies those funds invest in.
- BenoitEssiambre 9mo ago
  Right but the majority of people holding significant amounts of capital is retirees or people saving for retirement. There is a small minority of people wealthy for other reasons. It doesn't really make sense to strongly associate these people to "capital" since they are a small minority of capital holders.
runako 10mo ago
There's been a lot written on Labor vs Capital, so I will just suggest you research the topic because you are not on target here.
- BenoitEssiambre 9mo ago
  Do you have a link? What I've seen in most discussions is obscuring of the fact that the majority of "capital" is directly or indirectly retirees or people saving for retirement. Those in the top 5% wealthiest often need to survive on that wealth for decades so it's not as if they have per year spending power that is that high. You too will be at your top percentile wealthiest of your life when you are nearing retirement.

largbae 10mo ago

Market forces are what cause different jobs to pay different amounts. Welders don't get paid high wages out of charity or respect, they get it because welders with sufficient skills are rare, so if you don't pay up you won't get your welding done. If service jobs can be differentiated (e.g. by training and licensing) then scarcity can be created.

potato3732842 10mo ago
>e.g. by training and licensing For best results buy a political or ten and then enjoy the profit of having government violence chase away much of the "maybe not just as good but good enough for a lot of the demand that's out there" competition that doesn't have your training or license or belong to your professional group or whatever. And the best part is the public pays for the privilege of having supply be constrained because the state forces that constrain it are not paid by those who benefit but by the taxpayer. Something something privatize profits something something socialize cost centers.

adastra22 10mo ago

> Historically, they were better jobs due to a strong labor movement, but that movement has been largely destroyed. This is a widely believed narrative, but not necessarily true. The competing narrative that better living and working conditions arise from better technology and cheaper energy is just as supported by the data. Perhaps even more so because it also explains the post-1971 decline.

filleduchaos 10mo ago
This seems like a non sequitur to me. What does (general) better living and working conditions arising from better technology and cheaper energy have to do with which jobs are considered "good" and "bad"?
monocasa 10mo ago
How does the explanation without labor power dynamics explain the post-1971 decline? Electricity is cheaper inflation adjusted than it was then, and technology has certainly progressed since 1971.
- adastra22 10mo ago
  And working conditions are better now than 50 years ago too.

edude03 10mo ago

> There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery. There kind of is - it's the same reason B2B SaaS tend to make more money than B2C - it's easy (easier) to sell someone something if they can make money from it. If I can pay you Y to rivet some sheet metal together and sell the finished product for Y * 10, that's a much better outcome for me (economically) than paying someone to take care of my elderly parents. In fact, maybe I'm not mean, maybe _I_ don't make enough money to afford to pay someone to take care of my elderly parents.

runako 10mo ago
Economic rules are all subject to externalities like the effects of taxes, regulations, etc. I mean there is no rule in the sense that some of the jobs that are poverty wage in the US are not poverty wage in other countries due to the impact of regulation. It's a policy choice to allow Walmart pay full-time employees so little that taxpayers have to subsidize their food. We are free to make different choices.

tracker1 10mo ago

To some extent, the pay rate for a lot of jobs comes down the available candidate pool for those jobs. The easier/simpler a job is for anyone to step into, the more likely it is to have a lower pay associated with it. As an addition, regarding service jobs, a lot of the times, you get what you put in... at this point, most customer service interactions I've generally seen have been poor at best. Craftsmanship, pride in work, and just caring about doing a good job just aren't concerns a lot of the workforce has at this point. That's not to excuse efforts to offset employee pay into a forced tipping culture. Neither does it excuse efforts to use foreign labor as a lower paid under-class either... I think jobs for foreign workers should have pay floors that force them to be more expensive than domestic labor. If there really isn't a supply, or they really are that skilled, then pay up. Part of the problem is the idea of fiscal duty has been tunnel visioned into what the next quarter looks like over anything resembling longer term health of a company and the communities they operate in. Not to mention VC corporations swallowing industry sectors and "extractive value" to the point those sectors collapse altogether. Govt has largely sold out to corporate interests over the people's best interests and they are emphatically NOT the same... govt policy should be to encourage or even require competition in practice. Shared essential infrastructure should require dual/multi-sourcing with a healthy portion required to be domestically supplied as well. I truly believe that it's in everyone's best interests to refocus beyond the next quarter, and I don't mean woke lip service... just actually considering organizational and community concerns. If we/they don't do it, communism will only grow and take over.

ctoth 10mo ago

> There is no economic rule that says that riveting should pay more than taking care of the elderly or food delivery. There is, in fact. Baumol's Cost Disease, and it's a real bitch. Manufacturing has compounding productivity gains - one worker today produces vastly more than one worker in 1950. Elderly care doesn't. You can't make a caregiver 10x more productive through better tooling. The productivity ceiling is fixed by the nature of the work. Wages across sectors compete for workers. So service-sector wages only rise when they have to bid workers away from high-productivity sectors. This predicts: service wages are borrowed from productivity gains elsewhere in the economy. This doesn't mean we shouldn't want caregivers paid well. It means wanting isn't a mechanism. The mechanism is productivity growth in tradeable sectors pulling wages up economy-wide.

MetaWhirledPeas 10mo ago
> It means wanting isn't a mechanism. Well we still have demand in the equation. If demand for service workers grows, so will their compensation. (And so will the cost for those services.) So the possibility is there. People with more disposable income (the high-productivity ones I guess) demand more services. The question will be whether that demand will grow sufficiently to raise the compensation to where we want it to be. What I also don't know is how we will respond to service jobs being automated. "Premium" service usually shuns automation. Will we have fewer fast food workers and more massage therapists?
- spdionis 10mo ago
  And then you get to the reason why everyone complains childcare is expensive.
SgtBastard 10mo ago
Thank you, I learnt a new term today.
runako 10mo ago
I thought about addressing this in the original post, but I want to address part of your response: > one worker today produces vastly more than one worker in 1950. Elderly care doesn't Indeed, this is a core component of Capital vs Labor issue I mentioned. Productivity increases, workers generate more value, but Capital's share of the results increases nonetheless. The change in this relationship is why I would expect a reinvigorated manufacturing sector to be dominated by Bad Jobs instead of the Good Jobs everybody hopes for. (There's also a measurement issue in comparing those two. The benefits of e.g. caregiving are measured by the ability of other workers to be productive. For ex if a high-wage worker has to stay home to care for someone, then they are not doing high-wage work, which reduces the overall GDP potential of the country.)

pixelready 10mo ago

It’s almost entirely a leverage problem. Insofar as we rely on the labor marketplace as the primary “prosperity” distribution mechanism for the majority of people the power balance between labor and capital will determine the average person’s level of prosperity. The following increase the leverage of labor: collective action, high competition between firms, near-zero (actual) unemployment rate, strong labor laws. The following increase leverage of capital: monopoly, monopsony, cartel action, high unemployment rate, weak labor laws. Obviously the cost of converting wealth into tangible “prosperity” is an additional factor, so inflation of the cost of goods and services will factor in. So if we wish to promote broad prosperity over ultra concentrated wealth we need to address the above factors: enforce anti-trust, break up firms as needed, promote labor protections and organizing, make taxes more progressive than regressive, make stock buybacks illegal again. The hyper mobility, political ties (with low national loyalty) of the capital class make this difficult but not impossible. We will probably have to de-emphasize some sticky cultural memes around individual merit and everyone “deserving their fate” to accomplish the above. A surge of empathetic humanism would likely do wonders for the mental health crisis as a bonus.

giardini 9mo ago
pixelready says "A surge of empathetic humanism would likely do wonders for the mental health crisis as a bonus." Empathetic humanism isn't likely to do much for a schizophrenic or alcoholic.
- pixelready 9mo ago
  If we were more invested in each other’s well being, especially if we had more capacity to put that care into action, wouldn’t that improve the support network surrounding those suffering from chronic mental health conditions?
  - giardini 9mo ago
    Have you ever dealt with an alcoholic when he's drunk or a schizophrenic when he's acting out? You use the word "suffering" as if they had no part in their own condition. I'm reminded of Duke, the skinhead in "Repo Man" who, as he dies, says "I blame society!": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3b5Q7b8YXo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3b5Q7b8YXo

kjshsh123 10mo ago

I think you should read up on comparative advantage and the roy model of labor. Forced onshoring is likely to hurt US productivity and large wage gaps arise because of self-selection driven by correlations in productivity across jobs.

rayiner 10mo ago

Jobs aren’t good or not because they government declares it so by fiat, there’s substantive differences between different kinds of jobs. “Service jobs” are bad because they typically require little skill, just a human body physically present in the U.S. In contrast, many people will never be good riveters. They lack the strength, coordination, and stamina to do the job. Similarly, many people cannot be plumbers or electricians. Those are jobs that require intelligence and skill.

runako 10mo ago
This is exactly what I mean. Reading this, one would make certain incorrect assumptions about pay in service jobs based on imperfect knowledge of skills required. One might assume service jobs in general do not require any skills at all beyond the capability to slightly warm a room. The famous counterpoint is obviously "teacher" with its starting salary in the $20 range, but that's too easy so I will start with phlebotomist (starting under $15/hr). And I'll toss in chef (~$22/hr-$25/hr in my city) as an alternate to suggest that even in service industries skill matters (because there is a range here).