6 ms·

Do you really think that there are that many zero marginal product people? Or do you think that it's mostly people who are unwilling or don't have the education

by mdkess 14y ago

Do you really think that there are that many zero marginal product people? Or do you think that it's mostly people who are unwilling or don't have the education background to do work with utility? I feel like a lot of minimum wage is a big negative feedback loop - if you are making $7 an hour, you have to work a lot of hours to put food on the table. And these are generally manual jobs, or at least involve a lot of standing, and so you are exhausted by the end of the day. Plus - with poverty being so endemic, chances are nobody around you has an education either, so you can't see first hand that education really gets you anything. And, with a lack of money, you either have no credit or (more likely) bad credit. So how do you get out of that trap? When your parents are struggling to make ends meet like this, what do you do as a kid? You start working night shifts in high school instead of studying for the SATs. If you took people in this trap who were willing, and subsidized them for two years to go to community college, I feel like you'd have a huge increase in productivity, especially across generations. And it wouldn't even be that expensive, especially if you factored in increased tax revenue. Or heck, as a lesser goal, make it a goal to enable people making under $X/hour to get their GED. Maybe this is way too idealistic. I was lucky. Relatively rich parents, we could move into a good school district, I got to go to a good university, not really worry about money, and now I work in the software industry which is booming. But a huge part of that I owe to circumstance - I could study in school, never hungry, never worried about paying rent.

Domenic_S 14y ago
> I was lucky. Relatively rich parents, we could move into a good school district, I got to go to a good university, not really worry about money, and now I work in the software industry which is booming. But a huge part of that I owe to circumstance - I could study in school, never hungry, never worried about paying rent. But there are also plenty of counterexamples of people who didn't have rich parents, didn't live in good school districts, and did it on their own. I know a person just like that, and she paid for school on her own working fast food shifts at night and full time in the summer, and now has a great job in biotech. $anecdote++; > you can't see first hand that education really gets you anything. I don't see that education really does get you anything except a stifled sense of creativity, decreased curiosity, and crushing debt. See: the current college-grad crisis. "Education" in a modern, western sense is a red herring. Being a lifelong learner, being always curious, and having the desire to do something useful with your life -- if you have these qualities you'll do just fine.
- brianchu 14y ago
  > But there are also plenty of counterexamples of people who didn't have rich parents, didn't live in good school districts, and did it on their own. I know a person just like that, and she paid for school on her own working fast food shifts at night and full time in the summer, and now has a great job in biotech. $anecdote++; Yes, but those people are playing on "hard" mode, so to speak. More power to them, but it's unreasonable to imply that all people in poor socioeconomic circumstances will be able to do the same. EDIT (reply to below): Like I said, they're playing on "hard" mode. You cannot expect all or even most people playing on "hard" mode to achieve the same things that people playing on "easy" mode can achieve (people like me living in an affluent suburb, whose parents are upper-middle class, who went to fantastic local schools filled with other upper-middle class students, whose parents can afford to pay for college and any educational expense, etc.)
  - Domenic_S 14y ago
    > it's unreasonable to imply that all people in poor socioeconomic circumstances will be able to do the same. Why?
    - ZachPruckowski 14y ago
      Two reasons: First, while it's not entirely a zero-sum game, there's a considerable competitiveness aspect - there aren't enough college slots or scholarships to accommodate everyone getting a good degree from a strong school, and if there were, there wouldn't be enough jobs to hire them into. So at various points, people are going to not make the cut. Do we simply say "well, if you're not in the top X% of the nation you'll have to make do on $10/hour?" Secondly, because we can't simply wave our wands and make everyone 15-30 IQ points smarter. Getting every poor child to be as motivated and intelligent as that anecdote is at least as large a problem as income inequality generally. It's like saying "I've got a cure for cancer, but it requires time travel" - you've just reduced a Very Hard problem to a different Very Hard problem, which is a solid achievement but doesn't actually solve anything. EDIT: And Thirdly, why should the answer be that poor people have to work their asses off to catch up just because they made the wrong choice of parents? It's like a race where some contestants have to carry dumbbells - it's great that they can actually succeed, but it's still miles and miles from fair.
markshead 14y ago
What skills does it take to make minimum wage? Often it is the ability to show up on time and follow directions. If someone doesn't have those skills, I question how well they will do in a community college. If they do have enough reliability to show up on time and enough motivation to go to the community college, there are parts of the country where they can work a minimum wage job and still pay for tuition and a place to stay.
- mdkess 14y ago
  Find some places that pay minimum wage and will also pay for education in some form. And do you really think that the unemployment problem in unskilled or low skill labor is simply because there aren't enough people who can show up and follow directions?
  - markshead 14y ago
    The business owners I know who employ low skilled workers all have trouble finding people who will show up to work on time and actually do work. The unemployment problem in unskilled or low skilled labor is largely because government benefits make is economically better for low skilled people to NOT work. In my town there was a waitress who quit her job rather than take on the more hours they wanted her to work because it would have meant losing the money she was getting from the government. I see a lot of people whose job hunting efforts are minimal or are for jobs they know they aren't qualified for because they want to stay on unemployment. When the unemployment runs out, the real job search will begin. For a statistical look at this see the book: The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy
pmorici 14y ago
I found the movie 'Waiting for "Superman"' http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/action/ http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/action/ (it's on Netflix) to be pretty enlightening on the topic of how the education system is failing kids in this country. They make the argument that even schools in well off areas are not particularly good in absolute terms though relatively they seem great.
Daniel_Newby 14y ago
> Do you really think that there are that many zero marginal product people? About 15% of Americans are borderline mentally retarded. They are trainable, but most of the suitable jobs have been automated. Finding interesting work for them is a real problem and has gone badly. Currently the welfare apparatus is farming them for votes, but this is not a desirable or sustainable situation.
- galadriel 14y ago
  How did you get the 15% number? Assuming IQ of 70 is taken as margin of borderline intellectual functioning, and 15 points being the standard deviation, only people below two standard deviation lie below 70 IQ, or about 2.5% of population. (The other 2.5% being above 130 IQ)
  - Daniel_Newby 14y ago
    70 is generally taken as the threshold for mild mental retardation. I was using 85 as the threshold for borderline and assuming a non-normal distribution.
    - galadriel 14y ago
      You have got your thresholds wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_retardation#IQ_below_70 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_retardation#IQ_below_70 Also, the distribution is by definition normal, and I have hard time believing 15% of population is retarded. That would mean about 1 in every 6 person I met is retarded, a number too big to believe. Now 3 genius/3 dumb out of 100 is more like what my experience has been.
PeterisP 14y ago
The idea is that no matter how good people are, we soon won't need so much labor hours as a society to employ everyone. We'll have good, decently skilled, enthusiastic, hardworking "zero marginal product" people simply because software/robots will be able to do it cheaper than even a subsistence (calories+shelter) wage, and in most tasks employing a human for it would be a senseless luxury. You can hire a bunch of people to carry you around in a carriage on their backs, or you can hire people to do arithmetics for you - but almost noone does. Soon (in my and your lifetime) the same will be for all the manual, exhausting jobs; for most of the driving, service, cleaning, delivery, and retail jobs; for most of the simple clerical jobs. Even if there is no progress in AI at all, we'll come to a state where, say, 10% of population can cover all major needs (agriculture, food production, service, clothing, construction, consumer goods manufacture, transportation, medical, legal, etc) of everyone. What we'll do with the other 90% (or 99%, or even 100% if AI happens) ? They will be nice, great, fellow humans, but practically speaking, the society can do with them and can do without them. That's a choice for the society - utopias or distopias are both possible.
- chii 14y ago
  its interesting you mentioned this because i recently read a "book" online about this very topic (albeit in the form of fiction - its called Manna). Both distopia and utopia is possible, but the distopia is much more likely due to the capitalist system we have, and the rich/poor gap is only going to grow.
- mdkess 14y ago
  That sounds nice, but I don't think it's true, especially not in the near future. We're already in a state where society could go on with say 30% of the population working to produce food, but we keep growing, because as a society we want more. Who would give up what they have right now to go back and live as a billionaire in the 1500s, giving up their iPads and TVs and modern medicine? Not many people. I don't see that trend reversing. How many times has cost been the determining factor on whether to purchase or do something? Probably a lot. With trade, there's always relative competitive advantage. It's probably economically more sensible for you the software developer to hire someone to mow your lawn, since you make more money in an hour of writing software than it costs to get someone to mow your lawn. Even if you're better at mowing your lawn than the person you hire - you still make more money writing software (example: You make $100/hour writing software. It takes you 1 hour to mow your lawn, or you can hire someone for 2 hours to do it for you at $20/hour. Opportunity cost to mow the lawn: $200. Gain from hiring someone to mow the lawn: $160. So even though you can mow the lawn twice as fast as the person you hire can, it's still better to hire someone.) So now it becomes a resourcing problem - you need people who can mow your lawn. Robots can do that, but I don't think that robots can do all jobs at least not in the near future. Which is why I think that a huge part of this is a resourcing problem - you have a mismatch between skills and demand, which again I think is solved through education. Consider software developers again - I bet that if suddenly there was no demand for software developers, any one of us could be successful in another career, since at the heart of it, we're logical thinkers. We need to get as many people to that level as possible. Furthermore, it's very important to not make poverty generational. I think that I contribute to society through my employment (at least I pay a ton of taxes), but if I wasn't as lucky as I was, I might not be in the same position to do so. I'd still be as capable, at least in terms of potential, but I wouldn't have the opportunity.

by mdkess 14y ago

Domenic_S 14y ago

> I was lucky. Relatively rich parents, we could move into a good school district, I got to go to a good university, not really worry about money, and now I work in the software industry which is booming. But a huge part of that I owe to circumstance - I could study in school, never hungry, never worried about paying rent. But there are also plenty of counterexamples of people who didn't have rich parents, didn't live in good school districts, and did it on their own. I know a person just like that, and she paid for school on her own working fast food shifts at night and full time in the summer, and now has a great job in biotech. $anecdote++; > you can't see first hand that education really gets you anything. I don't see that education really does get you anything except a stifled sense of creativity, decreased curiosity, and crushing debt. See: the current college-grad crisis. "Education" in a modern, western sense is a red herring. Being a lifelong learner, being always curious, and having the desire to do something useful with your life -- if you have these qualities you'll do just fine.

brianchu 14y ago
> But there are also plenty of counterexamples of people who didn't have rich parents, didn't live in good school districts, and did it on their own. I know a person just like that, and she paid for school on her own working fast food shifts at night and full time in the summer, and now has a great job in biotech. $anecdote++; Yes, but those people are playing on "hard" mode, so to speak. More power to them, but it's unreasonable to imply that all people in poor socioeconomic circumstances will be able to do the same. EDIT (reply to below): Like I said, they're playing on "hard" mode. You cannot expect all or even most people playing on "hard" mode to achieve the same things that people playing on "easy" mode can achieve (people like me living in an affluent suburb, whose parents are upper-middle class, who went to fantastic local schools filled with other upper-middle class students, whose parents can afford to pay for college and any educational expense, etc.)
- Domenic_S 14y ago
  > it's unreasonable to imply that all people in poor socioeconomic circumstances will be able to do the same. Why?
  - ZachPruckowski 14y ago
    Two reasons: First, while it's not entirely a zero-sum game, there's a considerable competitiveness aspect - there aren't enough college slots or scholarships to accommodate everyone getting a good degree from a strong school, and if there were, there wouldn't be enough jobs to hire them into. So at various points, people are going to not make the cut. Do we simply say "well, if you're not in the top X% of the nation you'll have to make do on $10/hour?" Secondly, because we can't simply wave our wands and make everyone 15-30 IQ points smarter. Getting every poor child to be as motivated and intelligent as that anecdote is at least as large a problem as income inequality generally. It's like saying "I've got a cure for cancer, but it requires time travel" - you've just reduced a Very Hard problem to a different Very Hard problem, which is a solid achievement but doesn't actually solve anything. EDIT: And Thirdly, why should the answer be that poor people have to work their asses off to catch up just because they made the wrong choice of parents? It's like a race where some contestants have to carry dumbbells - it's great that they can actually succeed, but it's still miles and miles from fair.

markshead 14y ago

What skills does it take to make minimum wage? Often it is the ability to show up on time and follow directions. If someone doesn't have those skills, I question how well they will do in a community college. If they do have enough reliability to show up on time and enough motivation to go to the community college, there are parts of the country where they can work a minimum wage job and still pay for tuition and a place to stay.

mdkess 14y ago
Find some places that pay minimum wage and will also pay for education in some form. And do you really think that the unemployment problem in unskilled or low skill labor is simply because there aren't enough people who can show up and follow directions?
- markshead 14y ago
  The business owners I know who employ low skilled workers all have trouble finding people who will show up to work on time and actually do work. The unemployment problem in unskilled or low skilled labor is largely because government benefits make is economically better for low skilled people to NOT work. In my town there was a waitress who quit her job rather than take on the more hours they wanted her to work because it would have meant losing the money she was getting from the government. I see a lot of people whose job hunting efforts are minimal or are for jobs they know they aren't qualified for because they want to stay on unemployment. When the unemployment runs out, the real job search will begin. For a statistical look at this see the book: The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy

pmorici 14y ago

I found the movie 'Waiting for "Superman"' http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/action/ http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/action/ (it's on Netflix) to be pretty enlightening on the topic of how the education system is failing kids in this country. They make the argument that even schools in well off areas are not particularly good in absolute terms though relatively they seem great.

Daniel_Newby 14y ago

> Do you really think that there are that many zero marginal product people? About 15% of Americans are borderline mentally retarded. They are trainable, but most of the suitable jobs have been automated. Finding interesting work for them is a real problem and has gone badly. Currently the welfare apparatus is farming them for votes, but this is not a desirable or sustainable situation.

galadriel 14y ago
How did you get the 15% number? Assuming IQ of 70 is taken as margin of borderline intellectual functioning, and 15 points being the standard deviation, only people below two standard deviation lie below 70 IQ, or about 2.5% of population. (The other 2.5% being above 130 IQ)
- Daniel_Newby 14y ago
  70 is generally taken as the threshold for mild mental retardation. I was using 85 as the threshold for borderline and assuming a non-normal distribution.
  - galadriel 14y ago
    You have got your thresholds wrong. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_retardation#IQ_below_70 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_retardation#IQ_below_70 Also, the distribution is by definition normal, and I have hard time believing 15% of population is retarded. That would mean about 1 in every 6 person I met is retarded, a number too big to believe. Now 3 genius/3 dumb out of 100 is more like what my experience has been.

PeterisP 14y ago

The idea is that no matter how good people are, we soon won't need so much labor hours as a society to employ everyone. We'll have good, decently skilled, enthusiastic, hardworking "zero marginal product" people simply because software/robots will be able to do it cheaper than even a subsistence (calories+shelter) wage, and in most tasks employing a human for it would be a senseless luxury. You can hire a bunch of people to carry you around in a carriage on their backs, or you can hire people to do arithmetics for you - but almost noone does. Soon (in my and your lifetime) the same will be for all the manual, exhausting jobs; for most of the driving, service, cleaning, delivery, and retail jobs; for most of the simple clerical jobs. Even if there is no progress in AI at all, we'll come to a state where, say, 10% of population can cover all major needs (agriculture, food production, service, clothing, construction, consumer goods manufacture, transportation, medical, legal, etc) of everyone. What we'll do with the other 90% (or 99%, or even 100% if AI happens) ? They will be nice, great, fellow humans, but practically speaking, the society can do with them and can do without them. That's a choice for the society - utopias or distopias are both possible.

chii 14y ago
its interesting you mentioned this because i recently read a "book" online about this very topic (albeit in the form of fiction - its called Manna). Both distopia and utopia is possible, but the distopia is much more likely due to the capitalist system we have, and the rich/poor gap is only going to grow.
mdkess 14y ago
That sounds nice, but I don't think it's true, especially not in the near future. We're already in a state where society could go on with say 30% of the population working to produce food, but we keep growing, because as a society we want more. Who would give up what they have right now to go back and live as a billionaire in the 1500s, giving up their iPads and TVs and modern medicine? Not many people. I don't see that trend reversing. How many times has cost been the determining factor on whether to purchase or do something? Probably a lot. With trade, there's always relative competitive advantage. It's probably economically more sensible for you the software developer to hire someone to mow your lawn, since you make more money in an hour of writing software than it costs to get someone to mow your lawn. Even if you're better at mowing your lawn than the person you hire - you still make more money writing software (example: You make $100/hour writing software. It takes you 1 hour to mow your lawn, or you can hire someone for 2 hours to do it for you at $20/hour. Opportunity cost to mow the lawn: $200. Gain from hiring someone to mow the lawn: $160. So even though you can mow the lawn twice as fast as the person you hire can, it's still better to hire someone.) So now it becomes a resourcing problem - you need people who can mow your lawn. Robots can do that, but I don't think that robots can do all jobs at least not in the near future. Which is why I think that a huge part of this is a resourcing problem - you have a mismatch between skills and demand, which again I think is solved through education. Consider software developers again - I bet that if suddenly there was no demand for software developers, any one of us could be successful in another career, since at the heart of it, we're logical thinkers. We need to get as many people to that level as possible. Furthermore, it's very important to not make poverty generational. I think that I contribute to society through my employment (at least I pay a ton of taxes), but if I wasn't as lucky as I was, I might not be in the same position to do so. I'd still be as capable, at least in terms of potential, but I wouldn't have the opportunity.