[neilwilson]

The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth).

We need those people to work a full week operating the machines that actually make all the output we all consume.

But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people that are actually required to make enough stuff and stop work on Tuesday - having the rest of the week off.

So we all give up full weeks of our finite lives in solidarity with those who we need to give up full weeks of their finite lives if we're actually going to get the goods and services we need to live. And that's because we're a species that tallies our debts with each other - the reciprocity principle (https://www.en.uni-muenchen.de/news/newsarchiv/2016/paulus_s...)

Or to put it in other words, sharing out the needed work is rather more difficult in practice than it is in theory where fungibility is largely assumed. And the more advanced our technology, the harder the sharing becomes and the more difficult it is to maintain the illusion of sufficient reciprocity.

[thatfrenchguy]

> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable

This speaks personally to me as why tech workers (and multi-generation urbanites) are seen as widely disconnected: being persuaded a small number of people "create value" while forgetting about the people building your stuff, growing your food, extracting your oil (and killing the planet in the process), moving your stuff around, nursing people, building your house, installing your AC, shipping your amazon packages, and all the other ultra-necessary jobs (that are usually underpaid) that I don't even realise exist.

Without the drivers, Uber does not exist. Without Foxconn and its army of underpaid labor, Apple does not exist. It's not a small number of people creating value, it's a small number of people capturing all that value thanks to shitty wages and work conditions for everyone else.

We can all pretend "automation" will replace people, but it's obvious the complexities of those tasks will always mostly done by humans.

[roenxi]

> while forgetting about the people ...

You might be reading the comment slightly sideways. My read was that the people you list are from small businesses creating value, and most of the tech workers are creating very little value with a few peakers who do amazing things.

> Without the drivers, Uber does not exist.

Personal bugbear, there is as yet no evidence that Uber is creating more value than it destroys. It has a pretty basic business model, trivial positive externalities and is making loss. It looks like it is slow-burning value until someone goes broke.

Uber could be cited as evidence in favour of the idea that most people don't by default know how to create value.

That might be the core disagreement here. There are a lot of people doing activities that are useful. I struggle to think of them as value creators because what they are actually doing is whatever someone tells them - there is a lack of agency in deciding what they do, so I have difficulty attributing outcomes to them. They are fungible, but the people telling them what to do are not. If you tell them to do something stupid, they will do it (as seen with Uber).

Not a comment on personal worth; economic value isn't everything. But the people who make decisions are just more important than laborers. Small businesspeople in particular are a backbone of society in a way that most workers really are not.

[fao_]

> That might be the core disagreement here. There are a lot of people doing activities that are useful. I struggle to think of them as value creators because what they are actually doing is whatever someone tells them - there is a lack of agency in deciding what they do, so I have difficulty attributing outcomes to them. They are fungible, but the people telling them what to do are not. If you tell them to do something stupid, they will do it (as seen with Uber).

I think this speaks to your own lack of understanding of these jobs. Just because the general goal is set by someone higher up, does not mean that there is not hidden variation for the exact task, as well as a lot of places for 'hidden mediocrity'.

Take cleaning the toilets, for example. The general order given is "clean the toilets". Think, however, about how this task has to be broken down. The small things like cleaning the tap heads, under the rim of the seat, etc. that most people might not explicitly think of without being reminded. The person has to do those small tasks, possibly hundreds of times, while dealing with any unexpected obstacles.

Or take something less unsavory, like baking bread. Anyone who has baked bread understands that, while the general instructions _sound_ simple, there is a lot of complexity that is not accounted for, and a lot of room for variability of skill.

Sure, anyone can train for a month and play X tune on the guitar, but are you going to pay for someone who has spent simply one month training, or someone who can really play the tune that has been playing for years? If they are interchangeable then there needn't be thousands of threads submitted to hacker news about how to hire "10x developers".

> Small businesspeople in particular are a backbone of society in a way that most workers really are not.

The matter of fact is that once a company has been established, it can float for a long time without the business owner contributing much whatsoever. I can think of more than a couple of companies that have changed CEOs three times in the last 5 years, while the actual inputs and outputs of the company remain steady. Direction only matters in a vague sense until you hit bad economic times. The ultimate truth is that 'fungibility' has nothing to do with 'value'.

[gnarlee]

I clean trains (includes lots of toilets) the hilarious story to share is that long long ago one would just show up at the trainstation and be hired to clean by annother cleaner. Paid in cash every friday. Over time a truly insane number of madly overpaid deskjokeys was tagged onto the process to do countless completely nonsensical tasks. From a really well paid job and really good cleaning, in 70 years, things moved to really shit pay and half the employees. The work didnt change at all but everything is measured to the detail. Apparently the combination of shit pay and more work than one can do makes employees unreliable enough to justify tons of desk work. The hr and countless job agencies are completely overworked. The measurment of bad results triggers countless meetings. The ppl making work schedules are tasked with a completely and utterly impossible mission. But it gets truly hilarious where the cleaners bring new employees into the 3rd party job agencies, when we dont like it change the work schedule and carefully compare salaries with hours worked. So nothing has really changed at all. The only new thing is that for every 1000 euro in actual cleaning there is now 2500 euro in administrative tasks.

[throwayEngineer]

Because making the tech that is safe and reliable enough for technician's to use is the hard part.

I can teach anyone how to clean a mold.

I can't teach just anyone how to design a mold.

And if you designed a mold before, you have been stressed AF designing and reviewing it. For some reason that is disconnected? I still work 40+ hrs

[Avshalom]

the appearance of disconnect thatfrenchguy is talking about is the idea that designing the mold is the actual output of society despite the fact that designing the mold no matter how few people can do it is completely useless without a massive web of interconnected labor that, yes anyone can do but, must done in order for society to actually output anything.

It's not a swipe at engineers, it's a swipe at engineers who think they few highly skilled individuals are the engine of the world.

[thatfrenchguy]

That was the idea I was trying to convey, albeit said in a much better way thank you :-).

[qrian]

Not trying to critique anything, but it seems like engine itself is also useless without the rest of the parts.

[Avshalom]

That is point. The wheels, the engine, the frame, hundreds of other things... You can't point to one part a car and say "that's the bit that actually gets us from point a to point b"

(It's also a jab at the intellectual bankruptcy of Atlas Shrugged)

[qrian]

I am still confused. So are you implying the engineers who think they are the engine of the world incorrect or not?

[jp555]

So if you get a degree, it’s really the book publishers, librarians, and coal burning electricity plant that kept the lights on who deserve most of the credit?

[Avshalom]

Their contribution was necessary, I mean it's utterly facile but: you weren't gonna get a degree from a university if the university doesn't exist. There's a billion or so people in addition to them and a few billion more that got us to this point.

It's not that there is no such thing as individual achievement it's that there is no "small minority" skilled or unskilled that the modern economy can be reduced to.

[jp555]

Sure as a whole, on average.

But there absolutely is a small minority of extreme producers in most domains.

[someguydave]

That fails to respond to the point that there exists skilled necessary work that armies of unskilled workers can not replace.

[Avshalom]

And there exists unskilled necessary work that armies of skilled workers can not replace.

But even beyond that there's armies of skilled necessary work that skilled workers can not replace either but seem to forget exist.

Apple doesn't exist without massive sophisticated logistical support but no one ever points out that the naval architects at Maersk or the welders at their shipyards are one piece of the process that allows any one to actually buy anything from Apple.

[kjsbfkjbf]

It would also be nice to frame "necessary" and "unnecessary".

I would think developments like saving the environment, healthcare research, improving public transportation, energy consumption, etc. are all "necessary" work. Building Uber or Twitter or Facebook? I'd lean more towards "unnecessary".

HackerNews is so close to arriving at the conclusion that most jobs (including their own prized "skilled" engineering) are worthless outside of capital accumulation. :)

[dahfizz]

> And there exists unskilled necessary work that armies of skilled workers can not replace.

I think this is false. Unskilled work is easy to teach and learn, by definition. All you need is an "army" and the unskilled work can be easily fulfilled.

[pm90]

This is a very good comment.

Some people like to do more repeatable tasks while others like to do more creative tasks and others don't want to do any tasks at all. We are told that one is better or more required than the other. If we can make a society where people can do what they want to while continuing to have a decent life (whatever "decent" means), its all good.

[petra]

Value, for people, isn't necessarily dependent on scarcity.

A good hamburger is valueable, to me. And this doesn't change depending on how hard or how easy it was to make that meal.

[ionised]

If you're talking about software development, it's not hard to learn.

You can teach someone unskilled to be a developer in around 6-12 months. Within a year or two they will be working unsupervised to a professional level.

You don't need university for it. You don't need a degree. Anyone can learn it. It's not magic, it just takes time.

[spaced-out]

>forgetting about the people building your stuff, growing your food, extracting your oil (and killing the planet in the process), moving your stuff around, nursing people, building your house, installing your AC, shipping your amazon packages,

What do you mean "forgetting"? I pay those people for their services out of the money I earn. They're not doing all those things out of the goodness of their hearts, they working for the same reason I'm working, for a paycheck.

>and all the other ultra-necessary jobs (that are usually underpaid)

Their pay, just like my pay, is set by the market. If you don't think that's fair, your issue is with capitalism. I'm actually open to the idea of moving away from capitalism, but very few people, especially in the US, are, and I have no expectation that will change in my lifetime.

[hurryskurry]

I would say, to be pedantic, that your pay isn't set by the market "really," because of market distortions of all kinds.

Like doctors are highly paid for a number of reasons one of which is cause the APA restricts the number of doctors that can be trained, but also because of the nature of the finance of healthcare in America, and the cost of training doctors. None of those is determined purely based on the market really.

[spaced-out]

A distorted market is still a market. Considering there has never in history been a market completely free of distortion due to authority figures, I don't see the distinction you're making.

[thatfrenchguy]

By forgetting I meant forgetting their contribution to society (and the value they create).

There is a lot to say about pay to show that wages are not a real market as well :-)

[spaced-out]

A distorted market is still a market. Considering there has never in history been a market completely free of distortion due to authority figures, I don't see the distinction you're making.

[agent008t]

> Their pay, just like my pay, is set by the market. If you don't think that's fair, your issue is with capitalism. I'm actually open to the idea of moving away from capitalism, but very few people, especially in the US, are, and I have no expectation that will change in my lifetime.

No, the pay of people that you pay is set by you, not by capitalism. If you think some people that provide you services deserve more pay, what is stopping you from paying them extra?

[spaced-out]

That is a good point, however, I generally don't know what percent of what I'm paying is going to the employee who's providing the service to me, so I usually can't make that determination.

[pojzon]

Unfortunately with how the world works it requires some level of slave-like population to operate.

Noone really likes to talk about that because that hits our morality itch, but thats how it is. Without slavery-like labour, our society would collapse.

[_khau]

You mean capitalism would collapse.

Society would continue on in another form.

[kjsbfkjbf]

Yes! I wish people would take a better look at history and recognize that _throughout_ history we've had the ruling class make claims about the structure and survival of society and invariably those claims require the status quo of oppressed people.

Shorter work days and society will collapse. No slavery and society will collapse. Providing worker's rights and society will collapse. We find a way to survive because... the majority of people _are_ workers.

The only thing that collapses when we get rid of a slave population is the capitalist's free lunch.

[jandrewrogers]

To rephrase:

Surpluses and shortages of skilled labor are very unevenly distributed. Differences in ease of automation will magnify this. If there is a demand for 100 neurosurgeons and then cut everyone's hours by 20%, you effectively created a shortage of 25 neurosurgeons. Decreasing hours doesn't increase supply and supply of highly skilled labor is not fungible i.e. you can't trivially retrain a PhD in electrical engineering or truck driver to become a neurosurgeon.

This leads to the following conundrum:

If we forcibly cut hours for everyone across the board then it will create severe supply shortages for the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate, some of which already have severe shortages because it is so difficult to create supply. If we cut hours such that labor supply is proportional to demand then the most highly skilled labor that is most difficult to automate will be required to work by far the most hours, which isn't fair to highly skilled labor and creates a disincentive for required labor.

Systematically reducing working hours may benefit the majority but it creates perverse social and economic dynamics for the highly skilled minority whose labor society can't easily replace.

[Retric]

We already forcibly cut doctors hours by giving them inefficient education and excessive paperwork. A doctor working 3 days a week in an efficient system could spend more time with patients in a lifetime than the average US doctor does.

The US labor market only really has shortages by design.

[jandrewrogers]

I agree that some labor shortages are the product of artificial restriction. But I strongly disagree that all labor shortages in the US have this property. Some labor shortages are unambiguously intrinsic and very difficult to eliminate. Sometimes there simply aren't enough people with deep expertise necessarily acquired over several years to meet demand.

Take my specialty for example. I mostly work on operational multi-modal spatial and sensor analytics at extremely large scales and high velocities (as is typical for these data models). Right now, half the Fortune 500 are trying to hire people that know how to design these systems and throwing silly money at anyone that seems like they can. There is no open source software that can do it and half the required computer science is not in literature, it is an extremely deep technical specialty that takes years of experience to learn. There are, maybe, a half-dozen people in the world right now that know how to design these systems end-to-end from first principles and likely a demand for several hundred. There is no way to manufacture that supply on a time horizon that matters to anyone that wants to hire them.

Even one level lower, high-end systems engineering talent demand is at least an order of magnitude higher than the actual supply. This requires very deep experience to be competent that you can't learn in bootcamp or six months of on-the-job training. Yet despite being paid extremely well even by software engineering standards, as an industry we don't come remotely close to producing enough of them. In fairness, it takes serious devotion to craft and no small amount of talent to become high-end systems engineer -- but few people with the raw talent have that ambition or interest, even though it pays extremely well. You can't force people to do what they have no interest in doing.

[Retric]

6 months may not be enough to train up someone without a technical background, but when a skill shortage extends beyond the time horizon of training a pool of 100’s of thousands of people up it’s very much self inflicted as the company simply does not want to pay market rate + training.

PS: People with related skills can always pick up these deep specialty skills with extreme speeds. I have seen someone paid contractor rates to learn a extreme specialty. Including that training, he actually finished the project in less time than the original team had wasted.

[jandrewrogers]

There are many deep specialties that no one picks up with "extreme speed" no matter how technical they are, certainly not to the level required by companies that want to hire these skills. Think database kernel engineering or non-trivial parallel systems design. Acquiring these skills happens almost exclusively by apprenticing for years with real experts. In six months you could go from no skills to mediocre skills with a lot of training, but no one wants "mediocre" working on their database kernel for good reason.

It would be like me assuming that I, a broadly competent technical expert, could quickly and easily develop a deep expertise in e.g. high-performance graphics engines. A diagnosis of Dunning-Kruger would not be incorrect were I to make such an assertion.

[Retric]

This is not a new problem.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Institute_of_the_...

Look into it’s history and Walt Disney has been training animators for decades. It’s a deep skill that is takes significant time to master, so you need an actual pipeline.

Continuing the idea, NASA trains astronauts. They don’t need very many world wide, but they need a few and the only way to get them is to train these people.

I could go on, but outside of a months to few years for absolutely new fields shortages are by design.

[petra]

The assumption that highly skilled jobs are harder to automate may turn out as wrong.

Also, many given the right augmentation tools, the training time for highly skilled jobs may be much shorter.

Doctors(but maybe not neurosuregeons) is such case, because of regulation. Nurses , with some training and tools could replace many.

But this could be true for other professions.

[SubiculumCode]

Forcing hour cuts would seem to me to have more unintended consequences than sat UBI policies.

[rayiner]

> The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth).

This is an HN conceit that’s not actually true. Take something like health care. It takes a large number of individuals to produce health care services, and technology hasn’t really reduced that amount. The other day, I needed to schedule an appointment for my son, to follow up about his ear infection. I called the nice lady at reception who set everything up. I could’ve used an app, but that’s like saying you don’t need chefs because you could just eat grass. You can, but you don’t want to. Likewise, dealing with a computer to do something like this is an exercise in self abuse. And computers haven’t gotten any better at interacting with a human at the human’s level in decades. (On that front, I think self check out machines are similar. There is a reason Whole Foods mostly has regular cashiers. It’s because computers haven’t automated away the cashiers job, they just make it possible for customers to save a few cents by doing the job themselves.)

Likewise with pretty much everything else. In the legal field, secretaries have universally been downsized to cut costs. The result is just reduces efficiency, where $700/hour lawyers waste their time doing something a secretary should be doing. (Computers have done precious little to actually eliminate any of that work.)

[Conjoiner]

Growing Bureaucracy

https://images.huffingtonpost.com/2015-12-08-1449597231-8924...

[eevilspock]

> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth)

That's a very arrogant and elitist attitude. I wish Galt's Gulch actually existed and we could exile elitists there. Let's see how they do without all the lower castes in society who pick their fruit, clean their toilets, cook and serve their food, take care of their children, pick up their garbage, and have to smile at them in order to have the honor of serving them.

Gold is more expensive than water because gold is rare. But no one would choose a world with plentiful gold and no water. Gold is not worth more, it is just priced higher by market dynamics.

Putting a value on one's work by the price the market gives it, and then justifying the market as the arbiter of value by the total price of work it incents people to do is amazingly circular.

[Viliam1234]

> pick their fruit, clean their toilets, cook and serve their food, take care of their children, pick up their garbage

Already doing most of this, so... if I start picking my fruit (and vegetables) and learn to drive a garbage truck, what do I get in return?

[petra]

The Israeli Army is mostly made out of 18 year old people who get drafted for 3 years, reserves that come for a few weeks a month, and a small percent of career employees.

Many of those people fullfil complex , Critical roles, successfully.

But most of it's "employees" are easily replaceable.

So why won't this work in the general economy ?

[sooheon]

A draft does not guarantee efficiency or efficacy of work. The Korean military has a monopoly on labor of a certain age (and gender), any roles it needs will of course be filled, but from experience the arrangement is rather far from peak human output.

[perfmode]

the command structure consists of lifers.

[devcpp]

I can tell you that I gave my best during my 5 years at the IDF solely because I knew how well I would be paid afterwards if I did well, and I got directly hired at a FAANG. I can say the same about almost anyone I've known during my service across all programming units and beyond. Even the ones who knew they would stay did it for the chance to become Lt. Colonel and then director afterwards as a civilian. As for the ones claiming to be motivated by patriotism, they too usually ended up pursuing more lucrative venues.

As for IDF jobs with less potential, they are usually accomplished by people with fewer ambitions doing much less than their best and placed there because of that (think of military HR, secretaries, nurses, cleaners).

In short, there are no surprises. The Israeli military service is just a minor inconvenience in the path of ambition that is fueled by the capitalist spirit of the general economy, rather than being a replacement for it.

[petra]

Of course, today's context is capitalism, so it motivates many.

But there are other ways to motivate people.

If we're talking about a different , more utopian world, shouldn't we consider those ?

[harimau777]

What alternative do you suggest?

The alternatives that I can think of:

Enjoying the work and similar motivations: This tends to only apply to certain jobs. In addition, just because I'm intrinsically motivated to work on programming, for example, that doesn't mean that I'm motivated to program the things that society wants me to.

A sense of duty: I think this motivation tends to have limitations and is likely hard to achieve consistently without propaganda, nationalism, or a state religion.

Social status: Call me cynical, but I think this only works if someone can use their social status to get the things they want; in which case it doesn't seem that different from capitalism.

[petra]

In the old Jewish tradition, religious studies gave people high status, but also, because of the culture, were considered very valuable.

This meant that those who we're good religious students(a life long pursuit, and not financially rewarding) married the most desired women.

And that's just on culture.

So maybe there are ways to cretae a motivating culture .

[nerdponx]

The problem is fairly simple. The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable (ie fungibility is largely a myth).

Citation needed?

[iamnothere]

Or, perhaps those people could be rewarded in proportion to the value they deliver compared to others. You could then choose to live simply (but with life's essentials), working less, or alternatively you could work hard to obtain prestige and money.

You could say that our society works that way now, but there are innumerable pressures at work (many of them created by our public policy) that compel the less driven and the less capable to work ridiculous hours in "bullshit jobs" just to survive. It isn't necessary to compel less-skilled or less-interested people to work full-time just so that neurosurgeons will go to work. The people at the top of the skill pyramid get there because (a) they want to be seen as "the best" and (b) they want access to the money, power, and/or social prestige that comes with their chosen profession.

So many jobs are either not necessary or could be done in 1/4 the time. Our allocation of labor is massively inefficient, and it can't be just because we are afraid of making hard workers unhappy.

[perfunctory]

I am not really sure I understand what you are trying to say. 40 is not a magic number. Just like we once standardised workweek to be 40 hours, we can now (re)standardise it to be 32, or 16. Why not.

I've been working 4 days a week or less for more then 5 years already. No problems.

[brighter2morrow]

This is very interesting way to view it, but in my office there's a few people who do literally nothing and honestly I would like work more if they didn't have to be there.

[pm90]

I didn't truly understand how powerfully demotivating bad coworkers can be until I actually experienced them.

Good coworkers are encouraged and inspired when you do great work, or create automation that saves time and do more. Bad coworkers get jealous and feel threatened. if you're the kind of person who generally like to avoid conflict (most geeks fit this category), that alone is a powerful de-motivator .

[mrob]

Unproductive people must do pointless work or the productive people will be unhappy. But conversely, the productive people are paid less than the value they create, to keep the unproductive people happy. Why didn't Norman Borlaug die the richest man alive? Most people have never even heard of him. It's human instinct that only people of great social status are allowed great wealth. Obviously the CEO has to be paid more than the engineers, because the CEO has mastered the (zero sum) social status game. They were lucky enough to be born tall, attractive, well connected, sociopathic, intelligent, etc., and exploited their natural advantages. According to common sense this makes them a better and more deserving person.

There's an obvious positive sum trade: the useless people get to slack off (e.g. living on UBI), and in exchange the useful are paid commensurate with the value the produce. The useful are happy because they're fabulously rich, and the useless are happy because they're not the ones working so hard. The only real losers are the social status masters, and social status is positional, so they'll always be a small minority.

Unfortunately that small minority controls the cultural narrative. They can reinforce the natural human tendency to zero-sum thinking, and they can hold out the false hope that the useless can become successful parasites too. Everybody is born equal, so if you're not rich it must be because you didn't work hard enough! It's easy to fall for it when your brain is hard-wired with the just-world fallacy.

This combination of cognitive biases and active manipulation means I don't expect to see any improvement before environmental collapse renders the whole thing moot. The 1% rule and everybody else is either overworked or underpaid. You'd have to think like an economist to even see the possibility of escape, and who wants to do that?

[neilwilson]

"and in exchange the useful are paid commensurate with the value the produce. "

The trouble with that is that there is a fallacy of composition there. The only thing you can have in that system is more money. You can't have more stuff because by definition there is no more stuff being added to the pubic value pool.

And if you have more money, but the same amount of stuff, then all that happens is prices go up. Unless you believe more people than now value money for its own sake.

Trying to hide a transfer using a money illusion only works for so long. Then people work out they are being fiddled and have the system shut down politically. Which is historically what has happened in every single case it has been tried.

Alms to the poor is resented not just by those forced to provide the alms but by the poor themselves who resent being patronised and seen as useless.

Such systems are generally put forward by those who believe they can value signal to their peers by being the ones handling out the alms.

[scottlocklin]

> The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals that are not easily replicable

C'mon man, that's not even remotely true. Even taking the outlier; google, $360,000 revenue generated per employee. Big deal; I'm pretty sure a decent accounting firm creates more value per employee.

[Consultant32452]

I didn't read it as Google employees are productive while $othercorp employees are not. Even within google, things like Price's Law apply. Essentially half of all productivity is accomplished by the square root of the workers. So if Google has 10k developers. 100 of those developers are producing half of the value. The other 9,900 work together to produce the other half.

https://www.am1st.com/another-reason-companies-fail/

[scottlocklin]

I used the example of Google because it is a particularly productive company on a per-employee basis for a large company in a way that can be measured. Not that I think Google is awesome: I think they should be broken up, and its employees should consider their life choices that they continue to work for the Great Satan. FWIIW they have more like 100,000 employees.

The older I get, the less I believe in crap like Price's law. It sure seems like this in large and old organizations, but I can never point to the actually productive people. Some people appear to do nothing in a large group, but the group then falls apart when they leave/retire. In smaller groups, it definitely, trivially doesn't work like this.

[imgabe]

We are not in a static equilibrium. I don't think anyone believes we have reached an ideal state of technology where we don't need to progress any further. People who are not producing things that are immediately useful can be working to improve processes for building things, inventing new things, doing basic research, and supporting people who do that.

There's also the issue that the population is constantly growing and in flux in different areas. Nobody knows the exact right amount of stuff to make to serve everybody and underestimating can have dire consequences and get lots of people killed, so we can and should make more than might be necessary.

It's a huge oversimplification to say we just need 100 units of food so get the 5 people to make 20 units of food each and then we're good, no need for anyone else to work.

[kadendogthing]

How in the absolute fuck is this the top comment? There's so many platitudes stuffed side by side it just needs to be flagged.

That is to say: citation needed. For all of it.

[hedvig]

I agree. In that there are still U.S. fortunes that originate from slave ownership that have not been reciprocated

[_8j50]

> But why should they do that if nobody else is working? They could just make enough for the small set of people that are actually required to make enough stuff and stop work on Tuesday - having the rest of the week off.

Reward for the extra day worked? If top performers are rewarded more than everyone else and working the extra day or two is optional,everyone else can opt to not work the rewardless extra day while top performers opt to work a full week for the reward.

It's much like competitive shift jobs for waiters, the good performers get the hard well tipping shifts.

Does this simply not work at scale?

[hurryskurry]

Can you provide actual sources to support the claim that a very small number of people are responsible for output?

[doboyy]

The definition of a highly skilled worker kind of hinges on the fact that there are few. If everyone was skilled then we'd raise the bar.

Your argument makes sense, but I'm suspicious that there is that wide of a gap between the 2 classes of people described.

[jacobwilliamroy]

What about the slave laborers in foreign nations who produce raw materials and manufactured goods for the products consumed here in the U.S.? Surely they do the majority of the work?

[brighter2morrow]

No they don't. According to Amnesty International there's about 40million slaves in the world, which sounds like a lot until you realize that's only about 1% of the world's workforce. The reason they are slaves is not to make things cheaper forthe rest of us but because they live in corrupt societies that allow it. The amount of slaves in a country is highly correlated with that country's placement on the WBO's global corruption index.

[wavefunction]

The WBO's global corruption index surely fails to take into account inter-national corruption. That corrupt resource extraction requires people outside the country interested in purchasing the outputs.

[llamaz]

This is just Ayn Randian reactionary propaganda, a society based on these hateful ideas is not one I would want to live in.

[sonnyblarney]

"The actual output of society is produced by a relatively small minority of skilled individuals"

No, the majority of work is laborious and tedious and it's not a 'small number of people' doing it.

Do you realize how many retail service workers, customer service workers, restaurant servers, cooks, line pikers etc. there are?

This idea that somehow it's just a 'small number of folk working' is mythology.

And a lot of middle management is brutal - though it is often very inefficient, it's still essential.

Yes, a lot of jobs could dissapear overnight, but most could not.

[0815test]

That majority of work only accounts for a small portion of value on the margin. You could reduce that work quite a bit with very little overall effect. In fact, this could even increase total product since the unskilled do tend to be heavily liquidity- and risk-constrained, so freeing up some time and effort on their part (without the stress of involuntary unemployment!) would significantly incent them to do such things as retraining, starting businesses, entering formal education etc. etc. This is a major argument for UBI, in fact - which would work a lot better than cutting working time across the board by fiat!

[sonnyblarney]

"That majority of work only accounts for a small portion of value on the margin."

No, the surpluses yielded by consumers and profits by companies of those people 'doing the work' is vast.

If they stopped doing it it would be a nightmare.

We don't need resto servers to get English degrees, and then what, exactly? We need someone to do the resto serving.

If they 'start their own business', like 'a restaurant' ... well then they're still going to need servers!

If anything, wages could be increased for that cohort. Surely there's some opportunity for automation, but even then we still need people to do the work.

We all like the idea of 'education' and that everyone should have an opportunity for it, but there's simply quite a bit of work to be done, we should think about how to make it work better for everyone.

[pm90]

> we should think about how to make it work better for everyone

This is one of the strongest arguments that I can see in favor of more lenient immigration, specifically to larger countries like US and Canada.

The number of low-skilled laborers content with the current level of pay will keep decreasing, rendering businesses unsustainable. However, for whatever reasons, other countries are better at producing low skilled labor content with those wages. If they are so willing, they should be able to immigrate, allowing the more educated and more skilled native to work in more creative, leadership capacity. Purely from the monetary perspective, natives should see the immigrants as a win-win.

However, when Immigrants cultures or skin colors are seen as being different and not worthy of being assimilated into the country, cultural reasons influence the reasoning strongly.

[sonnyblarney]

In eras of low unemployment, yes, America can take in highly skilled migrants.

But in almost all eras (low and high employment) the import of unskilled workers into the US is probably bad. There are already tons of workers on the black market causing pricing weirdness and downward pressure on wages.

I think it's a primary driver of inequality. Recent interview on FT with direct of the Fed indicated for the first time in a long time, US companies are starting to actually 'train people', i.e. they will do this if necessary.

Some jobs Americans will do with the right wages and conditions. For those jobs Americans truly will not do - put them in other, cheaper countries, and let the surpluses go to those areas and villages, helping those people. It's much more fair that way, and more 'good' is created overall.

[0815test]

Isn't that argument even stronger for allowing the higher-skilled to immigrate? They give you a lot more bang for the same or lower effort spent on assimilation.

[pm90]

From the perspective of American society, yes.

From the perspective of Native born Americans, no. Because these skilled workers would be competing for similar jobs.

However, it’s possible that the Skilled Immigrants + Native Born Americans create a synergy that works even better, so IDK. It seems hard to do thought experiments with this stuff.

[0815test]

Did you miss the part where I was talking about effects on the margin, not just an arbitrary global change like 'they "just" stop doing it'? If the volume of that work were to drop by, say, 1% in value, product might drop by 0.1%. Or maybe, the unskilled workers' wages might rise to compensate, and then the skilled worker would no longer be so "scarce" compared to the unskilled worker. And you're very much underestimating the plausible effects of education or training. Maybe we don't need resto servers to get English degrees, but they might want to study some culinary-, food science- or hospitality-related track, and become more productive at the job they're already doing.

[pascalxus]

There's already a vast oversupply of high skilled non engineer white collar labor. Adding more would just exacerbate the situation

[0815test]

"Vast oversupply"? Wage levels/compensating differentials say otherwise. Plenty of highly-skilled (even STEM) workers are non-engineers, and they get high wages.

[dredmorbius]

Not in, to pick an arbitrary example, biotech.

[pascalxus]

I suspect there's price anchoring going on there. They don't actually need to pay such high wages. The unemployment rate amongst MBA people is over 30%.

[DuskStar]

> The unemployment rate amongst MBA people is over 30%.

I thought we were talking about skilled workers though?

(I kid, but only kinda)

[deadA1ias]

This is exactly right, and I wish I could have put it as succinctly as you. I fear it will take longer than expected for society to adapt to this dynamic.