[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)