| Yep. Apprenticeships solved this problem in the past (and of course created many others). Actually it’s almost a fun little exercise in economics. Basically there’s two types of efficiency, investment efficiency and allocative efficiency. (There may also be other types I don’t know about.) Investment efficiency means people are incentivized to make positive-expected-value investments. Think about how people are incentivized to invest in their house, e.g. preventative maintenance, because if the expected value is positive then they will recoup that value when they sell the house. If you’re renting you don’t have this with respect to where you live - water damage or no, not really the renter’s problem. Investment efficiency is maximized by private property, where you know that no one will take your property without your consent. Allocative efficiency means things go to whoever is willing/able to pay the most for them. Renting does have this property - if both of us want to rent a house, and I’m willing to pay more, in most cases I’ll end up getting the house. This is why gentrification can cause displacement - when wealthier people come into a city and are able to outbid the current renters, they win and the current renters lose. Allocative efficiency is maximized by auctions and things like them, where the good goes to whoever is willing to pay the most. Bringing it back to your comment, job training isn’t worth it because our careers as programmers are dominated by allocative efficiency, not investment efficiency. If you can train a programmer create $50,000/year more value in general (i.e. it’s not training that would only be useful to your company), they can now get paid about that much more from any of your competitors, and you will have to pay them about that much more to stop them from leaving. So you gain nothing from giving them general-skills training. Another way of solving this problem is with sectoral bargaining. If you have a sector-wide union, they can make all companies start training simultaneously, or assume some of the costs themselves. It’s a win-win for the industry and for the programmers, but it doesn’t happen nearly as much as it could because of that coordination problem. |
But it makes Reginald the investor angry that his ROI isn't exactly 20% each quarter, so they jettison apprenticeships and start cooking the books to make that possible.