[photon12]

Yes, there is an inconsistency in the amount of effort expended to survive versus the outcomes of that effort. I can't reconcile them in my head. I'm watching my friend trying not to physically deteriorate and have some modicum of comfort while I sit here on my couch living off savings from the job I recently quit. Nothing I do can be so much more valuable than what he does.

[lotsofpulp]

One can define effort in that way, and arrive at the conclusion you did, but it is not what cognitive dissonance is typically used to mean.

But that definition of effort as it relates to the ability to “survive” does not seem useful to me. It takes a lot of effort to manually dig a ditch compared to using an excavator, but you would not pay the person that shows up with a shovel more than the person that shows up with an excavator.

Edit: this is not intended to say your friend does not deserve a better pay to quality of life (QoL) ratio. However, the fact that you have a comparably favorable pay to QoL and they have an undesirable pay to QoL ratio means society does not want more people to be selling that labor, but rather more people to be selling your labor.

[photon12]

I used to dig ditches in places where excavators couldn't go for a living, and I'm familiar with the contract rate differences for that type of labor and equipment.

My point is that the disparity is such a chasm that my brain can't reconcile it. We aren't talking about ditch digging, we are talking about serving food to the people of Seattle. All the software engineers in Seattle, in my experience, love to frequent dining establishments. Their quality of life is dependent on the labor of people serving them. There's no way I can accept the disparity as "just the way it is." My gut can't take it.

[theonlybutlet]

Not really in response to your comment, but there is an assumption from those commenting on your post. In that the labour market is a perfect market. When in truth it is far from it. There's systemic issues such as imperfect information, misallocated risk (they don't know what the market rate is for their work/they're too scared to look for another job) , and friction such as monopoly, oligopoly and legislation. And then after all to consider labour isnt your typical resource, people do not simply disapear when they become obsolete, they need to eat.

[lotsofpulp]

Seattle real estate is some of the most desirable in the world. It very well could be that owning (and renting) land there could be so expensive, that food service workers having a higher pay to QoL ratio means eating out is “unaffordable” for most people in the Seattle area (under current quantities of housing).

I put “unaffordable” in quotes because eating out is easily replaced by eating at home, or eating frozen dinners, etc, so restaurants do not have the pricing power they might need to allow the food service workers to have decent pay to QoL ratio in a place like Seattle.

[uoaei]

I think you are missing the point.

The other commenter is not confused about why things are the way they are. They understand these things already, obviously they think about it a lot. You explain it, they agree that things are that way due to the reasons you describe, but that does not explain why the disparity ought to exist.

[lotsofpulp]

Sorry, my original intent was to inform that they were not experiencing cognitive dissonance, as typically defined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

[FollowingTheDao]

This is what a profit driven society does. I am not condemning it, but that is just the reality.

If you had to pay more at their restaurant then your quality of life (profit) will go down.

I am glad you are still human and your gut cannot take it. Maybe look at using some of your savings to help the chef start a coop restaurant?

[SoftTalker]

So give the guy some money?

[Firmwarrior]

I guess the answer is to pay $150 for a medium-quality meal for one, that way we don't have to build any more high rise apartments

[giraffe_lady]

Everyone trying to convince you to be ok with this but no, you have seen it correctly and it is wrong. People can work themselves to death doing jobs that benefit us, and what they receive for it is misery and precarity. Trust your own judgement and don't accept this as a natural, inevitable, or just state.

[lotsofpulp]

Then how do you allocate who gets to live in a highly desirable place like Seattle?

[Firmwarrior]

I think you're both right actually

The answer is very simple. They just need to tear down a small fraction of those endless twisting mazes full of tiny single-family homes and replace them with large apartment buildings like you see in Asia. Right now there's no free market at work, since there are too many artificial restrictions on building.

In Tokyo, you can work part time as a janitor and still live within a 10 minute train ride to work.

[giraffe_lady]

Would it even be highly desirable without any of the restaurants, retail and other services that don't provide a high enough wage to live there? My guess is that for a lot of the people living there now the answer is no.

We require these services but don't don't provide an acceptable living to those offering them, expecting them to sacrifice their health and comfort for our benefit.

I don't have a solution to how to "allocate" who "gets to" live in a certain city, and it's not in my role or expertise to. But the problem exists currently regardless of that, and what we do have is not a solution.

[lotsofpulp]

> Would it even be highly desirable without any of the restaurants, retail and other services that don't provide a high enough wage to live there?

My guess is yes. Temperate weather, world class scenery, cheap electricity, clean water, a convenient deep and protected harbor, and a productive workforce.

All are subject to change of course, but that combination precludes the existence of businesses with low elasticity of demand (and hence higher value). The luxuries like restaurants and retail follow after those other businesses.

Of course, they do enhance the desirability, and it very well could be that rents are too high in the short term, and that landlords are making Seattle less desirable in the near future, but that is always a dynamic relationship.

[uoaei]

This perspective is key, in my view. In short, we have a supremely myopic and isolated view on what "accounting" is.

Value is defined based on counterfactuals, similar to opportunity cost -- if that thing didn't exist, what would be the effect on the local economy? My suspicion is that if you price all the chefs out of a downtown, no one will like spending their time (and therefore money) there, and it will die. So if the singular act of removing chefs collapses an entire economic engine, then their value is defined as the economic activity before their removal minus the economic activity after their removal.

[yeahwhatever10]

The correlation between effort expended and outcome is misguided. The plow takes more effort than the tractor and produces a worse outcome.

[steveBK123]

Any job where the amount of labor has a fixed proportion to the possible economic output will at best track inflation.

Software can pay well because the code you write can service 100, 1K, 1M, or 1B customers.. with some time spent on scaling.

There's not much a single chef can do such that their labor which serves 100 tables/night can suddenly scale to serve 1000 tables/night.

The only way the replicate that kind of outcome in restaurant trade is to for example, open multiple restaurants with investor capital, hire cheaper chefs as your understudy to run each location, while you set menus, standards, and find efficiency on things like procurement, accounting, lease deals, etc.

Other options are to move more aggressively into some sort of profitable takeaway menu, selling food kids, branded merchandise, etc.

[secabeen]

Yes, this. Doctors and Lawyers do pretty well, but they delegate a lot of stuff to paralegals, associates, PAs and nurses, so that they can focus on the high-value work. The work itself in those fields also generates a lot of value either in a legal decision that can scale with the business, or a life saved, so they can capture a lot of that value. It doesn't matter how good a meal you can make, it's not going to give someone 5 more years of life or keep them out of jail for 5 years.

[czbond]

I mean... that's life. What schools should teach is not just "here is a career that matches you're skills" - but more so, "if you choose this career, these are the most probable outcomes and life paths you'll end up in"

If AI takes engineering, medical, and law work away from those professionals - they too could have spent many hours to learn, to then earn little.

Every human has worth, but we all value the type of work differently.

[giraffe_lady]

"that's life" like this is an inevitable fact of the universe we must live with? No, this is the world we have made. To some extent you have to come to terms with it and find a place to live within it, yes. But those terms can be "this sucks, this is wrong, it should change" which it seems that's where the other commenter is headed.

[czbond]

I don't disagree with your sentiment and the need for that effort, but the probability path is that since the medieval times or longer this has been attempted with no long term success. Make bets on the most probable until real change has occurred.

[pcthrowaway]

Medical and Legal are 2 of the last professions that are likely to get automated.

Lawyers are entirely composed of people who can legislate away the threat of AI practicing law (taking their jobs)

And robots aren't known for their bedside manner yet. Also, there's a lot of liability in practicing medicine, which companies would probably be unwise to take on

[czbond]

Counter argument:

Law AI will be used for case defense prep, argument creation, research, analysis (essentially what law graduates and non-partner style attorneys do) as cost savings / ROI enhancement. Attorneys will have to specialize in mostly customer facing / court facing roles. This will cut the staff needed to perform those duties.

Real Law AI change will have to be consumer driven.

Medical AI.... with so much malpractice & liability, AI will reduce those risks for practicioners, increase ROI to practiciioners (less payments to insurance), and also require back office practicioners to become more customer facing. Maybe instead of 10 radiologists, you can use 1.

Medical AI will be used on low tier ailments (eg: urgent care headaches, etc) to help nurses see more cases, etc - initially replacing the low end work. Doctors can then have a more normal schedule, but feed a collective AI model to where 1 doctor can then oversee 50...200 cases. Those models will first be rolled out to developing countries until a generation of doctors in the US are dwindled except in emergency care situations.

[lotsofpulp]

That is how it is already going with physician assistants and nurse practitioners, as I understand. Instead of 1 doctor seeing 20 patients in a day, 1 doctor “oversees” a bunch of PA/NP each seeing 20 patients in a day.

[pcthrowaway]

We do still have massive doctor shortages though (at least here in Canada) so I wouldn't worry about doctors not having jobs any time soon

It's gotten pretty ugly with provinces trying to poach doctors from other provinces, competing with each other to offer incentives to entice doctors from other provinces