[wafflemaker]

In Norway there's laws for that, but other places do it even without them. You just retrain the person to do something else. He might take a job of a temp that was hoping to get a fast contract (instead of a few weeks at a time during trial period). Other than that, it's good for the person (not losing job) but also for the company - you get a tried person with good work ethics that comes on time. It's not zero cost to find somebody like that.

[rincebrain]

A lot of places in the US are not, in my experience, that intelligent about hiring people.

Or, say rather, the externalities of the cost of hiring are not imposed on the people choosing to fire, directly, so they can say they "improved efficiency" by firing someone, and then the people trying to find reliable labor do not experience any improvement that might have been available by migrating the person.

[red-iron-pine]

agreed. the "lump of labour" fallacy is a thing -- the idea that there are always more bodies and that it's trivially easy to hire, train / get up to speed, and work them.

in practice hiring and firing is expensive and often very risky. Bjorn the office worker may now be redundant and have a room temperature IQ but he's shown he'll show up on time, sober, and is liked by his coworkers enough, so throwing $5k to retrain him may be a far, far smarter investment then blowing $7k to hire a rando for another position...

[fragmede]

Yeah the bar for competent is surprising hard to hit. A human being that shows up on time and it's reliable, doesn't have a problem with drugs or alcohol, or has a sick family member and just needs an advance. Good help is hard to find!

[eloisant]

If you're only getting those kind of candidates, then your job offer isn't attractive enough.

[red-iron-pine]

then the pendulum swings the other way and now I have ruthless mercenaries chasing $$$ who will jump at the first opportunity

and not every job needs to be top-shelf.

Betty in Accounts-Payable just sorta needs to be there and not screw up too often. I don't need a super-star, and if we have to move her to another part of Accounting that's fine; I'll save my money for a solid CPA or two, etc.

[yamakadi]

I understand the rest, but an otherwise capable person with a sick family member does not clear the bar for competent? Saddening if that’s where we are as a society.

[strken]

I think the key part of that sentence was "...and just needs an advance", implying that they're going to take the job, ask for a cash advance for a (possibly fictional) sick family member, and immediately quit.

[virtue3]

It’s hard for some people to understand that situation until they are in it. Unfortunately.

Totally agree with you.

[_heimdall]

Why do the laws exist if its better for (almost) everyone involved? Without the laws why would people not do it that way if its the better approach?

[abdullahkhalids]

Many laws solve the problem of high initial cost dissuading globally good actions. Laws forcing everyone to buy insurance, for example. It's very easy to see that where such laws don't exist, almost no one buys insurance, making everyone worse off.

This is also an example of the same kind of law.

[_heimdall]

Insurance is an interesting example, I would have expected one that causes more direct harm to others like drunk driving.

How are we all worse off when fewer people have insurance?

[koliber]

Healthy young people are less likely to buy insurance than sick older people. But if only sick older people buy insurance the payouts per insured are going to be higher. That in turn causes high premiums. Insurance works if everyone buys in, pays while they are young and relatively healthy, and gets paid healthcare when they are older and sicker.

If you “game” it, it breaks the whole system.

Now some of you might be thinking “why should a young and healthy guy like myself subsidize the old sick people?” The answer is that you will also get old.

[_heimdall]

What you are describing isn't really private insurance though, its a privately run socialized healthcare system. There's nothing wrong with that, it simply isn't insurance.

[koliber]

You're right. However, all insurance needs to get more in premiums than it pays out in claims in order to be viable. The details will differ about whether there is some kind of bias for certain people to pay more and claim less. With socialized healthcare, the coverage is just much broader and there is less room for "gaming" the system.

[abdullahkhalids]

Think of something like home owner insurance. Your insurance rates depend on exactly how your home is built, what type of heating system it has, where it is, etc. The rates, carefully calculated by actuaries, act as a signal to you as to how dangerous your house is to yourself, but also to others. If you set your house on fire due to negligence and cause the next house to burn, you might be liable for damages there as well.

Forcing everyone to buy such insurance forces everyone to fully pay for the expected cost of the danger inherent in their house. Over time, this causes houses to be constructed in a safer manner. If people are not forced to buy insurance, they don't buy it, and so this evolution over time does not happen. Also see [1].

Some financial tools are amazingly clever - whether they are morally good or bad. Bits about Money is a great blog to build insight into some of these constructions [2].

Another example for your initial question is car seats for kids. If you don't force em, nobody buys em. Then their kids die.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

[2] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/

[_heimdall]

For the insurance example, you're describing insurance as a forcing function for better made, safer buildings. That's what building codes are for though, we shouldn't need to have both and building codes are a more efficient and direct way of ensuring safe buildings.

For car seats, I'm not sure how we could know that people wouldn't buy them. I don't expect anyone would propose dropping the requirement to see how the market responds, and probably rightfully so. If car seats are much safer though (and I'm obviously not disputing that), people that can afford one would buy it anyway.

[abdullahkhalids]

> ... building codes...

I agree that in an ideal world that would be sufficient. But in practice, governments rarely deploy trained actuarial to make decisions, rather relying on politics and shoddy studies. Government codes also change very slowly. Insurance companies (whether private or public), under the financial incentive, are constantly changing their policies and rates in response to new data and calculations. I would be open to looking at studies that resolve this question one way or another.

> ... car seats...

I grew up in a poor global south country. Rich people, who clearly can afford them, don't buy car seats. Many people who live in countries where they are forced to buy car seats, when they come back on vacation don't use car seats for their kids. People can be very irrational.

[wafflemaker]

Norway has very strict pro-workers laws in general, it's just one facet of them. One Norwegian explained it to me like that: in the late '60 when Norwegian oil industry started developing, workers realized that they can incur great losses on the companies if they organize/unionize and strike together. They used that as a leverage to both change their contracts (to include paid sick leave and such) and also get better working conditions (Norwegian platforms have both better safety and on platform to on land ratio).

And later other trades did the same. Some of the things in contracts trickled down to the law. But still some laws apply only to companies where at least a certain % (is it 50%?) are unionized.

The general picture is more or less like that, but please verify the details.