Companies offer part-time jobs instead of full-time ones because then they don't need to offer benefits that are required for a full-time job. In other words, the current rules of the game are directly incentivizing this behavior.
The incentive can be very easily removed by legislating that a part-time job would need to offer a fraction of the benefits proportional to the amount of hours the employee works per week.
Ideally, there should be some sort of a credit transfer mechanism, where an employee working multiple part-time jobs that combine to 40+ hours a week could get benefits equivalent to a full-time job at one of the workplaces, proportionally covered by all employers.
Another option would be to crack down on monopolies and large chains. If you employ 10000 corporate drones, who are expected to follow the same corporate instructions day-to-day and can be swapped out by a fresh hire without any loss of productivity, they by definition don't have any economic leverage. On the other hand, if the same market niche is occupied by 1000 independent 10-employee companies, the overall efficiency is lower, but the leverage of each employee (and the salary they can negotiate through supply/demand) is higher. Because in a smaller company you are someone the owner trusts to delegate part of their business, and not just a line on the spreadsheet.
Why not just get rid of the connection between employer and benefits? Employer pays cash, tax system allow people to manage roth/health/etc accounts based on caps and percentages of earned income.
If the free market was supposed to handle the distortion of employer benefit programs, then every employee would need to monitor their employer's yearly benefit negotiations such that 10-20% of them would be giving notice on the basis of any negative benefit change. That isn't happening.
If folks are losing their jobs (assuming they don't have a nest egg which the majority of Americans do not have) how will they be better off being personally unable to pay for health care instead of losing access to their employer provided insurance to pay for healthcare?
Also - a lot of these benefits are things we'd generally consider "necessary" - if that's the case why would we open the door wider to allowing folks to continue being paid 7.25/hr and now not even have a chance at ever seeing a doctor?
Or, if that money is personally controlled is it going to be secured against debt repayment? Will individuals have a guaranteed right to pay for medical care before any paycheck garnishing?
We already have unemployment insurance, it’s easy to imagine something like government assisted cobra for recent job loss.
We already have Medicaid for people who are chronically poor.
It’s possible to decouple healthcare from a specific employer without moving to single payer or similar. I often like to point to Germany to show there is are much more varied solutions that can be tried than people are likely to say.
Conflating all these different ideas makes it harder to find an optimal solution, IMO.
Single bidder though. A reverse dutch auction in each market region for qualified providers to offer services, and if the price in that market isn't desired then short term bring in the military docs, and longer term fund the education of more doctors with the provision that they resettle among the target areas needing coverage.
The problem with USA's private healthcare system is that it refuses to train enough doctors. You're supposed to overproduce doctors to drive prices down.
I don't think so - the implication I read from "Pay me more and let me control my money." was an entirely private individual insurance market. If I misread the comment my apologies.
I had the same impression, which is an insane idea. The reason people should have universal healthcare and universal pensions and so on is to use society's size to shield everyone from individual risks.
Swiss American here. It's not insane [1]. The state of healthcare in America is so poor, I would caution us from referring to anything as insane without empirical evidence.
If people are arguing over what I meant, this system is the one I was thinking of.
The US already implemented tax penalties on no-coverage and could adapt them to be auto-enrollement in basic coverage at a high deductible.
I have nothing against single payer, but I don't think it is worth fighting for the details of it in the US system when it can be emulated like it is in Switzerland.
(But for pricing to be fair, the more important problem in to reverse the incentive for removing lower risk individuals into group plans and make sure everyone is considering the actual price of their insurance.)
It's not too unreasonable if we could also have a transparent, competitive, reasonably priced healthcare market. Doing that would require a lot of changes to how we conduct medical school admissions, residency, and medical licensing that'd be fought tooth & nail by the healthcare industry, though.
I don't believe a transparent healthcare system is realistically achievable without essentially moving over to full government control - I wrote up a thing above[1] if it's of interest.
Part of the issue is that the insurance pool needs to include low risk individuals to work.
If everyone under 30 says “I won’t shell out for private insurance, and if something catastrophic happens, fuck it, I’ll declare bankruptcy”, the system falls apart for everyone. Unpopular as it is, this is the logic behind the ACA mandate.
It’s a terrible outcome, unless you’re rich enough not to care about insurance to begin with. You get coverage that’s unaffordable for higher risk people who need it, and uninsured “healthy” people one stroke of bad luck away from disaster.
That isn’t insurance. You don’t need low-risk people in the pool for insurance to work. Insurance premiums are technically derived from individual risk, not the risk of an arbitrary pool. Pooling is only done to reduce the tail risk of the underwriter, it doesn’t materially change individual premiums.
You do need low-risk people in the pool if you want low-risk people to subsidize the insurance premiums of high-risk people. That is not insurance, that is just socializing the premiums of high-risk individuals. These distinctions matter when discussing policy. Socializing medical costs may be the appropriate policy choice but lets not smuggle it in by abusing a term of art like “insurance” which means something very different.
That is how your employer provided plan works, however. They negotiate a rate for the whole group, not an individual medical workup and premium for each individual.
If you want to move away from that to “just pay me the equivalent comp directly and I’ll get my own insurance”, rates are going to get ugly.
If you only get insurance once it is too late it is not insurance either. Insurers have a financial incentive to avoid paying for expensive care. If early or preventative care is cheaper they will administer it while you are "healthy".
Was hoping a Republican Congress and President would at least attempt health care market reforms, but that didn’t happen.
Would be happy with a government run plan, too, just want our government to make some attempt to address the problem, whether from the left or the right.
If you use a market to reduce cost of healthcare, it'll reduce cost for easy to treat conditions by extracting maximum profit from more difficult or rare conditions.
Healthcare being a fundamental right, this fails by not ensuring people with rare conditions get it.
I don't know the details so I appreciate your comment. You cannot have privatized healthcare while simultaneously restricting the supply of medical professionals. That's not a free market. It's welfare for specific individuals.
The biggest drivers of health care cost have little to do with physicians, their training, or licensing although they do all contribute a bit. So to make any impact you'd need a much bigger list of things to change.
I was maybe underemphasizing the labor costs - it's a real contribution. But you are right that everything is more expensive, and it's pretty interconnected. Big contributors: fee for service incentives, administration overhead, end of life care, inefficiencies due to fragmentation and licensing, insurance inefficiency (not the profit margin, but the tracking/coding level of detail), over subscription of expensive (e.g. capital heavy) procedures, pharmaceutical costs.
I agree - but the comment above was, AFAICT specifically advocating for removing both Large and Small Group insurance pools provided by employers from the equation. Folks currently get insurance from a variety of sources, Medicare, Medicaid, Military Tri-care, Fed/State/County Insurance, Self-funded plans - there's a lot of variety here. I believe the comment above was advocating for closing Small and Large Group coverage (and probably self-funded pools as well) in favor of those customers being dumped on the Individual market which does exist - and does definitely have it's own problems.
Oh, and the Individual insurance market predates the ACA and healthcare.gov - it was much harder to navigate before the ACA due to the pre-condition exclusions but there were a variety of plans on offer to individuals.
>I believe the comment above was advocating for closing Small and Large Group coverage (and probably self-funded pools as well) in favor of those customers being dumped on the Individual market which does exist - and does definitely have it's own problems.
The only problems I know of in the individual market are due to the fact that so many healthy lives are locked up in the government/small/large business group plans. If everyone, and I mean everyone was dumped onto the market, then there would be sufficient healthy lives to balance the whole situation. Basically, it would be the same as taxpayer funded healthcare, except you get to choose your insurance company.
>Oh, and the Individual insurance market predates the ACA and healthcare.gov - it was much harder to navigate before the ACA due to the pre-condition exclusions but there were a variety of plans on offer to individuals.
The individual market pre-ACA and the one that exists now are completely different. It's actually possible to compare different insurances in the one that exists post ACA due to standardization and certain stipulations for being ACA compliant.
>so many healthy lives are locked up in the government/small/large business group plans
Well, that and the fact that many young individuals who don't have health issues, aren't making much money, and aren't covered by employer plans are often opting out of paying $7K/yr or whatever for health care.
Employers require employees to pay for health insurance and subject them to deductibles and copays just like healthcare.gov. The government even pays for a portion of most of the health insurance premium under certain income amounts, so it’s not any different than people with health insurance via employers.
Also, bronze level health insurance is closer to $300 per month for young people, or $3,600 per year.
I don’t disagree. But the basic point is that a lot of younger people in poorly paying jobs still consider, whether one agrees or not, health insurance as being more than they’re willing to pay for.
Yes, I agree that there should be no tax benefits for employer's providing matching contributions to retirement accounts they can restrict investment options for.
I recently hit this up in Canada with a matched group RRSP which has a heavily restricted panel of options for investment and while contributions are matched and the transfer fees aren't too steep they are there and intended to capture clients within their spread of options.
I would prefer if group retirement plans had more flexibility on in/out flow and had to legitimately compete with the open market.
I'm not sure if you meant it this way, but way benefits work you'd actually be getting paid less (total compensation), as one of the driving forces behind benefits packages is it costs the company less than it would for you to get it on your own.
If you are happy with cash salary + (what benefits cost the company ) rather than the bigger cash salary + (nominal value of benefits) then this can work, but you have also be happy with the idea that some of the benefits you are used to become less (or un) affordable to you.
You're assuming that those "benefits" aren't something that can could leverage the scale of an entire country's government. The biggest example of a benefit that's cheaper for a company to provide in bulk is healthcare, and basically every developed country has demonstrated that it's cheaper to let the government handle that. Pensions, paid days off, childcare, and others all make sense to provide at a societal level rather than relying on a company to do right by its employees.
I hear this point a lot about the power of group purchasing. If everyone purchased their own insurance the market would be larger and be able to offer larger discounts.
Doing it at the company level doesn't make sense. Companies with larger sizes have better leverage under this model.
Would the purchasing power be greater at the state level or federal level?
I don’t think it’s purchasing power so much as risk pool. Or really a bit of both, it’s number of healthy vs unhealthy people in the pool. Employees of a company tend to be healthier. People on ACA tend to be part time / low wage, and have more health issues. Insurance companies pass that through by charging based on risk. I imagine what would happen is this would average out, the total cost(including employer contribution) would go up for most of the hn crowd who can afford it, but down for others who currently can’t
I would like this. It would simplify how I manage my own finances. For example, my 401(K), healthcare, dental, and insurance plans are all tied into poorly made apps I have to manage through an employee dashboard.
On the other hand, my personal finances are pretty easily managed through much better apps and services I selected myself.
If I just received cash compensation, I could manage my own finances much more easily.
Companies often select benefits providers based on ease-of use for the corporate customer rather than the end user. Shifting the purchasing decision to the end user will change incentives for the benefits providers.
Unfortunately moving that bargaining to the individual level would also result in a lack of negotiating power. What with forced arbitration and restrictions on class action suits being a thing the legal system can't properly serve a large number of individual bargainers that all individually suffered small damages in a just manner.
Collective bargaining comes with a lot of benefits - doing it at the employer level is just extremely unfortunate for jobless persons.
This might have been true before the internet, but it’s completely unnecessary now that it is trivial to shop and compare prices for insurance and investment funds.
There’s tons of near zero cost investment options from Vanguard/Schwab/Fidelity, you can go to healthcare.gov for health insurance, and you can go to term4sale for life insurance, etc, etc.
The only difference nowadays is that employers large enough to do non discrimination testing and handle the paperwork have an unfair advantage over small business and individuals by being able to compensate people with tax free benefits, whereas small business and individuals can’t.
I work in a healthcare adjacent business and while there is a large amount of information out there and a lot of market participants it isn't nearly enough information to make an informed decision. Whether a drug you currently use will be reimbursed at your local pharmacy and about what your out of pocket cost will be is entirely opaque to the consumer - it's even opaque to drug manufacturers and, in many cases, the precise cost is opaque to insurers until the pharmacy actually states their fill cost to the insurer for reimbursement - and these charges are arbitrary and continuously in flux.
When shopping for individual insurance you're trying to balance a lot of future unknowns - will you puncture your kidney in the next year and need dialysis? How likely is it and how much is 50% POC (Price of Charge) coverage worth to you? Are you going to need an oncological drug due to a sudden cancer diagnosis - those can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars a month - I hope you don't accidentally choose an insurance that covers treatment for all variants of cancer except the one you need treated.
The health insurance market is insanely opaque and most employers pick a reasonable plan and, when that plan inevitably refuses to cover a necessary procedure for their employee - they bitch and moan at the company over the phone and leverage their collective bargaining. There are also some really good reasons that the ACA didn't extend the individual market as a replacement for medicare since those insanely expensive and obscure treatments get more likely as you age.
Right now we're sorta surviving on insurance supplemented by go-fund-me and good will but that's a terrible system. Sudden insane health expenses can happen to you - I hope they don't, I wish they didn't happen to anyone - but our current system treats most folks decently well and really screws over a select few, and not due to any particularly stupid decisions on their part in most cases.
Collective bargaining is most useful when the 'little guy' has few options, or the switching costs are very high. Consumers seem to do well when purchasing other types of insurance, and I think they'd do well to get rid of the principal agent problem (if they can keep the tax benefits).
I think the biggest problems with employer-provided benefits come at the 'employment transients' (i.e. the time just after leaving jobs and while getting new ones).
If group pricing were eliminated and levels of coverage standardized for a universal open enrollment period then pricing would be consumer oriented and most would be extremely competitive.
HR people can only get numbers from a small number of insurers after an excessive amount of time and have leverage as weak as someone buying a new car.
Coverage standardization would be an absolute game changer - but at that point that standard of coverage is being dictated by someone - either a cartel of the insurers or the government. It's much more likely to be done by the government but if that's the case then you essentially have medicare for all except you have a bunch of private bureaucrats in the middle draining money out of the system and adding no value.
If the precise definition of the product is dictated by the government then what differentiation are the insurers actually providing that adds value to the equation. Right now insurers actually do do a fair amount of good work trying to assess treatment efficacy and ensure that their customers get the best outcomes within a reasonable budget. If coverage is standardized then they're just acting as a pool of money - cash goes in, it comes out, occasionally one of the pools will go bankrupt and catastrophe will befall a lot of folks - or else the government will step in and save it so... why not just let the government run it?
Insurer's roles would be marginalized to competing on doing just enough administration and estimating/negotiating cost/pricing.. They also would still have incentives to cut costs as they get temporary benefits of cost cutting until copied by the other insurers. It's not a lot but it is areas medicare has problems with (and pricing would get harder still without a reference private market) and retaining a private layer is more compatible with the politics of the US even when it is a pure cost.
Insurers have actuaries to make sure they don't go bankrupt. They would be plenty happy to just sit there as middle men skimming off a cut forever. With standardization of care it becomes a lobbing fight as every other player in the industry, plus various groups representing the public, are also working to get that standard to cover everything imaginable. This already happens with state minimum coverage requirements.
That's great until you or someone in your household has a pre-existing condition, then you're hosed. Either you can't find coverage or the coverage you can find is both poor and unaffordable. The way that people with pre-existing conditions get health insurance in a company, as is, is through batch purchase of coverage. This isn't on the table through a single purchase agreement, which is what the great "free market" solution offers.
There are places where the free market is fantastic, but emergency services, like the fire department, police services and health care, seem odd places for nongovernmental intervention. Emergency services, foreign relations, trade, taxation and border disputes are what the government signed up for and they seem the least functional at the first two. 60% is a pretty non functional average.
It's been 10+ years since insurers have been required to provide health insurance to anyone that wants it, regardless of pre existing conditions.
The only thing ACA compliant health insurance can price health insurance is on age, and even that is set so the oldest person's premiums can only be 3x a 21 year old's premiums. I.e. health insurers are made to force younger and/or healthier people to subsidize older and/or unhealthier people.
The amount paid by an employer for its employees' benefits is much smaller than the sum of what all employees would have to pay for the same benefits if they were to sign up as individuals.
Employers (ie a group of employees) go through a broker to get benefits. The broker (ie a group of employers) goes to insurance carriers to get good prices for benefits. There is power in numbers.
In principle I completely agree with you, it drives me nuts to change my benefits every time I change my employment, but it would take a while for the "invisible hand" to do its job. If tomorrow, employers start giving employees the cash they spend on benefits, there would be a massive gap in premium that employees would need to cover.
This is why we need a public option for health care. There is no reason the price of healthcare should change if you lose/switch your job (you could be buying in to the same insurance plan).
It’s an accident of US labor rights history that benefits are so tightly coupled to the employer; most other developed countries don’t do it like this and get more favorable prices for similar coverage quality.
There’s been only garbage replies to your question, which is really unfortunate. In reality, we aren’t that far away from being able to do this.
If you are a 1099/gig worker and file your taxes with a schedule C, you’re almost certainly eligible for a SEP-IRA (1). This is way better than a 401k; you can contribute up to 25% of your income (max $57k per year) pretax with all the same investment options as any other retirement plan. Sure, it could be made easier to setup, but it’s been around forever and works. What we need to do is say that if you have an employer who does not provide a [baseline] retirement plan, you are eligible for the SEP-IRA on all income from that employer.
The Covid-19 relief legislation established unemployment assistance for 1099/gig workers with federal backing and administered by the states. This should be kept around, improved, and made sustainable (add a line to the Schedule SE for paying the same kind of unemployment taxes that businesses pay on behalf of employees).
Obamacare allowed for association-based health plans and the Trump administration approved one of them. I don’t recall the details or the current status, but that’s a start in the right direction. Employers pay a lot of money for health plans and their size allows them to negotiate better deals. We need that leverage outside of employers and plenty of other improvements, but at least we have the basics.
Even just eliminating the whole 401(k) shit show by converting them to IRAs and raising the contribution limits for IRAs to ~$25k (roughly the sum total of what a W2 employee can contribute to an IRA + 401(k) combined) would solve the retirement account problem fairly efficiently. I'd be willing to bet that could be accomplished with approximately a page or two of legislation.
Edit: The problem is "lack of political will," i.e.. lack of people or corporations willing to hire lobbyists to make it happen.
Edit 2: While we're at it, why not just let everybody make Roth contributions, at least up to the amount one could contribute to an IRA? Let's just get rid of the whole "backdoor Roth" shenanigans and let people contribute directly.
Just a nit pick: The limit on total employer and employee contributions to a 401(k) is $58,000 in 2021, which includes the $19,500 elective deferral, employer matches, and post-tax contributions. If the "401(k) shit show" was eliminated, I'd hope it would be replaced with similar contribution limits.
To your point about backdoor Roth shenanigans, they aren't really shenanigans, they are legit and IRS-sanctioned. Shenanigans kind of implies you're doing something morally questionable.
Fair point. Raising the total contribution limit from all sources to $58k + $6k, without differentiating between individual and other contributions would totally make sense. It's an implementation detail, but a significant one, to be sure. :-)
There's been the virtual elimination of new private sector defined benefit pensions. Which isn't even entirely a bad thing. Leaving aside issues of benefits being cut in some cases, it was always a system that was designed around people staying decade+ in the same job. And between that and SS in the US, people didn't have much choice for a huge chunk of their savings.
The problems is the various defined contribution schemes were never introduced in a systematic way as you say. 401(k)'s history is particularly unplanned.
The other component is decoupling health care and dental insurance from employment. Because that's a far bigger problem than retirement. A lot of people lost their jobs last year and suddenly had to pay full price on their insurance to keep going to their doctor.
The whole insurance system in the US is best described as a real-life re-enactment of The Trial by Franz Kafka.
Dental insurance isn't really insurance. It's a benefit that exists mostly because it's tax advantaged. [1] Health insurance is, of course, really insurance. With Obamacare the biggest issue is probably that it's really expensive to pay for a good insurance plan (or even a not so good insurance plan) on your own. Though, honestly, not so cheap even with employer participation.
[1] By not really insurance, I mean that most people with it (especially older people) may consider it a nice perk but it doesn't really protect them from out-of-pockets they can't afford.
There is nothing simple. You just have to accept this. It’s really appealing to create the perfect system, but it is just not going to happen. I’m sorry. It’s not going to happen.
> If you are a 1099/gig worker and file your taxes with a schedule C, you’re almost certainly eligible for a SEP-IRA (1). This is way better than a 401k
Not if your spouse works for an employer that offers a 401k.
You're free to do that. I have life insurance and disability insurance that are not linked to my employer. I haven't pulled the trigger on health insurance because I've heard it's super expensive but maybe I will someday.
Socialism creates another bunch of perverse incentives. If you let a central system manage everyone's funds without competing against dozens of other parallel systems, the management's incentive would be to appropriate as much of the funds as possible as management expenses, as long as they won't be called out and fired/jailed.
In the current climate, they would create numerous equity and social justice committees, making sure that everyone gets a personalized pat on the back and 10% of the population will get a small bonus, while 50% of the funds will be spent on the friends of the management sitting in the committees. Anyone trying to call out the corruption will be immediately called racist/sexist by the media, and the economic state of an Average Joe will continue declining at even faster pace.
>In the current climate, they would create numerous equity and social justice committees, making sure that everyone gets a personalized pat on the back and 10% of the population will get a small bonus, while 50% of the funds will be spent on the friends of the management sitting in the committees.
Huh? We currently have a "single payer" health insurance system in the United States. It's called Medicare[0].
And the administrative costs of that system are ~17 times less (~2% for Medicare and ~34% for private insurers[2]) than that of the administrative costs of private insurers[1].
As such, I'm not really sure how you're assessing this. I'd add that administrative expenses for other national healthcare systems are also much lower (Canada ~17%[2]) than private insurers.
Please provide examples and data for your assertions. I'd certainly like to see such data and information, as it doesn't comport with the data and analyses I've seen.
> If you let a central system manage everyone's funds without competing against dozens of other parallel systems, the management's incentive would be to appropriate as much of the funds as possible as management expenses.
How is this different than the current US situation across multiple industries, especially in the medical field? Except that in the case of socialism you can actually vote the leadership out while under the current oligarchy your only recourse is to complain on Twitter.
>How is this different than the current US situation across multiple industries, especially in the medical field?
The current mess with the medical field happens because the hospitals can charge you whatever they think you can afford to pay. You can't compare quotes, pick a reasonable bidder and pay what you were quoted for. Sure, each case is unique and sometimes there are unforeseen circumstances, but currently the majority of out-of-the-network medical billing is just outright extortion. And, of course, it's done in the name of a great cause. "We are doing it out of necessity to pay for those poor folks that cannot afford healthcare". Except, most of this money is landing in the pockets of administrators [0].
>Except that in the case of socialism you can actually vote the leadership out while under the current oligarchy your only recourse is to complain on Twitter.
In the current situation you could vote for someone that would offer to bring more transparency and competition to medical billing. Except, you won't get a chance because people benefiting from the current system and people owning mainstream media play golf together and intend doing it for years to come.
>Socialism creates another bunch of perverse incentives
And capitalism creates other perverse incentives, such as middlemen all trying to get their cut of various fees, charging rents, building competitive moats, obfuscating the paperwork so you can't even figure out what basic services cost in advance... kind of like the health care system currently in the U.S.
Capitalism is good at innovation and at providing additional value but basic needs like food, shelter and healthcare are predictable enough that those needs can be met through the government providing a baseline of services.
Years ago I worked in retail as a night stocker. When I was hired, I was hired part time. Most other new employees were as well for the reason mentioned in this comment.
Eventually, the company underwent a large merger with two other regional retail chains. After this, they decided to go back to the grandfathered full time employees outside management and gave them an ultimatum: be dropped down to part time or take a small severance package and leave. Well, most decided they would take the severance. I decided since I was finally starting my software career, working some part time contracts, that I would take the opportunity to demand and wage, reduced hours, and control of my schedule. It worked at the time, probably because of their inability to hire and retain employees, albeit the raise was pathetic. Eventually however, they started shifting more and more responsibilities on us and the work was taking much longer because the newest hires we're not very good. I started spending more time there and often wouldn't go home till mid morning. I decided I didn't need it and just quit on the spot. A few months later, the company ended up filing for bankruptcy.
>legislating that a part-time job would need to offer a fraction of the benefits proportional
I mean, I think you’re spot on with the incentives but but I worry that your proposed solution would just take what is already a complicated system related to benefits like healthcare and just turn it into a bigger rats nest. It’s hard enough for people to navigate providers for in-network services, then haggle with insurance companies etc. I can’t imagine if this was fractured along different more complicated means.
I know it may be a pipe dream in the US but it seems like a better solution would be to divorce benefits from employers entirely through a single payer system
As a repeat small business owner I would say the lack of public healthcare is the biggest obstacle to entrepreneurship and business formation in the US. It is brutal trying to get a company off the ground and not being able to afford to offer benefits, as it puts you at such a huge hiring disadvantage.
Having to pay fractional benefits etc. would not “fix” things, it would just making starting a new business even harder. For big companies it might end some bad shenanigans they pull, but more likely would just result in layoffs as they consolidated to a smaller labor force.
Or, we could just realize that when you say "benefits," what you're mostly talking about is stuff like health insurance, which can be handled more efficiently by moving to a single payer system. I don't have a reference immediately handy, but there was a study done a little before the 2016 elections that pointed out how single payer (essentially Medicare for All) would reduce costs throughout the healthcare system, while still providing an excellent quality of care.
> I don't have a reference immediately handy, but there was a study done a little before the 2016 elections
A more recent survey of studies looking at single payer healthcare plans found[0]:
"The evidence abounds: A "Medicare for All" single-payer system would guarantee comprehensive coverage to everyone in America and save money.
Christopher Cai and colleagues at three University of California campuses examined 22 studies on the projected cost impact for single-payer health insurance in the United States and reported their findings in a recent paper in PLOS Medicine. Every single study predicted that it would yield net savings over several years. In fact, it’s the only way to rein in health care spending significantly in the U.S.
All of the studies, regardless of ideological orientation, showed that long-term cost savings were likely. Even the Mercatus Center, a right-wing think tank, recently found about $2 trillion in net savings over 10 years from a single-payer Medicare for All system. Most importantly, everyone in America would have high-quality health care coverage."
What benefits are we talking here? I presume mostly healthcare, though I may me missing something. What you suggest is overly complex compared to untying health care from work. In many countries healthcare is not tied to work.
Making the cost of healthcare visible to everyone that currently thinks their employer is screwing them with $100 premiums isn't exactly going to get in the way of a better system.
Or actually solve the problem and stop making companies offer health care. This is a stupid system. So many people worry about losing their job in fear of loosing their health care. So many people do not have healthcare because they do not have a job. A job and healthcare should not be connected is any way.
Completely agree. Once I quit and realized I was only paying $50 more per month with about the same crappy insurance (most insurance is completely bonkers unless you need meds- forget natural treatments) was amazing. Making a lot more as a 1099 worker without the company politics.
> Ideally, there should be some sort of a credit transfer mechanism, where an employee working multiple part-time jobs that combine to 40+ hours a week could get benefits equivalent to a full-time job at one of the workplaces, proportionally covered by all employers.
There's actually a much simpler solution - divorce basic human rights (healthcare) from the employer.
I think a better way to do it would be to basically cut the crap and target companies based on what they're obviously up to.
If a company has more than say X% of their workforce part-time (say between 10-30 hours/week, with <10 hour employees ignored in the denominator) for a period of Y years, every part-time worker gets full benefits, unless they are working another part-time job in a similar company, in which case they get benefits from one and the other will add their average employer contribution to their salary (this reduces uncertainty). Or, if they are working a full-time job (this is unlikely, except for a few businesses e.g. bars) or attending a university that offers healthcare, the requirement can be waived or some appropriate counterbalance can be devised.
The relaxation of labor laws for part-time work is intended to allow employers to efficiently deal with acute labor shortages, not maintain a firm of intentionally precarious and uninsured employees. An exception can be made for businesses which operate less than 30 hours per week, since they have no choice.
Granted, more systemic reforms would be nice, but this problem can be dealt with directly and harshly because it simply shouldn't happen.
Interesting reading these comments. I think it is fair to say that HN is disproportionately wealthy, and the replies here seems to echo that.
I'll admit I am an outsider here. I used to work 2 jobs, before the pandemic, and made $46K annually combined, typically 65hrs/wk. Mind you this is in the NYC area too. I now make $40k thanks to a raise at my full-time job (defense manufacturing, its really just a private equity racket). I can barely afford minimum living. Part of that raise also includes more responsibility, so it might even be a loss because I'm not sure I could still work a second job.
I can assure you that there are tons of people in my position. Way more than there are tech workers with 6-figure salaries who are bored on the weekend. It's not pretty here on the bottom floors, and it has only been getting worse.
The comments are telling, but I wanted to point out something from a different perspective.
I have friends from school who never really made it anywhere. One makes $12 an hour moving boxes around in Pennsylvania, another is stuck living at home and hasn't held down a job for more than a few months at any point in his life.
I have heard from this friend group, on many occasions, statements that prove they have no concept of relative value or of how money works at all. The guy making $12 an hour would be frustrated to hear you say that you make 40k and can barely afford minimum living. The cost of living differences between you would go completely unconsidered.
This is a roundabout way of saying that most people have a very narrow view of the world. Unfortunately, in my experience, it doesn't matter how educated, intelligent, or wealthy an individual is; they still resist expanding their world-view.
I'd also wager that many on HN have never held a minimum wage job or anything remotely blue collar. The disconnect here is a microcosm of this problem. The richer get richer, the poor get poorer, and the rich tell the poor to eat cake because they fundamentally just don't get it.
Software Engineers getting richer is the least of your worries. I'd like to talk about billionaires. The impossibly wealthy.
We need to have a society that pays well for high demand jobs. Please don't shit on Engineers. There are millions of people out there that are sitting on real estate old money, rich families, etc. They're not doing shit. They're not building the world around you. One mega billionare would dwarf a crowd of Engineers.
I want to live in a society where science and technology jobs are paid well and even fine with absurdly well. Same with doctors.
I also want to live in a society where shitty jobs such as cleaning gutters and driving a trash truck around should also be paid well because no one wants to do those. If you're stuck flipping burgers, you have the onus to do something that's worth while and in high demand. We need to make sure we give access to those people who want to learn and get educated.
Google's employee base making $450k/year is a miniscule part of software engineers. My guess would be US-wide, the average software engineer earns less than six figures or very close to it. Not "Rich" by any means.
I am tired of the marxist bs. I barely make six figures and that's after years of toiling through shitty code bases and mentally exhausted everyday and raising a family. I do boring software and anything that's thrown at me. Not what you have in mind as "Rich". Rich is relative.
Leave engineers alone, bang on billionaire's door. I've added more value to the society and I demand an equivalent pay. The real disconnect is with the mega billionaires playing golf at the Hamptons. Anyone with a salary is by definition unleveraged and not "Rich" in my view.
Marxist? You mean, having empathy for other people? Reading the comments on HN on this topic, it's largely people disconnected from the problems of a large subset of society and offering terrible and often insulting advice.
Does making less money than a billionaire somehow absolve you of this disconnect? You can make 50k a year and still be a complete dick to people.
I get what you're saying in some sense. The gorilla in the room is the fact that the true rich are taxed totally differently (and mostly unfairly). But also pointing to richer people and saying "they are the problem" is part of the problem. We're all voters and we all vote. If we want to, we could absolutely change the system and make it fairer. As much as it is the billionaire's "fault", it is also our responsibility to make the right choices, politically and socially.
But as long as we keep fighting each other and calling people absurd names like "Marxist", nothing will change.
I do have empathy for the poor. I used to work at a Shell gas station and I've talked to all kinds of people from Land Rover high rollers to drug addicts buying glass roses.
When you talk to the people flipping burgers in America, youll see a whole spectrum. And when you see these people earning a minimum wage and waste their life smoking weed, modifying their cars with shit they can't afford and playing video games all day, I have zero empathy for them. There are people that want to improve and I've had several conversations how they can't afford education or vocational school or any sort of apprentice practice. I have a lot of empathy for them.
If you don't understand why people would rather waste their life vs work up the ladder, you have a very poor understanding of what it means to be poor in America.
Surprise surprise, the person who claims they "understand" or "empathize" for the poor actually has no empathy or understanding at all! Really just confirming my original point. HN users have no idea what is going on.
Leave engineers alone, bang on billionaire's door.
Nope. Sorry (she/he/they) dude. You don’t get to point up the ladder and say “i’m not rich, but that guy is”. Reminds me people who define someone with an alcohol problem as a person “who has one more drink a day then I do”.
If you’re an engineer at Google and making $450k you are wealthy, you are a part of the “rich getting richer” and yes, if you want to solve inequality you’re going to have to contribute in a big way.
Edit: And no, your original post said “go after the billionaires”, not the engineers. Sorry, just because billionaires have more money than you doesn’t mean you’re not rich. Sure, the engineers making $50k get a pass. But over $100k? That’s double the median salary in the US. Time to pony up.
This misses the point as to why though: because it's not an incremental ladder, it's an exponential one - the wealth consolidated by the billionaire class is buying politics. It has an outsized influence on the thinking and mindset of the political classes they donate too and talk to on weekends.
This isn't just an issue like bribery it's more insidious then that: when your political leaders spend most of their "leisure" time in the company of these people, they adopt their values, listen to their thoughts and give everything a favorable view - more of hearing then you and I will ever get.
After all it's hard to be down on a guy who's put you up for the afternoon at his mansion, and even though you know it's a bad look to take him up on it it sure is nice he keeps offering the master guest suite if you want to stay the night.
This is just hand waving. Sure the billionaire has exponentially more, but there are very few of them.
We won’t solve inequality by taxing the billionaires it’ll be from taxing the upper-middle class. Just like the states with more equality in Europe do.
If you’re in the top 25% of income you’ll need to make some sacrifices if you want to solve the problem.
There are very few of them, and yet they control the vast majority of the country's wealth. The top 1% owns 55% of all the valuable assets in the United States. The top 10% owns 85% of all valuable assets. Most of the remaining 15% of assets are owned by pension funds and small-time landlords.
Just by taxing that top 10% (roughly people who earn over 200k/yr), the government would get access to 85% of all the nation's wealth.
That’s exactly my point. It’s not the billionaires who own most of the wealth, but the top 10% which includes people making over $200k per year. There are LOTS of those folks. That’s where the bill of the wealth is.
The first half of your comment and the second half contradict.
I forget the exact statistic, but did you know that something like 70% of those on the Forbes 400 Richest list are entirely self made? Did you know that the vast majority of millionaires in the US received $0 in inheritance, and far more received less than $10k? The rich, by and large, made their wealth in their lifetime with their own means.
I say this because we need to make better arguments and be more honest with the situation. No, we aren’t entitled to the money of the rich just because “they have too much” or something. Redistribution is desireable because the economics are fundamentally changing with winner take all economies, regulatory capture, the ability to influence government policy with wealth, and the massive increase in the general welfare achieveable with stronger redistribution.
Getting mad at rich people because they have bigger numbers in their bank account is a weak argument, disingenuous, and immoral. The truth is much simpler: redistribution results in a more successful society.
Perhaps you missed my point - I was specifically making the argument of non-Googlers. Google Engineers and SV salaries do not represent software engineering ecosystem and the average salary.
That is a pretty bold wager! I'm curious as to what your experiences have been to come to it.
Anecdotally speaking, most of the folks I've worked with in tech (including myself) have come from modest means and worked low wage jobs at some point (blue collar jobs aren't necessarily low wage, and what's considered blue collar can also be tech). The disconnect you speak of I think is more of a disconnect in value systems between folks, and hell even those value systems can be disparate across folks with similar incomes. I think value systems follow people as they gain wealth (more or less), and there are plenty of people at the bottom fighting for the people at the top in the USA.
Not OP, it's a wager about some average of other people based on how they talk.
The absolute best case for tech workers under 40 is they worked in a kitchen or factory on summers, did real work and saw/empathized with how the other half lives. And even that is rare. Lots had internships instead of that routine.
I think people that have been poor / hold minimum wage jobs are more likely to not care about poor people. I fall into this camp. On the other hand I think hacker news is predominantly liberal and seems to care very much for poor people.
Self-determinism is something I really struggle with.
I was always extremely poor growing up, even homeless at times during high school.
I watched countless friends from middle-class families totally squander their futures and now they mostly work dead-end jobs.
Meanwhile I was homeless after high school, robbed of my scholarships, and had to suffer greatly for years in order to get on my feet.
I feel like I earned the money I have. And that I deserve even more.
At the same time, everywhere I go people tell me how smart and adaptable I am and it makes me feel like I cannot base my expectations of others upon myself.
I think the core principle is that exceptionalism is exceptional. Don't ask masses of people to be exceptional. It's impossible, that's why "exceptional" comes from "exception".
Hard to be empathetic if you don’t even know what it’s like to be in their shoes.
And plenty of conservatives care about the poor. Ever been down south in a poor area? People look out for their neighbors way more than they do in big cities.
I think this is such a reductive take of The South. A great tool for understanding a culture is sometimes to place it historically so you can be more objective. For one, The South has more black people and poor than anywhere else in the country, meanwhile liberal states like Oregon, Vermont, and so on are some of the whitest, so the theory that it’s about lack of contact is obviously lacking.
The South places strong emphasis on self-reliance and community, to a degree other areas might consider to a fault. That manifests in wanting smaller government, less outside intervention, close-knit communities and neighbor friendliness, and so on. Someone “whining about how hard life is and begging for handouts” (said by someone from The South) is in their eyes selfishly draining their community because of their lack of self reliance.
To an extent: this is true. The South is relatively poor so they know better than most - there are many people who would rather get handouts than make better decisions. This is also wrong in many cases: many people are poor systematically, and are in a rut where self reliance isn’t enough. There’s tons of complexity to these things that both sides paint black and white.
The South isn’t your culture but mean, like some seem to think. It’s a different culture in many ways. One where pride, self reliance, and community are really important. If you want to have a chance at solving some of these problems and answering these questions you should be aware of this.
Rich get rich by paying software engineers to develop applications that deliver efficiencies. Efficiencies usually mean getting rid of workers.
Newspapers used to be big local employers, newsroom employees, print workers, packaging workers, delivery workers. Software engineers developed news applications for rich people and many newspaper workers lost jobs.
The increase in legal and illegal immigration has cause labor supply increase, while jobs have fluctuated, resulting in stagnant or decreasing salaries.
Offshoring manufacturing and services to China also led to decrease in employment opportunities.
These factors are real but working around them is just a matter of proper government policy. Of course, the problem is a lack of willingness to work around them.
The government made the decisions that results in rich getting richer and poor getting poorer. The rich oligarchs are getting great returns on their investments and owning government. While millions of people are facing declining quality of society.
California had millions of people without power during summer fires. Texas just had millions of people without power during winter cold. These are third world type events, society can’t deliver basic life infrastructure.
The rich owned government is responsible for declining quality of social structures for millions of people. They don’t care, they can just distract with BLM and social strife, instead of improving quality of society and preserving job opportunities for
While I agree with a lot of what you said, unless first world means “perfect and flawless”, what happened in California and Texas arent “third world events”. Our systems have limits, even multi billion $ systems built by very smart engineers. Rolling wildfires across a state is infrequent on that scale in California. That cold snap in Texas was one of the lowest ever on record. These are rare events that to prepare against except in hindsight would seem like a waste of everyone’s money. France and other places in Europe lose power during heatwaves and cold snaps. That’s just reality.
Our grid isn’t prepped for a nuclear war, or an alien invasion for the same reason. That’s not a third world outcome, that’s a look behind the curtain to see how fallible the world just is.
I agree, when I read the comments I get the impression that most of the commenters take it for granted that two jobs must be read as two part time jobs. I have not found the paper and the article does not suggest anything. If it is part time jobs people are talking about when they have answered the questionaire, though, the headline should have suggested that an increasing number of people struggle to get full time jobs? More part time employment in low wages jobs is a social problem, of course. More people having to take more than a full time job to make ends meet is a bigger problem in a society, though.
I make good money now (not tech) but didn’t always and yeah, the vast majority of the population (where I was born and the US - both developed countries) get by on very little. They aren’t necessarily poor (in the sense they can’t afford necessities) but rather never financially secure. Having $2000 sitting in a bank account would be a major win for them.
I remember working a box factory when I was in college. For me and a few other students it was a great summer job. Unionized, paid double the minimum wage, etc. For the non-students I realized they were lifers - this was a really great job, would pay the bills with some left over and it was unlikely something better would come their way. They weren’t poor, but they had hit a ceiling in terms of their financial situation.
Having multiple family members and friends that work in retail or the food industry, this is very common among them. From what I can tell, this happens for two major reasons:
1. The pay is too low, so a second job is required. If you are making $12/hour (which is pretty good for retail), that is only $25k/year at full time, which is not enough to support yourself and certainly not a family. Raising the minimum wage, providing health insurance, and paid time off could definitely help here.
2. So many companies refuse to have employees work full time. It seems like it is impossible to get a job at any big box retail or food company that will actually work you 40 hours per week. I assume this has to due with not wanting to pay out benefits for full time work. It seems like most of my family members and friends hover just under 30 hours per week. Even if they were making $15-18/hour, at less than 30 hours per week plus no benefits, this doesn't cut it. So they end up with a second job where they are also part time. And balancing two part time jobs, both with schedules that constantly change, is incredibly difficult and stressful.
I would rather work 40 hours without benefits than 29 hours without benefits and then trying to fit in an extra 11-20 at another place every week(also without benefits).
What a short sighted rule enacted by the government. I don't see how they didn't recognize what would invariably result.
I think most people would agree. The federal government had good intentions, but of course, large businesses found a way around it, which just screwed over the employees even more.
But even 40 hours at $12/hour with no benefits is not something you can survive on in the long term. It's not like there are very many advancements or raises either. You might be surprised to learn, that the manager at many of these retail stores only earn about $2 more than their floor employees. So that's where you cap out, unless you some how have connections and get into regional or corporate hq.
I am not sure what the government can do. It seems like any rules they make, business will find loopholes. In my opinion, retail workers and food industry workers need a union. That is the only way they are ever going to get full time work, benefits, and better pay.
Stop treating employment as a vassal-servant relationship in which the employer is a subordinate lord underneath the government to which responsibility for the basic minimal support of citizens can be transferred. If there a minimum level of income, healthcare, etc., a person should have, don't tie getting it to full-time employment and demand that employers provide it, provide it directly and pay for it out of taxes. Mandate job-protected leave if there are good reasons, sure, but if it 8snto be paid leave, provide pay for qualified leave at public expense (maybe actuarially paid by employees out of payroll taxes, but probably better out of general progressive taxes which should hit capital income the same as other income; otherwise, the tax itself makes production methods that are less labor-intensive more attractive.)
Obviously a bunch of detail but broadly it doesn't seem that hard if govt bases off solutions that work in other countries. For example these 3 things could make a huge change for the positive;
1) Universal or similar health care like rest of Western world so this is not tied to a job.
2) Better minimum wage
3) Casual minimum wage loading at X% premium vs full time minimum wage so there is a business cost to flexible scheduling.
I think gig economy is the harder one to deal with going forward. You need some freedom for people to sideline in markets but not have companies abuse this. Maybe something is needed like if X amount of people do more than X hours in a month companies response are responsible to ensure their minimum wage. So a small gig environment can operate, but if.you have thousands of people doing 15+ hours a month the company needs to step up... there'd be lots of cracks in that though.
What's the practical difference between mandating a minimum wage increase and mandating benefits? They both increase the cost of labor without directly making that labor more productive. It's not surprise that price controls negatively impact the labor market, like it does to other markets.
If we want low wage earners to take home more income, it seems more prudent to subsidize their pay through a negative income tax rather than try to fight against mathematics and supply/demand curves
Price controls do not negatively impact the labor market.
Employment is an inelastic good, everybody needs it, even if the price sucks, and employers hold all of the bargaining power. Wages naturally sink to zero in an unregulated environment.
The United States has the cheapest labor in the developed world, despite being the most productive in the developed world, because it has the lowest minimum wage in the developed world, and it's not pegged to inflation, like in the rest of the developed world, so it's actually a constantly decreasing minimum wage.
In the 12 years since the last minimum wage increase, inflation has decreased its value by 21.5%, the equivalent of $5.75 in 2007 dollars, which is, by the way, the longest period of stagnation it's ever seen. Prior to the Reagan administration, Congress raised the minimum wage by 5-10% annually. If that pattern had kept up, the minimum wage would be over $20 today, and if it had been kept close to inflation since 1978 it would be $16 today.
Price controls absolutely affect the labor market. Whether or not a market has perfect demand and supply curves does not render them immune to price controls. It's why many white dominated communities passed minimum wages long ago, to keep blacks out of the workforce and from competing with white labor. They knew the implications of minimum wages, and wanted that result.
In fact, prior to the federal minimum wage passing in the 1930s, blacks had a higher employment rate than whites. After the law passed, the employment level among african americans was destroyed. It still hasn't recovered.
Minimum wage laws in the US are literally a very clear example of codified systemic racism and it's shocking how many people relentlessly support them.
If we want low skill workers to take home more pay, subsidize their wages.
> What a short sighted rule enacted by the government. I don't see how they didn't recognize what would invariably result.
What results is...reduced headline unemployment, and reversing the policy would instantly and significantly boost headline unemployment, and result in lots of people losing jobs in a way individually and obviously traceable to the policy change.
Sure, there's a good story to tell about how the situation without the rule is better in the long-term steady state, and maybe even in aggregate in the short-term. But it's a more complex and abstract story.
> So many companies refuse to have employees work full time. It seems like it is impossible to get a job at any big box retail or food company that will actually work you 40 hours per week. I assume this has to due with not wanting to pay out benefits for full time work.
Yes, and this is why I think government mandates tied to full time work should be converted one of two ways:
1. Where sensible (mandatory sick leave or other similar things), pro-rate the requirements for sub-full-time work, in some cases with only a fractional reduction rather than the full ratio.
2. Where not sensible (e.g., health care), it should not be an employment benefit but a public benefit. In some cases the employer might be permitted to replace the public benefit with a superior one, with some credit for the displaced public cost.
A major argument against raising the minimum wage is productivity ceilings. Is a retail workers work worth $15/hr? If it isn’t, the employer is losing money by keeping them, and so they are fired. If I remember correctly, the congressional budget office reported that a $15 federal min wage would lift 1 mil people out of poverty - but would also cost 1 mil jobs.
The devil's in the details. Last week, my wife started doing DoorDash. She's loving it. I accompanied her on one of the trips and I enjoyed it. I thought, ya know, I like people, I enjoyed this a whole lot more than some of the other things I do for entertainment, I'd do this with free time occasionally. Boom, second job.
But then, I look back on my history as a developer. I've occasionally taken on some work. I sell things on e-bay/craigslist. I've always sort-of had a second income source, mainly to pay for things I would just go without -- phone upgrades, an extra vacation, etc.
I don't need it ... well, depending on how you look at the numbers, maybe I do, but is it all that strange?
I'm a bad example, though. My wife has told practically everyone she knows and many of her friends/family have decided to start doing it. None wanted a second job, though some surely needed it. None could take on a second scheduled or full time job but all had a few hours a week, a need for some extra cash, and found doing "gig work" to be a great fit. Many of them are simply making idle time more productive for themselves and they'd have never gotten a second job if it these specific types of "second jobs" (frequently first[0]) didn't exist.
[0] And I don't mean that as a "tragedy", either. Though there are stories of people barely scraping by, there are areas where the pay is far higher than other unskilled jobs (and many skilled in my area).
this may be me projecting my own sensibilities (and sorry if i am misinterpreting) but.... why cant people just hang out, take some time off and relax with friends?
why does everything have to be about "productivity" ?
For me everything i do is about productivity, but that's because i have more things i'm interested in than i have time or energy.
My play time is 100% about maximizing my enjoyment and regeneration, to get me back to doing the things i really enjoy doing. Even my casual, lounge time is a calculated effort at that.
Now hopefully i have a healthy balance. I don't work myself too hard because i don't want to burn out. I'm also less productive if i'm burning out.
But yea. I just enjoy building things. It's who i am. If i had one wish it would be to not need sleep. With those extra hours i'd learn to woodwork or something physical, but still build - create.
My only regret is that my ability to build (software) is limited per day, and i give a significant portion of that to the necessities of life. Aka work. It's not making me rich, nor is it things i truly want to solve. But hey, i still enjoy it - and for that i am truly fortunate.
After seeing what my wife went through working retail; I can't imagine having to work retail. It was awful.
It's not really about "productivity", it's about "wasted time". To be clear, I don't consider idle, leisure, even completely bored time to be "wasted". In fact, my favorite vacation is generally cruising because (1) they give you a menu of things to you can do that day, you pick, you don't have to think. (2) it's mostly pre-paid so budgeting is easy and (3) it's generally easy to find a cruise where it's expensive/impractical to have any internet service allowing me to completely disconnect.
Wasted time is "I have a handful of really low priority things that I'm never going to do so I'll look at Netflix and see what I haven't watched yet". For me, though, it's a bit more than that. Our budget allows us to live just fine, but with what amounts to very little work, I can literally take my family on a vacation about every two months.
Before eye-rolls abound, we travel extremely cheap -- I'm talking week vacations, family of 6, under a grand. And I decided a long time ago that my priority with my children would be to put my money toward memories rather than "crap". We've had gift-less Christmas's in favor of a (way over-budget) vacation[0] more than once and we'll probably only do it that way from here on out.
Given a choice between channel-surfing-Netflix, which I get plenty of (and I think a lot of us find ourselves in that spot) and driving around to places in my local city that I haven't been before (and it's surprising how many there are), I'll take the extra paycheck. Honestly, I'm nearly out of things to repair/improve in my home with my spare time. There's still a whole lot closed down up here.
[0] Partly because of that, we have a hard time when we aren't planning a post-Christmas trip. Our kids don't want much. I mean, they have basically everything in the palm of their hands from Apple and Gooble, as it is. :)
I totally agree with this. The point of being productive is to integrate and contribute to society, not dedicate your life to society. It shouldn't be about squeezing every last ounce out of an employee but somehow, that's what the American dream has become.
> It shouldn't be about squeezing every last ounce out of an employee
Apologies for nitpicking, but this statement comes up from time to time and I think it's one that has to be evaluated from both sides to understand it. From my perspective: I was the child of a (very successful) entrepreneur. Around 2006-2008, my dad's company was sold out from under him[0] and he chose to open up an identical business, up the road, in an attempt to continue doing the work he was doing at the last place (and ultimately shut them down[1]). The first several of those years, he received no paycheck. He had 9 people employed by him (all getting paid) but needed about 12, so he worked nearly every hour he wasn't asleep.
At least as far as his business was concerned, if every one of those 9 employees weren't giving everything that was expected of them[2], they'd have failed. Really, they should have failed--my dad had underestimated how apprehensive the huge companies would be about working with a "brand new outfit" even though as far as the purchasing people were concerned, my dad was the last company they worked for. But after delivering early (and often himself[3]), he slowly proved that the last company really was all him).
> that's what the American dream has become.
You're pretty right with this. The American Dream got warped when we all decided the only way to "make it" was to work for someone. Don't get me wrong -- it's what I do, and I'm perfectly happy with that. My Dad's life is a great example of the American Dream, but at times it was a hell of a nightmare. The one consistent thing throughout is that my Dad worked hard. I don't think it would have mattered what kind of business he started -- he would have been successful -- honestly, the product he sold was lubrication systems for (mostly American) automotive manufacturers. Running this business was my Dad's passion, but I don't think it was his dream in life to be the best provider of butter for hardware. Basically, the dream was supposed to be "you can be wealthy/successful/etc without the rest of us getting in the way. The law should keep others from stealing from/cheating you but don't expect help, and at least some of us won't be happy if you make it." I choose to be an employee of a company doing cool things and I get a large reduction in the risk associated with launching/creating new products while accepting a lower salary for that consistency. I've watched my Dad do it multiple times and I believe I could start a business and make much more. I've got 4 kids. I don't want the hours or the risk.
[0] He received no compensation after the lawyers got their take.
[1] Several years later he purchased the old company back from the larger outfit that had originally purchased it. They remaining employees were let go -- the previous owner was planning on shutting down the operation as it was and there was enough bad blood built up over the years that the staff likely would have preferred to collect unemployment than just quit.
[2] My dad didn't handle operations/staff, he was sales/financials, they paid hourly and never played games with overtime (the majority owner of the last place tried that with a secretary ... who sued them with years of logged hours for documentation) and as far as I know, they laid all of one person off (and they agonized for weeks over it).
[3] He likes to tell a story about meeting with a plant manager at 3:00 AM. I'm going to butcher the story, but the manager, expecting that my dad was a lowly delivery guy for his company, started griping about how awful the boss must be for making him drive 150 miles in the middle of the night to deliver an order that was supposed to be there at 5:00 PM (he was rarely late, but it happens). I can't remember how it went down, but I'm sure the guy was shocked when he found out that my Dad was the son-of-a-bitch owner. :)
However, after spending almost a year hanging out at home and relaxing, it's actually kind of nice to get out and do something.
And of course, to each their own. Some people just enjoy accomplishing things and don't like sitting still. Others prefer to spend their idle time relaxing as much as possible. Neither is inherently wrong, and there's no reason to shame either group.
It's the only way to increase the net standard of living, and richer, healthier, more comfortable conditions is generally a common human interest.
We could have stopped increasing our productivity in 1820, but I doubt most people today would like living at an 1820s standard, and in 200 years time, I think people will be glad they aren't living at a 2020's standard.
because productivity, or, more accurately, 'busyness', is in line with our ethos. openly relaxing is viewed as squandering (unless you're already wealthy)
There are plenty of kinds of wealth that don't involve money. Being wealthy in time is probably the most important one of all, given we can never get more time in this life, no matter how much money we acquire.
That's nice you and your wife have fun doing DoorDash. It's not as fun if it's paying your rent, feeding yourself, or your kids depend on it.
Your use case is the ideal use for "gig work", but much like the proverbial thinking that McDonald's jobs are only for high school students, it's not realistic at all. A lot of people's livelihoods are tied with "gig work".
I don't doubt it's not as fun if I weren't paying my rent. And I've been through times, myself. I'm not currently going through them now, praise Jesus, but I don't delude myself into thinking that I couldn't be there, again.
If my wife continued doing the DoorDash at the amount she's doing it (just under full-time), she'd be doing OK, but by no means "well". Still yet, she'd be making far more than minimum wage if the per-delivery pay doesn't change much. When you say "a lot of people", on paper, that person is "my wife". She's got various skills, but no degree, and she's been out of the professional workforce for so long that the best salary she can expect to make is as a server at one of the local chains[0]. If she found herself in that position, again, there is no question that she'd DoorDash until she could finish up her nursing program.
[0] That's not meant as "she can only make a waitress' salary" -- she had a 3-bedroom apartment with her two kids working as a waitress. It can pay well if you're organized/friendly and employed at the right place.
McDonalds is able to sell massive amounts of cheap food partial because labor is cheap. Forcing them to provide higher wages will result in higher prices, which will reduce their market viability and result in closure of some locations. This results in a net decrease in overall employment even though those employees are better compensated.
We see this play out at large scale in an economy like France, where even pre-pandemic the youth unemployment rate approached 20% (and now is more like 35%).
This applies equally to gig work: gig work is able to employ so many people because the services they provide are cheap enough to appeal to broad stretches of the population. Triple the prices of food delivery or uber, and the market will dramatically shrink.
> Forcing them to provide higher wages will result in higher prices, which will reduce their market viability and result in closure of some locations.
And it's done just that every single time it's happened. But it also has a more permanent effect: labour is usually the biggest cost to a business, and it's often necessary -- or at least, any investment in technologies to eliminate labor come with so much risk that they are often slow to materialize without a solid catalyst. Raise the cost of labor, substantially, and you get self-checkout. Raise it more and the self-checkout aisles start working more easily[0], or are eliminated entirely in favor of electronic tracking and facial recognition.
It's all got a breaking point -- it's ~$9.00-~$12.00/hr (locally based on the marquis in front of the local McDonald's) times every required front-end employee vs. a multi-million dollar investment that might eliminate the 90% that labour cost, but might also be completely rejected by customers or otherwise fail horribly. Time is always going to bring that "multi-million" side down, but another way to accelerate it is to raise the cost of labour (either artificially by increasing the minimum wage or naturally as a result of full employment/good economic conditions).
[0] Because they kill the "scale" that checks that you've set the item you bought on the "purchased" side in favor of putting an extra person behind some screens and opening up 8 more check-out aisles. Additional shrink from the less strict systems is offset by lower labour costs. Of course, lost sales from people like my great aunt/uncle who are pissed off that they need a manual to operate a Walmart end up creating new opportunities for companies to offer an option to pay someone else to handle that hassle for you. So now you just pay the damn cashier, directly, through DoorDash or whomever.
It's depressing to me that the reason we don't have decent automation systems in place is that humans are still much cheaper than kiosks. It's an insult to our species IMO that humans are still used for tasks that could be done by relatively simple machines.
I heard a story once about how construction sites in India don't often use tools like bulldozers, because it's so much cheaper to just hire 400 dudes with shovels. I'm sure we'll all look back at retail and the food industry in 20 years and view it as barbaric that humans were used to do such menial labor.
We see this play out at large scale in an economy like France, where even pre-pandemic the youth unemployment rate approached 20% (and now is more like 35%).
Except the minimum wage in the UK is very close to that of France but we don't have the same youth unemployment rate.
There is much more going on than just the effects of a minimum wage.
I'm curious of you and your wife's age. Seems as if those in late 40s to 60s have no hobbies except for working, and therefore are continually working jobs next to me throughout my 20s and 30s. Many in that older age bracket have benefits and retirement through other means, therefore not caring about lack of benefits from work and possibly being part of the no votes when my coworkers vote to unionize, not to mention occupying spot from a younger person who instead is a few rungs behind.
This is not meant to be personal or attacking, but I'm curious how much of this applies or not to you and your wife.
This is meant to demonstrate my general frustration with younger folks having many barriers to stability or opportunity by being crowded out politically and in the workforce by those who've had years more in better economic situations and just can't seem to develop a life that isn't revolving around consumerism and lacking in signifcant social/familial time investment.
I'm not in the age bracket you mention, but I have noticed that as I get older I simply enjoy accomplishing things alongside others.
In my early 20s I worked hard, but I also couldn't wait to get out of the office and hang out with my friends. As I get older, I still hang out with my friends when I can, but I also really enjoy interacting with work peers and getting things done at work.
Even in my off time, I find myself preferring to do projects around the house or yard rather than watch yet another show on Netflix or waste more time scrolling social media.
> This is meant to demonstrate my general frustration with younger folks having many barriers to stability or opportunity by being crowded out politically and in the workforce by those who've had years more in better economic situations
It's interesting to see this in contrast to complaints on HN that older developers are crowded out of the workforce by companies that prefer to hire younger developers. Perhaps it's more likely that breaking into good jobs is just hard in general, and it's easier to blame your older or younger peers.
> and just can't seem to develop a life that isn't revolving around consumerism and lacking in signifcant social/familial time investment.
Someone in their 50s or 60s is likely more interested in securing their retirement than simple consumerism. That's about the age it becomes obvious that you physically can't work forever, and you need a decent chunk of money in the bank if you want to do fun things in retirement.
As for social/family time investment: Someone in their late 40s through 60s might have raised kids to adulthood, who are now off doing their own thing. It can be a shock to go from constant family time at home to having nothing to do. Not uncommon for them to return to work to fill the void with some activity, a way to continue getting things done, and to simply socialize with coworkers.
Apologies for the delay in reply but there's a few things to unpack here and I wanted to give it some thought.
I'm reaching the big four-oh. I'm blessed in that most of my hobbies revolve around software development, which I also do professionally. That's not to say if I had "FU money", I'd keep my 9-5 (I very well might, but it's still a job). I've been pretty much full-time employed at a good job since I was 19--first in systems, then in software. Incidentally, I landed that first "real job"[0] by taking a pay-cut to $8.00/hr assembling PCs, installing networks and writing software for small businesses for a year to give my resume the appearance of more skill than I thought I had (turned out I was perfectly suited for the position but lacked the confidence to recognize it at the time).
> therefore not caring about lack of benefits from work and possibly being part of the no votes when my coworkers vote to unionize
I'll stay out of the union debate. Where I live, I've mostly watched the unions serve themselves and their leadership rather than the people in them, so my perspective is biased unfavorably. While I wouldn't join a union, personally, I understand why people choose to.
> general frustration with younger folks having many barriers to stability or opportunity by being crowded out politically and in the workforce by those who've had years more in better economic situations and just can't seem to develop a life that isn't revolving around consumerism and lacking in significant social/familial time investment
... and there's the biggie. I don't know what to tell you that won't come off as belittling -- not my goal at all. So I'll share with you advice that I turned to when I was making $8.00/hr eating Ramen noodles (and none-to-pleased with my current situation in life). A buddy of mine said "if all you want to do is make money, that's easy, read about arbitrage"[1].
I watched a guy get laid off from a $85/hr network tech job and when the two months severance ran out and the mortgage payment came due, he discovered that he could make his paycheck on garbage day if he drove his SUV through the right communities. That's all he's been doing for the past decade. He loves it because it takes 3-4 working days a week, a lot of the inventory is free (he buys things on Craigs/Offerup and sells on e-bay, occasionally, but often just grabs appliances that people leave at the curb). After discovering that about half of the things he picked up still worked, he invested in a box truck so that he could deliver the working ones, locally (which turned out to be a big deal). Heathcare was the big issue (I want to say he was paying $2,000-$3,000/month for terrible coverage for his family), but he sorted that out last year.
Having served at my church for a few years, I have hundreds of stories of people who hit bottoms like "homeless" and -- almost always through others (often strangers) -- found a way out. That's not meant to belittle those who are struggling or imply that their circumstances are their own fault. Frankly, it doesn't really matter who's fault it is--the person who has the highest probability of fixing the problem is the person experiencing it.
I was lucky (privileged, whatever), though, to be born to my Dad. He was one of 7 kids living in a 2-bedroom house (his "bedroom" was the couch and in his 70s, he's never lived alone or had "his own bed"), went right into construction work building garages, almost joined the construction union but decided to go into sales, instead. He was a good salesman but the commissions were weak. Despite that, he managed to somehow support a family of 4 well enough to save and buy into part of a company. We went on tons of trips -- they were all paid for via cereal box tops and by us tagging along on one of Dad's sales calls.
That company was later sold out from under him, he sued the owner and won but ended up paying more to the lawyers than his winnings, meanwhile he opened his own competing business and worked without a paycheck for two years so his staff would get paid. He's retired, now, and very comfortable but damn ... as his child ... I'd say watching what he went through was the single strongest vaccine against opening my own business he could have found.
The people I know who are "financially independent" (wealthy or otherwise, money isn't in the top 10 of their concerns) -- the first step was getting out of "hell", you can't get out of debt/become wealthy if you're searching for money for your next meal. Covering as much of that as possible and putting every remaining penny back into other things. Doing an 8-5 on a W2 is a reliable, consistent and predictable way to make money. Understanding that making money is a matter of convincing another human being to trade green pieces of paper for "something", and that acquiring said green pieces of paper doesn't have to be done by following your dream/doing what you love but can simply be "a means to having more money to do the thing I love with" or to ultimately getting to the dream job. Hell, my in-laws made most of their income two years ago selling elephant ears at fireworks shows[2]
I don't know your situation and -- as previously mentioned -- this is not meant as a judgement. You may find the only way you can get past those "barriers" is to move somewhere else for a bit. We joke that Ann Arbor, Michigan is basically missing almost everyone between the ages of 25 and 40. You can't afford to live there unless the bank (or school) is paying for school or you're already wealthy/retired from your U of M degree. You may be in a spot, like me, where moving is absolutely not an option.
Not sure if any of this was helpful but feel free to reach out via my profile and best of luck to you.
[0] At the time, graduating with a CS degree -- according to terrible, paper, sources provided by my High School -- would land between $35,000 and $45,000 where I live, so I considered any job that paid within that range to be a "real job". I'm not saying it's a good gauge, it's just the one I used.
[1] Not two years later this same person approached me for a $10,000 "investment" in a "pet rock"-like fad of these styro-foam balls with pictures on them that people attached to their antennas. The intelligent man in me turned him down without much consideration. I'd have about $70,000 had I trusted the guy.
[2] You wouldn't believe how many $7.00 elephant ears (that cost all of a nickle) you can sell in 3 hours, or how long it takes to get that smell out of every pore of your skin.
I've never had what I'd consider a "second job." But I've had side streams of (a bit of) income whether one-offs or something more long-term. It's always something I've done mostly because I found it interesting and I haven't needed the extra money but I've never exactly minded it either.
I can't seem to find the report that they're referencing and the conclusion seems to be directly at odds with the Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly assessment of multiple job holders[1]. Does anyone have a link to the publication?
EDIT: Here's the report https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2020/CES-WP-20-26.pdf. One explanation for the discrepancy seems that the number of individuals holding multiple jobs when measured on a monthly basis has been decreasing over time while the number working at more than one job at any time during a quarter has increased over time. People seem to be more likely to occasionally work a second job but less likely to consistently work a second job. The paper's authors disagree with this take but I'm not sure I find their explanation totally convincing.
A reminder that wage theft is endemic to the types of jobs that people who work multiple jobs have. We absolutely need stronger worker protections in the form of actual punishments for business owners who shortchange workers, stronger labor union protections, and government-provided healthcare so people aren't held to their jobs at metaphorical gunpoint.
"wage theft" - I think for those jobs the wage is known beforehand. If it is too low for you, don't take it. If somebody refuses to pay you the promised wage, that would be theft and a case for the law.
>A common form of wage theft for tipped employees is to receive no standard pay ($2.13 an hour) along with tips.
>A 2009 study of workers in the United States found that in 12 occupations more than half of surveyed workers reported being denied overtime pay: child care (90.2 percent denial), stock and office clerks (86 percent), home health care (82.7 percent), beauty/dry cleaning and general repair workers (81.9 percent), car wash workers and parking attendants (77.9 percent), waiters, cafeteria workers and bartenders (77.9 percent), retail salespersons (76.2 percent), janitors and grounds workers (71.2 percent), garment workers (69.9 percent), cooks and dishwashers (67.8 percent), construction workers (66.1 percent) and cashiers (58.8 percent).
>The most blatant form of wage theft is for an employee to not be paid for work done. An employee being asked to work overtime, working through breaks, or being asked to report early and/or leave late without pay is being subjected to wage theft.
At a past company we had certain manual labor tasks that had to be done by end of day, so work schedules were flexible. We offered full time with benefits, but there was still a lot of demand for part-time work. There are a lot of people out there who simply want to use extra time in the day to take on paying work. You get college students looking for a few hours after work, or parents who have to work around their kids school schedules, or older people who simply want to have something to do but aren't up for full-time jobs.
There are also plenty of jobs where companies simply can't afford to pay someone 40 hours per week plus benefits. Hiring someone for 20 hours per week with no benefits is arguably better than not having that job in the economy at all.
I'd love as much as anyone for the US to separate health care from employer-provided health insurance, but it's not really fair to blame companies for the failures of our politicians.
I mean, high-school age children were predicting this. I am skeptical that the goal was to try make things better for workers. It seems much more likely that the goal was to appear to try to make things better. At least they did something, amirite?
Or it implies skilled people who would have had under the table side gigs are getting gig economy jobs because it's so easy and turnkey even if the pay is lower.
Yeah people working part time are getting screwed out of benefits, but it's hard to tell whether that's rising or more side work is moving above the table.
To be fair, I know a significant amount of people who work multiple jobs but they only really put in a few hours on the weekend. They are the minority though, and most 2 or 3 job workers I know do put in a significant >15 hours a week at each.
I think the bigger thing beyond hours worked is commute and decompression time. I don't know anyone who, after working 6 hours on a Saturday, is ready right away to go out and have fun with their friends. Everyone wants to come home, change clothes if needed, and relax a bit before moving onto to something else. That extra hour or so, not even including the commute, is a pretty big hit to your weekend time.
I'm going to shill this book again "The Price of Tomorrow - Jeff Booth", because it is so relevant to what's happening in the labor force. Technology is eating jobs and less and less people will be needed. Technology is deflationary and it's driving down the cost of labor and everything else. Just look at what's in store for the delivery sector once AMZN can use drones to deliver your package. Self driving cars to replace Uber/Lyft, automated kitchens where there are half the employees, factories where robots do the work, financial firms where software/algo's do the research and investing, software that writes software, etc. Work as we know it is changing, less and less jobs, less and less people will be needed.
I personally see basic income as an inevitability for this reason. It's going to be hell getting there though, and it's possible we'll destroy ourselves before we make it there.
I think in many cases people will start to do jobs that were previously automated away and learn to appreciate the superior quality. For example, raising children, cooking and cleaning. That's a full time job that is outsourced by many households. But we pay the price in quality. We've already seen shifts towards artisanal goods when mass produced ones are a fraction of the price. As long as it happens gradually enough, it should be OK.
People, whether they're billionaires or are making just $80,000 a year, resent having to take care of others, even if those "others" are without a job through literally no fault of their own.
This is exacerbated by IQ, or g factor, or whatever you want to call it. A person with an 85 IQ isn't going to be able to write complex software, so "learn to code" works just fine for people sitting at maybe an IQ range of 100+. You might could be a delivery driver with an IQ around 85, but as someone said, delivery drones and self-driving vehicles are going to finish off that sector.
There's millions of jobs that could be filled, but no one wants to do them because it isn't "prestigious" or some such. We need lots more electricians, welders, carpenters, etc., but good luck convincing people to go get the training to do those jobs - some of which are extremely high paid. Underwater welders can make up to $200,000 a year.
> There's millions of jobs that could be filled, but no one wants to do them because it isn't "prestigious" or some such. We need lots more electricians, welders, carpenters, etc., but good luck convincing people to go get the training to do those jobs - some of which are extremely high paid. Underwater welders can make up to $200,000 a year.
I don't think it's about prestige for the most part. It's just that those as HARD jobs: you exert your body way beyond what is comfortable, work in uncomfortable, hazardous and unhealthy environments (heat, cold, rain, smells, noise, dust), have to be constantly careful or otherwise you can kill/injure yourself or others and, after a decade or two, can easily end up with an injury or just worn out body (joints, back etc.) which prohibits you from continuing to work. $200k is worth it, but $60k, which is most people will be making, is probably not.
> but $60k, which is most people will be making, is probably not.
People aren't going to have much of a choice soon. It'll be that or live a miserable life by way of having little-to-no money. Or I guess the third option of whine constantly on the Internet, but that's already happening.
> They also noted that multiple-job holding occurred at all levels of income
Ok, I LOL'd when I read this one. Of course it occurred at all levels of income, how else are some people going to pay for their second private jet if they aren't sitting in multiple boards of directors?
It's odd to continue calling gig work as a second, third, ... job. Is putting something up on eBay a job? If not then making a few buck driving for Uber isn't a job either, at least for those who are doing it for the same reason, which may not be a small fraction of workers. Selling something you don't need on eBay and getting the extra money can be fun so why not think of it that way instead of the urge to view gig work as the last resort effort for someone to maintain their livelihood?
When I was in college and early 20s, I usually had 2-4 different jobs at any given time.
There's a demographic component to this that seems missing, given that we have two big baby booms behind Gen Xers (millennials who I guess are old now) and Gen Z.
Is the share of workers 20-30 today higher than the share among 20-30 year olds in 1996?
It's also important to note that the gig economy has vastly reduced the work required to get a second job. If you want a second job at Uber, you're not a felon, and you have a car, then congratulations, you're hired.
Many companies in the USA lobby against universal healthcare for this reason. As they (correctly) see it, if employees were not tied down by healthcare, many of them would leave.
My uncle just finished serving his jail time and has entered a world of shorter working hours due to regulations. Hard to solve for unintended consequences. Will likely be homeless soon.
We do this at my startup. Instead of hiring FTEs, we hire people for 10-30 hours per week. This is great for people that want to make more money than they could as an FTE, or for people that want to work more on side projects.
It helps that we have no bullshit meetings, everything is async, and we take advantage of automating almost every aspect of the business.
I’ve found that hiring contract devs for say 20 hours per week yields the same output as an FTE at 40. Why? Because we don’t fill the rest of their week with bullshit.
> I’ve found that hiring contract devs for say 20 hours per week yields the same output as an FTE at 40
This is interesting bc of how common it is to hear people complain about pointless meetings. Do you see a sacrifice in devs not being familiar enough with the product?
Not in the 10 months we’ve existed. We’ve had a few backend devs in that time. We make sure everything is written down, and I make myself very available for questions - mostly async, but I’m not opposed to a call if it makes things faster.
It helps that our tech isn’t that complicated - python/Django backend, slack app and react frontend.
I wonder what the Census Bureau counts as a "job" here. Does having a monetized YouTube channel, Twitch stream, or OnlyFans account on the side count? What about monetizing a hobby you might still otherwise be doing with something like Etsy or Patreon? Driving for Uber or DoorDash on the side? A school teacher taking a part-time job over the summer? Hosting an Airbnb? Going door-to-door for the Census Bureau itself? Many of these are not necessarily indicative of economic turmoil.
A data point missing from the article is how many hours workers are committing to their jobs. I'd consider that to be more important that just the number of jobs people have. The article clearly attributes the rise in multiple jobs to wage stagnation while the cost of living continues to rise - which does seem like a reasonable explanation. However, it's possible that at least some of the rise can be attributed to greater economic opportunity as people dip their toes into new markets without completely abandoning their traditional jobs which they may already have.
EDIT: Others have pointed out that many employers have also stopped offering full-time work to avoid having to provide their employees with benefits. That would also contribute to a rise in multiple jobs without necessarily increasing the number of hours worked.
How about the world could benefit from people having multiple employers, with the right structure.
How about, I would prefer to lose half my income in a layoff than 100% or nothing.
How about, I would love to be able to take a new job and see what it is like without putting all of my eggs in this unknown basket?
The idea that full-time employment by a single employer benefits the employees is silly, it clearly gives more leverage to the employer. This is the reason health insurance being tied to employment continues.
I'd go a step further and suggest the lack of job mobility and variety benefits no one at all and actually hurts society a great deal, because it leads to the infamous peter principle, where people move up the career ladder until they reach incompetence, at which point they do everything they can to stay there because moving would mean reduced pay, reduced status and a feeling of personal failure.
The number of people who've long lost any enthusiasm for their work and yet won't give up their seat because they don't know how to do anything else is also quite frustrating and counter productive. Ah well :)
If we took money from rich people, they might decide to be lazy instead and not work as hard, therefore depriving society of their abundant genius and benevolence.
> If we took money from rich people, they might decide to be lazy instead and not work as hard, therefore depriving society of their abundant genius and benevolence.
They're already not paying taxes here, how is it a loss? And I don't mean they're cheating (although many are), I mean our tax rates are so low that it's not a big loss if they leave, which they won't. Plenty of rich people live in New York or California and they would continue to live in the USA if we raised federal taxes to appropriate levels.
Wealthy people have all sorts of ways to avoid taxes, but high income people don’t, and they pay for almost everything. I think the number is something like the top 1% pays 20% of all income tax and the top 50% pays 95% of all income tax. So it really is a big deal of high income people just leave. Poor people can’t support the country on their own.
That's easy. We take their land and investment properties and put it up for sale on the market so that people can buy homes again. We tax all capital gains at a point so that once you are no more than 10 or 20 times above a middle class income, you have no incentive to try to earn even more money. At that point, it allows others who want to innovate and achieve that higher level of wealth a chance to compete and innovate rather than be strangled out by rich oligarchs. Billionaires are the new lords and nobles and if you can't see that you are blind to the reality of the situation. Monarchs caught on fairly quickly after Napoleon. Who cares what you are called, as long as you still have the same power that you wielded before? Not to mention you've convinced the serfs you can be "just like them if you work hard enough" instead of claiming divine right. I'm honestly shocked by the number of "intelligent" members of Hacker News who haven't figured out the "hack" yet.
They won't go, not in big enough numbers. They will have families, friends, other connections locally. Moving away is easier said than done, you need a visa/long term residence rights, you need to learn the local language and customers, you'll probably remain a foreigner for the rest of your life.
And another thing, if currently wealthy people live, what do you think will happen? Everything turns to a wasteland? People left behind will just take advantage of the new opportunities that are suddenly available.
* * *
This is kind of like those discussions where people say that Gates is not actually a billionaire because his wealth is tied up in shares and if he'd sell all of them he'd be poor because this sudden influx of shares being sold would reduce the share price to 0. Like:
a) the price would actually go down to 0 if he suddenly sold everything
b) he'd actually sell everything all at once.. he'd probably just do it in stages and he'd still probably get something like $50-60bn cash, at least
But they won't leave, because high income people still live in New York and California. If high income people don't even move to new states, they certainly won't move to new nations.
I actually find it hard to believe it's less than 10%. My wife has always worked .ore than one job. I have worked two jobs before (one full time and kne part time for about 60hrs+ per week). Even now, I run an LLC after my fulltime job, although it doesn't take up enough time to really count as a second job.
I hear a lot of people saying they want to do this or that they could do this but... I would love to hear more stories about how it works in practice. Like, isn't there some level of legal liability, whether justified or not, that you would be opening yourself up to by doing this? Especially if the companies are in any way related, which could probably be hard to quantify.
I worked at a company where a remote worker tried this. It only lasted a few months because the decline in his performance was more obvious than he thought. He also suddenly become more difficult to schedule meetings around because he was pulled between two companies.
Corporate counsel said it wouldn't be worth pursuing anything against him. He won't get any positive references from anyone, because he tried to make the two-job situation work by shifting more work to his teammates and doing the bare minimum to not get fired.
The real risk is that the companies find out about each other and you lose both jobs. This is a real possibility if your new employer does a background check and calls the old employer to confirm start and end dates, which I suspect will become standard practice in any remote company going forward.
The only way the two-jobs scenario works out for anyone is if you can find two companies where both managers aren't good at managing performance. Either that, or if you're a superhuman developer who can actually put in the equivalent of two 40-hour workweeks with the same energy for both companies, in which case you're better off getting a single 40-hour FAANG job that pays as much as two normal jobs anyway.
I wonder why exactly companies would be against this, if 1. the employee's performance was acceptable, including their ability to schedule properly, and 2. the companies were not competitors where insider knowledge, IP ownership, etc. was an issue. If I could actually manage to do 40 full-time hours in company A and 40 full-time hours in unrelated company B, why should they care?
I technically have 3 jobs, two unrelated "full-time" SE roles, and 1 mom&pop store where I handle all but day-to-day operations (handled by the gf).
To be cold bloody honest, unless you are SE for a serie-A start-up a 40h weeks is probably 20h work, 20h bs. If you were SE for a serie-A start-up, a 40h week would probably be 80h-paid-20h anyway.
The biggest hurdle is the morning scrum, I've got two pretty much back to back between 10am and 11am. Other than that, both are relatively flexible and there is not much critical meetings which can't tweaked.
I’m curious that any Tech company allows multiple full time employment. All tech companies require employees to sign work for hire intellectual property assignment. You must disclose any other intellectual property agreements with other entities.
Even taking on a side job contract has IP issues. Most companies claim full ownership of any IP produced by employees at any time, on any devices.
There’s also workman’s comp and medical insurance, unemployment insurance and all other issues that conflict with multiple full time employment.
I know people that work full time and do a side gig. Either their own business or a part time under the table contract job.
I’ve never known anyone work multiple full time SE jobs. That leaves easily discoverable paper trail.
Why do you think he's concerned if they "allow" it or not? The paper trail is not as obvious as you think. The insurance issues you note are not a real problem.
If, for example, he needed to decline health coverage at one employer he can simply say he has it through a partner. It will not be questioned. The workers comp and unemployment insurance won't matter. Multiple jobs are normal for many folks and the payroll companies and government won't care.
I know people that do this. If you are doing it correctly then there is no deception, both companies are aware and expressly allowing it. The key condition is that the two companies are not competitive.
Unstated, the people who are allowed to do this are superstars who are incredibly productive even at a reduced capacity. Companies view it in terms of retention risk: 75% of a superstar is much better than forcing the superstar to choose, which may leave you with 0% of a superstar.
I know at least 1 friend doing this. Of course you don't tell the company know you are doing this. It require good time management for sure. The risk are low.
It's unfortunate that people have to split their time between two separate jobs but these stats never mention the number of hours worked which is the key metric. If you have a job that is only 10-20 hours a week, picking up another job with equal hours, while less ideal than holding one with twice the hours, is not worthy of the headlines.
I'm not sure I agree that it's not worthy of headlines.
One of the big trends I see with those 10-20 hr a week jobs, is that they are automated in terms of scheduling to try and optimize profit. In other words, they call you in for an 1hr on Monday, but then another 2 hrs later in the day. It's so chopped up that it's hard to coordinate a second job.
And part of the automation is to also ensure employees don't accidentally hit full time, to avoid benefits.
So now they hold two jobs, each chopping their day into tiny bits of unusable time (commute, prep, etc.). And neither has to pay any benefits.
It's a win win for companies, and a lose lose for everyone else.
Are such short shifts legal in the US? Last time I worked retail in Canada the law was that if you were called in to work you had to be paid for at least 3 hours even if you were sent home.
I agree that companies should be disincentivized/punished for doing that. The overhead of an additional job can't be overstated.
I would still like to see the total hours, but ideally the hours spent at each job, to see the depth of the problem. It would also help draw attention to the exact thresholds that businesses are abusing to draw up better legislature.
This is why Uber/Lyft were so good. They allowed people to dodge the bin-packing problem by allowing someone to convert time and an asset smoothly into cash flow.
I disagree. Generally working 40+ hours at one company brings significant benefits like health insurance or retirement plans. Working two part-time jobs wouldn't do that. Plus there's a significant cost with context switching. 40 hours at two jobs will have more overhead than 40 hours at one job.
Agreed with all points and that's likely the case for the majority of these people. But there is probably still a non-trivial number of people that are working 32+ hours at one job and 10-20 at another that would fall into these statistics that would receive benefits. More data can't hurt. Existing laws are clearly being gamed.
Edit: Also, these stats will exclude people that are working just one job but still under the benefits threshold which is not good either. "Working two jobs" is just too broad of a statement to be actionable.
> Those juggling more than one occupation earned less, on average, than people who had only one job.
I would like to see a more detailed breakdown on why that is. I thought that perhaps there would be more information in the source paper, but these journalists at Reuters have shared neither the title nor the names of the authors with us.
I haven't found anything similar to what's being reported on either the U.S. Commerce Dept. or the U.S. Census webpages.
US wages have reached an all-time high, powered by strong growth during the Covid recession[1]. With higher compensation it makes sense that more people would trade off leisure to work additional hours at attractive pay. Including getting a second job.
> US wages have reached an all-time high, powered by strong growth during the Covid recession
Translation: employment losses were strong at the bottom and light at the top, leaving the average wages of the remaining employed workers much higher.
> With higher compensation it makes sense that more people would trade off leisure to work additional hours at attractive pay. Including getting a second job.
I would be very surprised if the distribution of who is getting second jobs is consistent with that “a sinking tide lifts all boats” fairy tale rather than it being concentrated in the same segments where unemployment has gone up the most and representing instead people who would otherwise be underemployed due to limited hours available in the primary job backfilling with a second, possibly lower-paying-per-hour job.
Although labor market recomposition plays a role. There's a major shortage of semi-skilled blue collar labor, leading to some of the strongest wage increases of any sectors in 2020. This includes construction[1], manufacturing[2], and logistics[3]. These workforces tend to skew older, and hence were more affected by workers dropping out due to Covid fears.
Unlike traditional white collar professions, these are industries where workers are likely to take a second job. Particularly during boom periods when pay is attractive. It's very likely that at least some of the increase in second jobs is driven by rising secular wages in semi-skilled blue collar jobs.
This will certainly be made worse by raising the min wage, as suggested in the article, not helped. Contrary to the apparent popular opinion, companies aren’t bottomless pits of money and many are barely surviving. How do people get away with having this fantasy as one of the central “truths” of their universes?
Many of the barely surviving companies are those that employ “vulnerable people”, think grocery stores- laser thin margins, managers that aren’t actually making much more than employees. Nuking those businesses will improve the health of the job market? are you kidding me?
I love how Americans just think there is no other country that might have, say, higher minimum wages or socialized medicine. It's just impossible they say. Not sense in comparing or seeing other places approach, America is just too exceptional.
Note that in Europe the economies are not as dynamic and has lower GDP growth on average. There are costs to higher taxes and more regulations. We're not exceptional, things are done differently.
Well, that GDP growth technically means you have a better opportunity to trade up in the USA than anywhere else in the world, if you apply yourself, get yourself trained, etc. you want to make people believe that these career choices are impossible to escape and they really aren’t.
It certainly is true, but academics who want to conduct sophistry can use the metric that gives them the answers they want. Comparing USA to Denmark using in-country income percentiles gives Denmark a much lower bar to hop over for this BS "social-mobility" as defined in the article.
Here's one: use USA percentiles for both countries. Or use Denmark percentiles for both. Only when you use a high bar for US and low bar for Denmark do they come out on top.
This may have more to do with the US not getting blown up during WW2, and the US being the largest single market(in the sense that everyone speaks the same language, has same culture, comparable laws everywhere etc.). And less to do with good policies.
>This may have more to do with the US not getting blown up during WW2
It's been 80yr and Japan and Korea are doing fine.
The USSR basically force created a large single market over the course of its existence. If it was such a net win for prosperity the economic would have stuck around.
Nobody says it’s impossible, just that there are trade-offs. France has a monthly minimum wage that works out to under $12/hour on a 35 hour week. It also had 8.5-9.5% unemployment over the last few years before COVID, while the US was half that at 3.5-4.5%.
Same thing with socialized medicine. Nobody says that socialized medicine is impossible, just that it requires a level of taxes nobody wants to pay. Again to use France as an example, health insurance is paid for with a 20% tax split between employers and employees: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=924192.... America could easily pay for socialized medicine with such a tax. That’s not how any proponents of socialized medicine in America have proposed to pay for their proposal.
Ironically, that’s just a different form of American exceptionalism. “We can have high minimum wages and socialized medicine like Europe without having higher unemployment and higher middle class taxes like Europe.”
Raising minimum wage leads to efficiency gains, because companies automate their processes to remove labor from the equation.
We can take care of those people who cannot sell their labor at above minimum wage. It's not a law of the universe that they need to be exiled to starvation or eviction. (American corporations would love to have you think so!) Of course, this means that if you own a big company like McDonalds and put all your workers out of a job by automating, you need to do your part to take care of them.
When jobs are automated, overall revenue doesn't go down. It often goes up. It's a misallocation that the increased revenue doesn't go to displaced workers in the form of welfare.
Groceries are already adapting: they employ fewer people than they did prior, especially in high-cost areas. They already are removing cheap labor: self checkout. The increase in productivity goes to the worker who still remains, in the form of a higher wage.
It is just simply not true that we can maintain a huge portion of the population on unemployment for an indefinite period of time. It would come out to trillions of dollars per year, the math just doesn’t add up. And I should remind you that not every company is McDonalds or Amazon, but this kind of thinking supports their dominance rather than undermines it because their competition are less able to afford to comply with regulations. Wouldn’t you feel like a fool if you killed all small business in the US and ended up only with a few big players? Isn’t that the scenario everyone is afraid of? Stop making it a self fulfilling prophecy.
Nuking, how? Where do you think you are going to get your cheap bananas? Your bananas are going to go up from $0.29/lb to $0.39/lb and the grocery clerk is going to have a little more rent money.
You assume the store wouldn't replace the grocery clerk with self-checkout machines or install an amazon go like-system.
Robots & specialized technology solutions are year-over-year going down in cost. If labor continues the upwards cost trajectory we'd simply be accelerating the replacement of unskilled labor with robots.
Great example is Knightscope. It's able to meet security guard compliance & insurance needs at an hourly rate cheaper than humans. And given enough time, I'm sure it'll end up more reliable.
https://www.knightscope.com/
That's a pretty terrible reason for UBI imo. If UBI is built to offset the lack of jobs, more people will choose not to work. If people choose not to work, the price of labor will go up. If the price of labor goes up, more and more labor will be outsourced to countries without UBI. It will create an underclass of non-citizens who don't get the luxury of UBI but live in an economy built for people who do.
If you're working 3 jobs to pay the bills, and then someone starts paying the bills for you, you're probably not going to continue working those 3 jobs. I don't see anything remotely controversial about that logic.
The reason people work minimum wage jobs is because they require that minimum wage to live.
The incremental cost of labor is not going to slow the arrival of a robotic Aldi. Fortunately, I have other grocery stores in the area and can spend my money at the one with the best quality AND service.
> The incremental cost of labor is not going to slow the arrival of a robotic Aldi.
No but it could speed it up. I'm certain plenty of big enough retail operation has a spreadsheet somewhere tracking the ROI on potential automation endeavors.
> Fortunately, I have other grocery stores in the area and can spend my money at the one with the best quality AND service.
Agreed, but are you in the majority with that? There's people who don't care about the long term impacts of, say, buying from an online retailer versus a local bike shop, but there's also a decent portion who's incomes mean it's either take the choice that's a little destructive to society, or not have any even-close-to-nice things for yourself.
If you want to know what a race to the bottom looks like in the US grocery biz, just ask Tesco.[0] At the end, they were practically giving food away with ridiculous coupons and it still wasn't enough to keep people coming to their "fresh & sleazy" stores.
The automation in ordering at fast food places was visible immediately after several cities uped the minimum wage. Hurt the workers but my orders accuracy has gone up compared to the previous human system
They would raise prices? Which would disproportionately affect me, who makes a good bit more than minimum wage, since I still buy from those vendors but my wage is not increasing.
While lower income workers would have the prices raise on them, but less than by the amount that their page is rising (because the cost is also spread on people who won't have their wages increased).
Which is fine by me. It can present a problem to positions like, say, academic adjunct, since those are budgetary and can't simply increase prices. But for the most part I don't see anything apocalyptic about a minimum wage increase.
They would raise prices, and be immediately replaced by Amazon, who can outprice them with scale and robotics. All this time you are complaining about a society dominated by a few large players, but every policy you advocate favors the dominance by a few large players.
Maybe going on a tangent here, but it's really the idea of a federal minimum wage that doesn't make sense to me. Cost of living can literally be an order of magnitude apart between 2 given states.
Because it’s literally the minimum wage. States are free to raise it higher if their cost of living is higher, but it makes sense for the federal government to say “there is nowhere in the country where you can support a family on less than this dollar amount so everyone should have to pay at least this”
And differences can be a magnitude apart living in different parts of the state! I live in a major east coast city, where a small rowhome in my neighborhood is 200k+ in good condition.
new houses in the state capitol 2 hours away? No problem coming in under 100K.
So COL varies wildy even within a state, as is no surprise.
I don't disagree, this is just making my point even more :) And reinforces the original comment that a minimum wage that doesn't take these disparities into account may simply be a death blow for a lot of small businesses in low CoL areas.
I think you make a good point here that a lot of people miss: we have things like cheap groceries because as a society we prey on vulnerable people. When do we accept that the reason we get to have avacados and limes year round everywhere in the country is because we are all collectively taking advantage of people? And we have to accept that if we want to take advantage of people less, our day to day will be more expensive.
I suggest to decrease the minimum wage to 1 USD/h like in Mexico. Other option is that the bosses may give the employees a tract of land in rent as payment, they can keep a small portion of their production for themselves.
What’s the point of doing that? That’s $2000 a year at full time. No American can even come close to living on that and frankly I would rather be unemployed
Some Nordic countries, which usually come up at some point when discussing employment dynamics, do not have a minimum wage and yet no one earns only $1/h.
Correlation not causation. They don’t have minimum wage because they don’t need minimum wage. This is like saying that antibiotics give you an infection because only people with an infection have antibiotics.
Here's one study, reviewed jointly by Dr. Henrique Schneider, professor of economics at Nordakademie University in Germany and the chief economist of the Swiss Federation of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-ric...
In the US, we have welfare programs that target the poor (yes, some slip through the cracks unfortunately). Once you account for all taxes, transfers, and non-welfare benefits, the poorest 20% are on average richer than most European nations. This is measured by looking at annual per capita consumption among the bottom 20%.
The article you provided are from the same people who deny global warming(The Heartland Institute). Dr. Henrique Schneider is a conservative Austrian (as in the school) economist with loony ideas about science:
https://ecaef.org/the-anthropocene-fallacy-learning-from-wro...
So allow me to be quite skeptic about the quality and validity of his "research"
You mean like universal healthcare for low income people (Medicaid)? Or retirement security for low income people (Social security)? What exactly are you referring to?
Nobody doubts that Nordic countries have generous social safety nets, but I think rayiner is scoffing at the notion that the US's social safety net is "non-existent", which is laughable.
And that's not even including State-level welfare. Each State has its own unemployment insurance, welfare programs, and subsidized state university. In Georgia (where my alma mater is), university is essentially free if you can maintain a GPA > 3.5.
On top of all that, the government is currently debating another big round of welfare and stimulus. A Republican has proposed a massive overhaul of welfare to provide up to $15,000 a year in cash for parents: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22264520/mitt-romney-chec...
I can see how you may read it that way, but I did not state that the US does not have any social safety nets - that would be as you pointed out, obviously false. To re-iterate, my point was that the US lacks very expansive social safety nets such as those present in Nordic countries, some of which were enumerated by cambalache. Were the US to adopt some of those policies, perhaps the minimum wage would be less important.
Is free college part of the "safety net" given that the majority of people in Scandinavian countries don't go to college? How is this relevant to a discussion of minimum wage workers?
Paid vacation and parental leave are good examples of social benefits that exist in Scandinavia but not in the U.S.
> Option to opt in for half-time working and the companies are mandated to comply
Is working half hours a problem minimum wage workers actually face? This sounds more like a benefit for more skilled workers, who
> Universal healthcare not related to your job situation nor to the whims of the coverage of your health policy
For minimum wage workers, the same exists in the U.S. A full-time minimum wage job where I live in Maryland pays $21,000. Through the Affordable Care Act, someone my age (36) at that income level can buy a "Gold" plan with low deductibles for $75/month. That works out to about 4.2% of income, basically the same as the higher income taxes you'd pay in Sweden on that same income. Except in Maryland your sales tax is 6% rather than the 25% VAT in Sweden.
> How is this relevant to a discussion of minimum wage workers?
Gee, I dont know, maybe becuase college students with no degrees has a higher probability of a minimum wage. But he can study and work, not to choose between both or a life-enslaving credit.
> Is working half hours a problem minimum wage workers actually face?
Minimum-wage earners are people too, not mindless drones. You have there colleges students, second-income parents, people trying to create their own business, people working in the arts, volunteers.
> For minimum wage workers, the same exists in the U.S.
In a gold plan you still have to co-pay 20% of your costs, so good luck with an unforseen 30k medical bill.
Here is the latest data in one chart: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/figures/images/figure-cac-3.... In the U.S. 47% of people have a post-secondary degree. It's 43% in Sweden and 38% in Denmark. I'd imagine vanishingly small numbers of low-wage workers have college debt, or would qualify to get into college.
> Gee, I don't know, maybe becuase college students with no degrees has a higher probability of a minimum wage. But he can study and work, not to choose between both or a life-enslaving credit.
The vast majority of workers earning minimum wage aren't qualified to go to college. If they are, they can get government-guaranteed student loans, which are repaid based on income levels after college.
And it's not like college is actually free in Scandinavia. You still have the opportunity cost and cost of living. Student debt levels in Sweden are actually similar to those in the United States, $20,000-25,000: https://qz.com/85017/college-in-sweden-is-free-but-students-...
Student debt in the U.S. is also not "life enslaving." To go back to my example of someone making minimum wage in Maryland. If that person somehow has a college degree and the average $25,000 of debt, they'll pay only $24/month on their student loans: https://studentloanhero.com/calculators/pay-as-you-earn-calc.... This is for federal student loans, but more than 90% of all student debt is federal loans.
> Minimum-wage earners are people too, not mindless drones. You have there colleges students, second-income parents, people trying to create their own business, people working in the arts, volunteers.
I mean do minimum wage workers actually have trouble getting their employers to give them half-hours, such that they need a law that forces their employer to accept that? In the U.S., it's so easy to hire and fire workers that employers are very flexible about low-skill, hourly workers only wanting to work say 20 hours a week. They just hire more workers.
Yes, but the co-insurance is subject to Cost Sharing Reduction: https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/cost-sharing-reduction. If you actually get sick on the Gold plan that I was looking at, your maximum out-of-pocket costs is $6,500. Which is a significant amount, no doubt, but most people making minimum wage are young and will not get sick.
> In the U.S. 47% of people have a post-secondary degree. It's 43% in Sweden and 38% in Denmark.
You guys are missing the point; social mobility for all. Also, if so called low-skilled jobs still provides a comfortable living in Scandinavia, it will obviously skew those numbers.
> And it's not like college is actually free in Scandinavia. You still have the opportunity cost and cost of living.
Yes, you can choose to remote or on-site education. There's also a cultural thing where young adults are encouraged to move out from their parents sooner rather than later.
The loan is taken from a government agency, that means non-profit. The current interests rate for student debt in Sweden is 0.05%. This is surely a major difference from the US?
> but most people making minimum wage are young and will not get sick
This seem very optimistic, bordering cynical. I wonder how long the Uber waiting times would be if there's only healthy young people driving (and some even like to assume that it's only part timers at that).
> The loan is taken from a government agency, that means non-profit. The current interests rate for student debt in Sweden is 0.05%. This is surely a major difference from the US?
Interest rates in the US are higher, but unlike Sweden your repayment is based on income. If you make less money, your monthly payment will be much less, and the debt will be forgiven after 20 years.
The incentive can be very easily removed by legislating that a part-time job would need to offer a fraction of the benefits proportional to the amount of hours the employee works per week.
Ideally, there should be some sort of a credit transfer mechanism, where an employee working multiple part-time jobs that combine to 40+ hours a week could get benefits equivalent to a full-time job at one of the workplaces, proportionally covered by all employers.
Another option would be to crack down on monopolies and large chains. If you employ 10000 corporate drones, who are expected to follow the same corporate instructions day-to-day and can be swapped out by a fresh hire without any loss of productivity, they by definition don't have any economic leverage. On the other hand, if the same market niche is occupied by 1000 independent 10-employee companies, the overall efficiency is lower, but the leverage of each employee (and the salary they can negotiate through supply/demand) is higher. Because in a smaller company you are someone the owner trusts to delegate part of their business, and not just a line on the spreadsheet.