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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33986 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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I was reading Scott's review of Hive Mind recently. The part that stands out to me is this:

The best guess is that the cognitive skill of elites really does matter more than the nation’s average score. When it comes to institutional quality, Potrafke and I found that the cognitive skills of the top 5 percent did the better job of predicting property-rights friendly institutions, although the nation’s average score also did a reasonably good job as a predictor…for the time being it’s reasonable to start with the belief that a nation’s top performers matter more for the economy than a nation’s average performers.

A decent manager would probably be able to find something productive to do with the functionally illiterate office worker Scott mentions in your link. The problem becomes compounded when that person's boss is also an idiot, and so on and so on.

If there really were 20,000 unemployable retards wandering the streets of Springfield, we would be seeing video clips, not second and third-hand rumors. So I am tentatively willing to believe that they are employed. Is there really that much demand for cheap low-skill labor? That is one of the things I am confused about.

A decent manager would probably be able to find something productive to do with the functionally illiterate office worker Scott mentions in your link.

Sure. If there isn't a welfare state to tempt him away from working in the first place. And if there isn't a minimum wage law to prevent him from working at his natural wage. And if the overseer is allowed to give him a stiff beating when he catches him stealing on the job. And if...

I'm not so sure the manager can actually find something useful for the illiterate worker to do within the constrains of 21st century America.

If the hypothetical manager of company A cannot, then said hypothetical manager is replaced by hypothetical manager of company B, unless you believe there are no industries that can find use for low-skill labor in 21st century America.

There are no uses for low-skill, high priced, lazy, dishonest labor in 21st century America. The supply and demand curves for sufficiently low-skill labor would meet below the current minimum wage if it wasn't in place; add in laziness and dishonesty and it probably doesn't clear at all (that is, there's no demand at any positive price, because the worker does more damage than work)

The UAW is still going strong... Clearly someone has a use for low-skill, high priced, lazy, dishonest labor. Just maybe not the people required to hire them.

In any case, I think "lack of English language comprehension" is the real nail in the coffin. We can get away with Spanish since it's basically the unofficial second language of the USA, but I don't see too many government forms translated into Creole.

Bosses of low skilled labor, and white men entering those fields on a management track, expect to need to speak (imperfect)Spanish as a job skill. On the contrary I’m not sure that learning creole is even possible except by exposure; you don’t have classes on it at the local community college.

Edit: I'm not actually sure that there is something called 'creole' which can be learned- it seems like it's multiple dialects which are never written down, not all of which are mutually intelligible. At least with Spanish Mexico city is the prestige dialect for people who actually come here(not a lot of Argentines walking to the border) and is mutually intelligible with eg Noreste Spanish, Centraco Spanish, etc pretty easily.

Depending on the minimum wage laws it absolutely can be the case. Not to mention that the big problem isn't just being low skill - we have some black market work for those, even if it isn't ideal - it's unreliability. If you can't depend on a person to at least show up on time, stay for the agreed-upon time, do the work, and not opportunistically steal from the company, than a person can easily be worth negative money for a company. If you read up Haiti and more generally african countries, it's this unreliability that drives most of the dysfunction, not just merely being low-skill.

Is voting low skill labor?

Is there really that much demand for cheap low-skill labor? That is one of the things I am confused about.

Yes. In a rapidly aging community like that, yes there is.

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