site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26868 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

9
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

White-collar migrants are even worse since you are making college admissions and jobs even harder for your kid but you are also ensuring votebanks, unstable coalitions

That's how I (and I think a lot of Trump voters) feel about it. For a long time now the standard line has been that immigration is good, as long as it's legal and limited to people with some credentials. Which basically means either middle class white-collar migrants, or students aiming to enter that class. We cracked down hard on the lower classes of migrants workers, so now there's no one available to build houses, process poultry, nanny babies, or basically do any of the other low-wage jobs that no sane person wants to do. But instead there's millions of them here competing for scarse positions in the upper-middle class.

I guess from the point of view of Musk and other billionaires, the middle class is so far below them that he feels no threat there. For me in the middle class, I don't see much threat from the lower class, but I can see how a low-wage worker in the border states might feel more of a threat. I'd like to live in a society more like Dubai or Singapore, where we have lots of migrants workers but only for the low-wage jobs, and Americans are given a huge boost to help them enter the middle class.

In what world did we crack down hard on the lower class of migrants? There are more in America currently than ever.

Lots of them here illegally claiming asylum (or just straight up hopping the border). Very few here legally on work visas. That makes a difference.

In the US? Lots of people want to build houses. Nannying babies is a problem not because of lack of available work force but because taxes and regulations make it obscenely expensive. And there are indeed people available to process poultry, even though it is a thoroughly nasty job.

Define "lots of people." My understanding is that there's a lot of people with a fantasy of "someday" building their own craftsman cottage, where money is not an issue. But very few people want to go out and hang drywall to make low-cost apartments.

There's a lot of people in the construction trades. Construction tends to follow a boom-and-bust cycle where one month there will be lots of unemployed construction workers, the next there's a labor shortage, but that's different than having a very few people in the trades.

Lower end construction trades are full of hard drug users with what their bosses refer to as 'crackhead tendencies', you can get white Americans to do those jobs for market rate(which is like $17/hr starting these days), but illegals do it better, faster, cheaper, and more consistently.

Again, I'm asking you to please use actual numbers, not just vague words like "a lot of people."

My understanding is that most people doing construction in the US, especially in the low-paid jobs, are people born in Mexico or Central America. Some came her legally, some illegally, some... who knows. The "boom and bust" is often solved by those people moving back and forth across the border. It's not going to be solved by raising wages slightly so that a recently laid-off code monkey takes a job hanging drywall.

Again, I'm asking you to please use actual numbers, not just vague words like "a lot of people."

I don't have a research agency backing me. The department of labor says there's about 8.5 million in construction and extraction, plus another million in construction managers. 2.2 million of those are construction laborers. But they don't break it down by where they're born.

As for drywallers specifically, the DoL expects demand to grow at about the average for all occupations.

Thanks. So by way of comparison, (statistica)[https://www.statista.com/statistics/193261/unadjusted-monthly-number-of-unemployed-men-in-the-us/] tells me there's a total of about 3.5 million unemployed men in the US right now. So we even if we took literally every single unemployed man and sent him to work in construction, it wouldn't massively increase the number of construction workers.

In fact, an increase of 3.5 million over a base of 9.5 million WOULD constitute a massive increase the number of construction workers. But there's also the men "not in the workforce" to be considered; prime-age male LFPR is 90% compared to 97.5% in 1955.

I can build a house top to bottom -- I'd actually be kind of happy to do so rather than bullshit SD work, but the money isn't good enough. Am I "in the trades"?

If you're going out there regularly, building houses as fast as possible for competitive market prices, then yes you're in the trades.

If you're just doing it as a hobby for yourself then no, because that doesn't affect the overall market. It would be the same if some carpenter or plumber wanted to dabble in SD in his free time.

I used to do that -- it's not as though I've forgotten how! If there were a massive boom (perhaps induced by stopping the cheap labour) that made the money more tenable, I could do it again.

I seriously looked into opening a daycare center a couple years ago because my area was obviously chronically underserved, and found that workforce was in fact the main bottleneck. Finding people to do that sort of job for less than $35/hr is apparently impossible. Talked to a couple people who have made it work and they said the secret was to hire friends or people from church.

In-home daycares are also unbelievably scarce despite the much lower (still ridiculous) barrier to entry.

Nannies are likewise at least $30/hr.

People simply don't want to do the work.

Nannies are likewise at least $30/hr.

No they're not lol. That might be what an agency charges but the girl's getting paid $15-$20.

And why do you need an agency that employs the girl? Regulations.

Because the girl wanting to nanny and family looking for one have to be connected somehow, and the family is going to want someone who did background checks and stuff for them. Yes, technically it’s overhead on the transaction, but the transaction wouldn’t happen in the first place if it wasn’t for them.

Background checks are not so expensive as to require an agency to actually employ the nanny. A broker model with a one time fee for placement would make much more sense for the connection problem. But having an employee brings you under myriad regulations, and that's why people pay an agency instead.

I hate to break it to you but teenage girls are not very good at money maxing and looking out for number one, and people who can afford a nanny don’t care.

Now you're telling me there's just a $10-$15 per hour market inefficiency that no one cares to exploit? No, I'm not buying that one.

More comments

Obviously it varies by area, but a while ago I read (might have been in Reason) that in-home daycares have to comply with a huge laundry list of expensive-to-follow health and safety regulations; one that stuck in my mind was that the house had to have a circular driveway to minimize the danger of cars backing up - a measure which would leave most neighborhoods bereft of daycare facilities.

thanks for this post, it's fascinating to get this kind of specifics from someone who really looked into the business.

There really seems to be this giant, gaping void in society now where we are lacking women in traditional roles, and the market just can't keep up.

Nannies are likewise at least $30-35/hr.

That's honestly fascinating, considering that matches nearly exactly the average salary for women with a default college degree. I think the market correction that happened to low-skill labor in 2020 was actually just ripping the band-aid off something that the Western world has to come to terms with, which is that most white-collar work actually just ain't that objectively valuable (and never really was), and the market is starting to reflect that. Hell, immigrating to the US and having only that job available is a raise over my current (exchange-rate-adjusted) wage in a high-skill technical profession at home.

Those rates are obviously going to be higher to the customer, so... who's buying this service and expecting to come out ahead? Is it the average middle-class woman who would rather spend 100% (or at least an overwhelming majority fraction) of her take-home pay to have another woman raise her child, is it the people who are making 200,000 dollars doing who knows what, or something else entirely?

Indeed, in practice you can hire a teenager to nanny your baby for not much more than an illegal, and poultry processing plants have had great success replacing migrants with drug addicts and parolees. Construction is actually much harder, but it pales in comparison to the real challenge- finding someone to pick crops.

We cracked down hard on the lower classes of migrants workers, so now there's no one available to build houses, process poultry, nanny babies, or basically do any of the other low-wage jobs that no sane person wants to do.

And as a consequence, there has been a surge in working class wages that are the envy of the developed world, along with large growth in worker productivity.

Meanwhile in the UK and Canada, we've been importing low-skilled workers and their (many) dependents, and all we've got to show for it is skyrocketing house prices, a growing welfare bill and stagnating wages and worker productivity.

Its complicated.. i know there's a lot of charts and statistics to argue that working class living standards have gone up recently. But the "lived experience" of many people, which they've been screaming for 4 years, is that their living is being destroyed by inflation. I suspect there's a bit of both.... some people overestimate inflation, but the official inflation statistics also miss some important things, like home mortgage rates doubling.

At any rate, if working class wages have risen despite the immigration, what's the problem? @Corvos this is also my reply to you. I think America clearly has "the stomach" to do a lot, since we elected Trump again. The question is what are we going to do? Nothing, i guess?

It's not just interest rates doubling. Inflation tends to be calculated on a "basket of goods" system, where (in an ideal world) they try to react to trends in the real world by determining how much of a product the average consumer is purchasing in a year. For example, if there is a bad year for pork, most people will buy more chicken/steak, so it doesn't make sense to claim that the average person experienced the full inflation of the pork shortage.

The problems are:

  1. The people calculating the basket of goods know that bad inflation numbers will act against the current government.
  2. The basket of goods can accept inferior substitutions without reflecting that the quality of the good has gone down.

So people can feel their quality of life is getting worse because steak is outside their reach due to inflation, but the basket of goods now contains ground beef at the price steal used to be. If the government in power is favored by the bureaucracy, they can also choose to include irrelevant items, or exclude items that are relevant, to make the numbers more favorable (electronics tend to be cheaper over time, so they're a good one to use to balance the numbers if another category is too high). And with electronics especially, it's very easy to selectively say inflation is negative (the iPhone 12 has a better camera than the iPhone 11, but was the same price on launch - that represents a deflation rate of 6%!)

Four years ago, a bag of potato chips was around $3.99 CAD, with the expensive brand being $4.50. Looking at the same thing today, it's $6.39 for the cheap brand, and $8.49 for the expensive one. Inflation has far exceeded the official government numbers, especially for food.

Yeah, that's true, and those are all good points for how inflation calculations are not the most scientifically objective measurement.

But interest rates are different because they're just straight up not included at all in the consumer price index

I know that economists give a lot of reasons for that. But I suspect that part of the reason is that any economist who's really good at math gets recruited into finance instead, where he can make vastly more money, so the people who work in academic economics tend to be risk-adverse and kind of weak at math.

Specific complaints about price increases tend to center around, mostly, things you’d be mildly embarrassed to tell people you buy a lot of, like candy or alcohol. I suspect the griping about continuing ‘grocery’ inflation is partly due to eating cheaper cuts of meat and partly down to soda addicts or alcoholics using it as a euphemism.

We buy our groceries at a membership outlet. We just did a grocery run this last weekend. We bought no alchohol or candy, nor any other specialty products, no junk food; we bought a variety of fresh fruits and veggies, milk, bulk ham and turkey, hummus, bread, and so on. our grocery bill is more than double what it was two years ago.

Plus there's a lot of fudge factor in hedonic improvements. If a 60" TV is the same price as a 54" TV was last year did prices of TVs drop by 10%, more than 10%, or less than 10%? Or if this year's Intel $299 offering can do 10% megaflops how much better is this year's chip? Overestimating that can offset a lot of price increases.

Dubai and Singapore have lots of middle-class immigrants too. They get treated better so they don't read as "migrant workers", but that is what they are.

Most of the Gulf monarchies (not sure if Dubai still works this way, but it did when a family member did a lot of business there) are societies where citizens have cushy government jobs and all the real work - blue and white-collar - is done by migrants.

Singapore is a crowded city-state where citizens get subsidised housing and middle-class immigrants pay market rate.

how many is "lots?" My understanding is that those places have temporary work visas, but no real path to long-term citizenship.

All the Mormons I know know somebody working in the UAE as a pilot/structural engineer/other actually high skill job, so it’s clearly a substantial number of people.

True, but it doesn't really tap their welfare system and there's no longterm path to citizenship.

If the prevailing Western Democracies operated under similar principles of 'we will pay you well for your service but you cannot bring your sprawling extended family along and plonk them on pensions/medicare/welfare' the whole system would work better.

No path to citizenship in the Gulf monarchies. "Lots" as in two of my British classmates spent multiple years working in the Gulf (one as a petroleum geologists, the other as an accountant). My current employer has a Dubai office staffed entirely by PMC immigrants.

Anecdotally, permanent residence (usually after 5 years) and citizenship (after 10 years) are pretty automatic for skilled migrants in Singapore, although Brits working there often don't take them up because it exposes your kids to the draft. There are about 500k non-citizen permanent residents in Singapore out of a population of 6 million, and the vast majority of them entered as skilled migrants or dependents of skilled migrants.

There's no way to talk about it. Any native saying It gets called names, any non native natrulised citizen gets called self hating and anyone like me who's neither gets called names, I won't be surprised if that happens here too, maybe one or two posters.

Dubai is ideal in this regard, good model for the future, citizenship at least.

so now there's no one available to build houses, process poultry, nanny babies, or basically do any of the other low-wage jobs that no sane person wants to do.

I think i speak for a lot of the American right when i say "fuck no".

The left claims without evidence that immigration is neccesary because immigrants do the jobs Americans don't want to do. The Right responds that necessity has nothing to do with it and that the truth is that they're doing the jobs that the left is unwilling to pay an American to do because the left are a bunch of moral degenerates who value cheap access to avocado toast over the health of thier community, and would rather have a serf than an employee.

It is the attitude of people like you that has made this an issue of contention in the first place because like it or not, proles vote.

the jobs Americans don't want to do

the jobs that the left is unwilling to pay an American to do

But those are functionally the same thing. Pay us enough money and sure, you can get an American to work in a chicken processing plant or wherever. But you'll also have to massively jack up prices. It doesn't raise overall prosperity, it just raises inflation. People have this fantasy that the entire country can all be rich and prosperous, but it's never been like that, there's always an underclass doing unpleasant work for shit wages, it's just a question of who is going to be that underclass.

There is a free lunch here: the productive output of folks who prefer not to work and consume welfare instead.

They can do the jobs or starve. In either case the rest of us benefit.

The fake socialists like AOC have given up one of the key tenets of socialism: from each according to his means.

is your username legit? You really want to be like the USSR and feed all people into the industrial machine, letting the weak die off from starvation?

I want to replace our fake socialism/welfare state with real socialism where people contribute what they can.

The "weak" as you call them are not people incapable of producing value. They are just lazy wreckers who consume welfare and refuse to work. I want them to work for their dinner. This might be a net negative in EV - their consumption might exceed their production - but it's higher EV than having them sit around playing video games and doing drugs.

Pay us enough money and sure, you can get an American to work in a chicken processing plant or wherever

Yes, that's the smoking gun that proves beyond any reasonable doubt that anyone claiming that "there is no evidence that immigration has a negative effect on wages" is either an idiot or a liar.

This is the crux of the issue. The left claims that they want people to be paid a living wage while doing everything in thier power to undermine and sabotage said wages.

As I said in last weeks discussion of this topic, i have yet to be convince that the exchange of labor is somehow exempt from the ordinary rules of supply and demand.

As I said in last weeks discussion of this topic, i have yet to be convince that the exchange of labor is somehow exempt from the ordinary rules of supply and demand.

The main problem is scale.

You want more eggs? no problem, raise wages and get more chicken workers.

You want more strawberries? No problem, raise wages and get more strawberry workers.

You want more of everything, across the board, espeicially in low-wage manual labor jobs that are hard to automate? Well... now you've run out of workers. You can raise wages as much as you want, but you're not going to magically get more workers out of thin air. It might have been different in 2010 when US unemployment was high. Now it's near record-lows, there's just not a lot of slack left in the economy. Or do you want to put my 90-yr old grandma at work building houses?

You're not "running out of workers" though, you just don't want to pay them. Labor force participation for people under 65 has been trending downwards for decades.

Prime-age male labor force participation rate is at 90%, off its all-time lows during COVID but still well under the 97.5% we had in 1955. So there's slack without grandma building houses. Unemployment is low, but it's been lower.

As we all know, in America, absolutely no homes were built, no lawns were mowed, no children raised, no crops picked, no animals butchered, prior to the passing of the Hart-Cellar Act.

At one point, all of these jobs were done, and ones requiring a wage - as opposed to the family just doing it - paid living wages. The idea that it's mathematically impossible for chickens to be slaughtered at a living wage without immiserating the rest of the US flies in the face of all of recorded history.

Once again, I am begging the citizens of the Motte to stop with this "reasoning from first principals" nonsense; it doesn't work, it has never worked, and it is incredibly unlikely it can ever work.

And there were many more poor people in America circa 1960 than there are today! There were also far fewer labor-intensive services on offer- you mowed your own damn lawn.

You cannot run a society without Dalits. Middle class people don’t want to be janitors and meatpackers and peach pickers(I don’t either). When we stopped oppressing the blacks we needed some replacement.

You say i should stop "reasoning from first principles", but that's what you're doing. The 1960s weren't some golden age of American prosperity. The average wage was far, far lower back then than it is today. The average person lived in a small, low quality house shared with a large family or many roommates. The average job was shit. They also had a huge underclass of both black Americans and refugees from 3rd world countries, in much worse poverty than we have today.

Please, show me your ideal society so that we can stop using reasoning.

As we all know, in America, absolutely no homes were built, no lawns were mowed, no children raised, no crops picked, no animals butchered, prior to the passing of the Hart-Cellar Act.

I have bad news to you about how most cotton was picked in the past. Even after 1865.

The idea that it's mathematically impossible for chickens to be slaughtered at a living wage without immiserating the rest of the US flies in the face of all of recorded history.

Immiseration is relative and it's well documented that relative deprivation is perceived far more sharply than the equivalent increase.

US poultry consumption was fueled by low prices -- taking that away now, even partially, is a dead idea.

I do agree that an objective sense, the state of Americans in the 60s eating far less meat was not immiseration. But that's not the same as saying that going back to that place now would not be perceived as such.

As we all know, in America, absolutely no homes were built, no lawns were mowed, no children raised, no crops picked, no animals butchered, prior to the passing of the Hart-Cellar Act.

Back in those days Americans were being paid well under what they're currently getting in real terms. If there are Americans willing to work for similar real wages as to what they were getting back then then yes, they can build homes, mow lawns, raise children etc. The problem is that they're aren't willing to to this for the much higher wages they are currently being offered, so what makes you think they'll happily accept the much lower wages (yes we are more technologically advanced today which means we can offer them higher real wages than those days without much loss, but we're not that much more advanced that we can just give them however much money they are asking for)?

This is true, but you are overlooking the fact that the average American in the past was very poor compared to Americans now. Yes, even poor people could buy houses and raise large families back then, but the standard of living was much lower. How many Americans would really be willing to pick fruit or lay roof for contemporary fruit-picker or roofing wages today if we just magically departed all the illegal immigrants? You might like to go back to the demographics of the 1950s, but you can't magically unroll immigration but not all the economic and technological changes since then as well.

Personally, I'd be willing to bite that bullet and say yes, let's deport illegals, pay Americans living wages, and eat the price increases in the grocery store and service industries. But I think a lot of people would regret asking for this, because I think those prices will get jacked to the sky compared to now.

down on the farm, labor costs are typically less than 20% or for specialty crops close to 40% of total operating costs, and the price from the farm is about one-third the price on the shelf...

Quadrupling those wages might cost the typical family $300 in a year.

From Oren Cass' "Jobs Americans Would Do" https://americancompass.org/jobs-americans-would-do/

(Tagging at @BahRamYou and @Tractatus because this is all kind of flowing together)

No one should be a chicken processor for their entire career. Or a waiter / waitress at a diner or fast casual restaurant (service staff at high end restaurants is another matter). Or the proverbial burger flipper.

These jobs should be more or less easy-in-easy-out temporary employment for people who need cash to pay their bills. If you read some of the mid century "road" novels, you'll see how a pretty common modus operandi was for the protagonist to roll into town on his last dollar, pick up a few days work doing janitorial work at a auto garage or something, and then go on his merry (usually drunk) way of philosophizing. I've written about this before. It's not so much that people in the 50s/60s were raising full families on these unappealing jobs, it's that these unappealing jobs were the equivalent of day rate motel stays.

So, problem number one is that employment law and regulation has become so burdensome that we literally have millions of jobs that are not worth having - for either the employer or employee. These are the jobs that immigrants (many illegal, all of them willing) actually end up taking. I think I actually saw the very beginning of this as I was finishing high school. One summer, I got a job at a book store - I filled out a single page application and was working the next day. I got a check at the end of the week. The next summer, I got a job at a decent restaurant. The first FULL DAY, I had to fill out pages and pages of digital corporation nonsense on the computer, then watch a bunch of compliance videos (mostly about not falling down in the kitchen or being on drugs), and then had to sign even more physical paperwork relating to me 'trainee' status. This is all so that this restaurant (owned by a corporate chain) doesn't get sued to death by various regulators for not ... self-regulating.

To put it in economist terms, the friction for labor is so much higher than it was decades ago, that it isn't worth going through that friction for some of the lower paying jobs.

For immigrants, however, employers might just skip the paper work and pay in cash. Or, if they employee is visa connected, the company knows they won't just rage quit one day and face deportation. I can't support this at present, but I also feel like the visa-employment situation has a cottage industry of consultants who help the employers manage all of the paperwork (for a fee).

But the fact remains that shitty jobs have always been shitty but, before, you could hop in and out of them, collect some cash, and be on your merry way.

The second issue is that market interference has made the cost of certain things untenable. The major one, of course, is housing. There simply isn't enough (because of burdensome construction regulations and the perverse incentives of home equity appreciation). Wages can't keep up. Wages, however, have kept up with some things that we now consider close to necessary - computers and phones. A decent laptop can now be had for less than $500. Same for a phone. Monthly cellular service is between $20 - $100 depending. nearly gig level internet at home is $100- $200 a month. Very few Americans who want a phone do not have one. Very few Americans who want broadband (and don't live intentionally in the middle of nowhere) do not have it.

All of this is to say I see "the immigration question" in it's economic context as really an outgrowth of a much bigger issue - over regulation and bureaucratization. I shouldn't care too much about low skill immigrants because, if I am competing with them, we're all essentially "taking turns" in that job pool. As we go up the skill ladder, I'm competing with fewer people and then things like community and connections (networks) become more important (which I, as a native, ought to have an advantage in). Instead, because jobs are such high friction now, I am at the bottom of the skill ladder competing with people who exist with the ability to better slide through the legal maze of employment because they are either (a) breaking the law or (b) part of a international labor movement system that penalizes me, ironically, for having been born in the right place.

nearly gig level internet at home is $100- $200 a month

If you live in a relatively new house which has been hooked up to cable/fiber it's $70-90 now for gigabit. And Starlink is $120/m, which gives you less than a gig but you can have it practically anywhere.

I'm skeptical that you're getting a "normal" view of society from reading novels. Basically, anyone who can write a novel is above-average intelligence and motivation. Even more so if it's a famous novel like "On the road."

As a teenager, I worked a few shitty minimum-wage jobs. One I particularly remember was being a dishwasher at a fancy restaurant. It was basically like you described- I showed up, the manager told me bluntly that it was minimum wage, I told him I had no experience but I was friends with another kid who worked there, we shook hands and I started the next day.

It sucked. It wasn't "a step on the jobs ladder." It didn't teach me any useful skills. It mostly just sucked up all my time and energy and made me too tired to concentrate on my schoolwork. It also injured my body with scalding hot water full of sharp metal objects, which I had to work in like a maniac to keep up with the pace of dishes. The only way to get a break was to go smoke, so basically everyone in the kitchen was a hardcore smoker. Also, almost everyone there had a prison record. Most of them were not young people on the path to a better job- they were pretty much stuck in shit jobs for their entire life.

So no, I don't think I could "hop in and hop out" of a job like that, and be on my merry way to my "real career" as a novelist or whatever. A lot of jobs just suck, that's why we pay someone else to do them for us because we don't want to do them. Most of the people who do those jobs get stuck their for their entire life (or in a similarly shitty job). That's why we call it a "dead-end job."

So no, I don't think I could "hop in and hop out" of a job like that

But, like, you did.

But your very own account, you had this job as a teenaged, hated it (but made some money) and then worked hard at your studies to go build a different career. Not hopping-in-and-out of it would imply you either a) never got the job in the first place or b) are still working there (or a similar job).

You're proving my point here. Shitty jobs are shitty. People shouldn't have them for very long. But they're hand to have if you're close to destitute and need quick, honest cash (or if you're, I don't know, a student who would like some small income).

Please re-read my original post. I'm not advocating for shitty jobs as actually not shitty. I'm not saying people should be thankful for their shitty jobs and stay in the forever. I'm saying that shitty jobs should have low friction of entry and exit and that, because they do not, this contributes a level of extra competition at the lower end of employment that is wrong and unfair, especially for legally complaint native born Americans.

I think that there's some misinterpretation of what my point is and I'm not totally convinced it's innocent misinterpretation. I agree with "people shouldn't have to work shitty jobs" as much as I agree with "we shouldn't have wars" -- A nice thought, but unrealistic. Worse yet, I find that people who are super-duper anti-shitty job tend to be in favor of very generous Government cash transfer programs. This is a negative-sum game; the taxpayer base gets a raw deal, and the welfare recipients become strange pseudo-indentured wards of the state.

The thing is, I was already a good student before I had that shitty job. It didn't motivate me to go and work harder, it actually just distracted me a lot from my studies. Saying I hopped-in-and-out is like saying someone can quickly move from from a brief drug addiction or short prison sentence. It's possible, there are people who do it, but it's not good for anyone, and there's an awful lot of people who get stuck there for lifetime. Most of the people I saw there were stuck there or in a similarly shitty job for their entire life.

I agree with you that it's unrealistic to not have shitty jobs. You seem to think that they can be done by native-born people who are just working there briefly on their path to a better life. I think that's unrealistic too, and that we should help citizens find a better life while letting immigrants from 3rd-world countries work the shitty jobs because it's still better than what they would have faced back home.

More comments

One of the important lessons of price floors/caps is that they cause competition on other margins. Think back to when there were price caps on gasoline. It caused shortages in terms of price, and produced competition on other margins - specifically, it caused people to have to compete or "pay" in terms of time spent sitting in line. Alternatively, you could curry favor with a supplier (say, your dad's brother runs a gas station; he might be willing to let you skip the line; presumably you're "paying" with good will).

Similarly, a price floor on low-skill labor (minimum wage) results in shortages in terms of price (unemployment) and competition on other margins. If you're not willing to work under shittier conditions, for example, you're easily replaceable by someone else who is, and since you're going to cost the same either way (in terms of monetary price), who do you think is going to "win" the job? It's very similar to rent control as a price ceiling. Tenants can't compete on price, so they implicitly compete on who is willing to endure the housing conditions getting worse and worse (lack of maintenance, etc.). If the "price" of shittier conditions gets too high for you, someone else who is willing to pay the higher "price" of shittier conditions, but is mandated to pay the same monetary price, will win the competition.

I don't really understand how your comment relates to the topic at hand. H1B visa holders are usually getting paid more than minimum wage, and migrant/illegal workers aren't bound by any rules at all.

My own experience is that the real world is a bit different from the perfect frictionless sphere econ101 view of the world. Working at a small shop, it's not always easy to replace someone, so they'll often put up with some shockingly bad behavior to avoid firing. But there's also shitty managers who enjoy flexing their petty power to make workers lifes worse just because they can, for not rational economic reason.

More comments

The job you described is basically a frivolity, a way for the rich to waste time, a way to skimp on a dishwasher, no one needs to do it. The people who work those jobs are obsolete. Their jobs suck because there’s not enough demand for their supply, so they need to accept bad work conditions for low pay. Improve their conditions and offer better pay and it’s not a dead end job any more, but to do that there’d need to be greater demand, tautologically proving these people and their work aren’t very important.

Sanitation is far from frivolous, if anything it is one of the more essential jobs out there. I am prepared to wager that janitors and dishwashers are far more critical to the day-to-day survival of civilization than whatever it is that you're doing.

With that sort of attitude I am confident that you aren't working in food or energy production.

I think you misunderstand what it was like. the restaurant had a dashwasher. Not like the one you have at home, it was a huge industrial machine. It required two humans to constantly load and unload it, like an assembly line. If you want to raise pay for that sort of thing, you'd have to massively raise prices at the restaurant and no one would want to eat there anymore.

More comments

These jobs should be more or less easy-in-easy-out temporary employment for people who need cash to pay their bills. If you read some of the mid century "road" novels, you'll see how a pretty common modus operandi was for the protagonist to roll into town on his last dollar, pick up a few days work doing janitorial work at a auto garage or something, and then go on his merry (usually drunk) way of philosophizing. I've written about this before. It's not so much that people in the 50s/60s were raising full families on these unappealing jobs, it's that these unappealing jobs were the equivalent of day rate motel stays.

I think you're the first person I've seen in the wild who seems to agree with me thay not all jobs need to pay a "living wage", and that that's okay! That some jobs should be just for the high school kid after school or during the summer, or someone who isnt trying to support a family on it ling term. I don't know how you deal with people getting stuck in a rut and eventually not being ready for retirement, though... I'm sure many will say that it isn't their problem to make sure others don't make poor life choices, but that doesn't help convince the general population when the news is publishing sob stories.

I'd be willing to bet that the number of people who:

  • Hop between these temporary jobs for their entire working life and
  • Have zero substance abuse issues and
  • Have zero contact with the criminal justice system and
  • Make it to retirement age with no savings

Rounds to zero.

Let's say you get the "burger flipping" job because you're not really doing anything else. You're living at home (or with a bunch of other underemployed roommates). Sure, maybe you get some cheap beer every weekend - fine, whatever. If you retain that job for two years, you're going to be promoted to some sort of assistant manager position by inertia and availability alone. The cycle repeats.

Or, you get the burger flipping job, decide that, yes, it does suck, and figure out a new job a little further up on the skill/wage level. You like this and do it again. The cycle repeats.

My more controversial take is that this should be the path for pretty much everyone.

College has become a pay-to-play social proof mechanism for bullshit jobs that mostly fuels middle class over-capture of resources - especially housing. There are some hacks around this (military service, community college pathways) but it, most of the time, boils down to a family being able to pay between $100,000 - $500,000 to jumpstart their kid into the professional class. Oh, by the way, for something like 50% of graduates, this has not worked and has been a fraud for 20+ years. Please ignore that.

At the bookstore job I alluded to in my original post, I got unofficially promoted to assistant manager by my second month mostly because I would follow the store close down procedures correctly each night. This was as a 17 year old. Several of the other 20-somethings working there would routinely forget to lock doors, secure the cash box, or do basic cleaning and organizing. It doesn't take much to be an above average performer and, with just a dash of talent, you can accelerate quickly. I've seen too many graduates of "prestigious" universities who can't metaphorically close down the bookstore making $100,000+ per year because they have the fancy sheepskin on their wall.

Hop between these temporary jobs for their entire working life and

  • Have zero substance abuse issues and
  • Have zero contact with the criminal justice system and
  • Make it to retirement age with no savings

But why do you not care about those people? Those are also human beings and our fellow citizens. We should help them, not make fun of them for being losers and go "oh well, sucks to suck, I guess we're going to remake society to make their lives even worse."

More comments

Rounds to zero.

Reading reddit subs like /r/personalfinance and /r/povertyfinance, I am not so sure. There are a lot of threads along the lines of "My mother worked her entire life at low-wage jobs and has nothing saved up, what should I do?" A lot of people really do just fall into a rut, have zero ambition, and do not think about the future. Either they assume their kids will take care of them or they assume there is some sort of government assistance.

We here on the Motte are almost all well above average in intelligence, conscientiousness, and time preference. Those 20-somethings you mentioned who couldn't even cut it as assistant manager of a bookstore are more numerous than you think, and a lot of them will never really change.

Should we as a society say to these penniless retirees (even the ones who did have substance abuse or crime issues) "Tough shit, your bad choices, die on the street"? While there is a certain karmic justice in that, I also think that's a path to looking more like India.

More comments

Personally, I'd be willing to bite that bullet and say yes, let's deport illegals, pay Americans living wages, and eat the price increases in the grocery store and service industries. But I think a lot of people would regret asking for this, because I think those prices will get jacked to the sky compared to now.

Given the latest election under moderate inflation, I suspect that you wouldn't do that if you wanted yourself or your party to remain electable.

FWIW, I think it would be worse than just price increases. Many entire classes of services and establishments would no longer be viable. It's not just that Chick-fil-a would charge $10 for a sandwich, I think they would cease to exist.

Yes, even poor people could buy houses and raise large families back then

This seems super important.

But I think a lot of people would regret asking for this, because I think those prices will get jacked to the sky compared to now.

Even worse, it opens up the possibility of large-scale working-class organised labour movements engaged in industrial action, as with the UK General Strike. But still worth a shot, I think.

This seems super important.

Perhaps, but ... those houses were smaller, shoddier and had few modern conveniences (or safety features), and every man had to be a handyman to keep the walls and roofs up. Would you want to live in a 1940s (with no modern upgrades) house? Would you want to have a lot of children whom you will struggle to keep fed and clothed and educated? My point is that people point at how folks lived back then ("Large families, everyone had their own house!") but little notion of just how much harder and poorer their lives were compared to ours. Maybe that is a tradeoff a lot of trads would be willing to make, but I think the majority of people would not, and you should at least be honest that deporting all the immigrants doesn't mean suddenly lower class people will get to live like middle class people and middle class people will all be richer and more numerous.

Would you want to live in a 1940s (with no modern upgrades) house?

In Britain this is basically standard, for reasons which have been discussed elsewhere. New builds are rare and the extent to which modern upgrades (dishwasher, tumble dryer, central heating, double glazing) are available varies wildly.

What you have to remember that where mod cons were unavailable they were compensated for by other things. My granny didn't get air conditioning until a couple of years before she died because she had a permanently-fuelled coal-fired oven, and she spent the whole winter in the kitchen next to it. Add thick walls, blankets and jumpers and you're sorted. The only mod cons I have trouble doing without are hot water and washing machines.

I read Scott's article on Cost Disease once and I've never forgotten it. I think that lots of people would be happy with 1940s housing and education at 1940s prices (adjusted for inflation). Medical care not so much. Food is complicated, because the form, quantity, quality and satisfaction associated with it has changed in so many ways that it's not easy to pin the changes as wholly positive or wholly negative.

In practice, those fifties houses don’t seem to exist at fifties price points in places people actually want to live in- clearly, people today are willing to live in them.

To some extent, yes, but it's less a question of raising prosperity and more of shifting it. People who eat lots of chicken will be somewhat poorer, people who work in chicken processing plants will be richer. So it goes. I suspect it would do a lot for American cohesion.

At the risk of scoring cheap points, the last time America imported people to pick cotton for shit (no) wages, it didn't work out well.

Do you think the last 4 years has been good for American cohesion? Because we've gotten pretty much what you describe- higher wages at the low end, paid for by higher inflation overall. But people don't seem happy about it, especially people on the low end.

And I think there's a pretty significant difference between literal slaves and migrant workers, don't you?

Just to be clear, I'm not American and I don't have boots on the ground experience. My understanding is that Biden just pumped money into the system, which is obviously inflationary and primarily benefits those with assets. To the extent that working-class wages rose, it would only be to keep up with inflation. I don't think it's quite the same thing as reducing the lower-class / middle-class divide. EDIT: @Crowstep suggests that I am wrong and the rise in working-class wages is real. He's not American either but he has sources so I will concede.

And I think there's a pretty significant difference between literal slaves and migrant workers, don't you?

You were mentioning Dubai and Singapore, "where we have lots of migrants workers but only for the low-wage jobs, and Americans are given a huge boost to help them enter the middle class". My point was that, in the same way as having a slave caste, or post-slavery segregation, this system doesn't seem like it will be stable long-term. It seems likely to generate massive amounts of resentment and political struggle. Places like Dubai make that arrangement work because they're willing to do whatever they have to do in order to keep the migrants in their place; I don't know if that's stable either but I really don't think modern America has the stomach for it.

My lived experience is that the lower middle and middle classes would happily go back to 2019 in terms of both price and wage levels, but actual lower income people would not. Wage growth at the bottom is real.

Biden pumped some money in toward the beginning of his administration but a lot of the 2020 stimulus money was still beginning to make its way into the economy when inflation started taking off. Republicans like to blame Biden but, to the extent that inflation involved COVID stimulus money, there's plenty of blame to go around. Anyway, you can talk about COVID money pumping and supply chain disruption and this was all definitely part of it, but the low-end labor shortage and resulting wage hikes were obvious to anyone who wasn't still hunkering at home in 2021 or 2022. You couldn't walk into a restaurant or convenience store or retail establishment without seeing a help wanted sign in the window promising a signing bonus and a starting wage that was at least 50% higher than anything imaginable in 2019. Activists had been pressing for a $15 minimum wage for years, but, in the absence of any legislation, places that were paying like $9/hour were now proudly advertising $14. That this was necessary was evident in the fact that these places were all operating for fewer hours than before the pandemic and were obviously short-staffed when they were in business. It wasn't uncommon to go into a McDonalds at the height of the lunch rush and find a single cashier working the register. Even now Wal-Mart, which used to be open 24 hours almost universally, closes at 11 pm. All-night restaurants are a thing of the past. US Steel used to have a year-long waiting list for basic laborer positions and now offers 85k/year with bonuses and no overtime and still can't get people to stay more than a few weeks. I don't know how much this contributes to inflation, but I don't think it helps.

Whether it was Biden or other systemic issues, the distribution of the last few years has been strongly towards wage growth in the below-median (under $35K/yr) section.

Pumping money into the system, especially the pandemic giveaways and outright PPP fraud, seemingly (?) has allowed that segment of society to coast for longer without work.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats