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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26868 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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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.

In practice, the way to exploit that inefficiency is to decide on a nanny from an agency that you like, and offer her a small raise to work for you independently.

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.

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