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(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.
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.
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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."
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.
When you say "we" in "we should help citizens find a better life" what do you mean exactly? Education programs? Cash transfers? Job finding support?
Because all of these ideas have been tried before and, in some cases, are still being tried - to great failure.
Again, what is your proposed solution? Please try to be more specific than "help those who need helping"
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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.
The conversation turned significantly toward minimum wage "dead-end jobs". You can find some more interesting discussion of this group here.
This sort of feeds into 100's point about frictions. Yes, there are frictions to firing people, too, which in multiple markets leads to behavior like, "Let's just make it shitty enough for them that they quit." This isn't just at the low-end. I'm very aware of situations where C-level people were pushed out by just gradually taking away all of their power/budget and making their job shittier and shittier from the perspective of a C-level person.
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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.
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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.
My father did a job like that for several years. They didn't have air conditioning, and he complained about it being about 90 degrees most of the time, and they only gave him little pixie cups of water. He eventually left after they switched the kitchen language to one he didn't know, and got a job teaching high school math, because he was a grown adult with a college degree, a clean background check, and family at the time. In retrospect, I have no idea what he was doing there, and it's good he was pushed out.
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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:
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.
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."
I do care about them. But I'm not willing to trade the general warfare of the top 80% to help the dysfunctional 20%.
Of course, always.
Not always.
@Amadan's comments below are useful here. The fact of the matter is that somewhere around 10% of the population even in highly prosperous western societies are just going to continually fuck themselves up with bad decisions. This is a fact as real as gravity and it sucks. I don't think we should leave these people to die in the streets, but what to do when every bit of government "support" delivered feels like it's not only going nowhere, but might actively be subsidizing damaging anti-social behavior.
You, @BahRamYou, can keep telling me "it's hard out here in these streets!" and "people are struggling." Great. But what's your solution? Because if it's more of the same; a Government sponsored cash transfer and redistribution scheme, I am telling you it does not work for anyone involved. The poor remain trapped in poverty, the middle class gets soaked and slowly collapses, and the wealthy elite use the myriad holes in tax and estate law to shield their assets.
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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.
This made me think of something else.
The Success Sequence
It states:
If you do this, there's only a 3% you're at or below the poverty line by your late 20s to early 30s. This even holds for a variety of often awkwardly tricky subgroups:
To me this says there's more to the equation than just jobs and job friction - it's a basket of pro-social and delayed gratification goods.
So, to return to your anec-data about "my mom worked odd jobs all her life and she can't retire" .... I'd have to ask that reddit poster if their mom had kids before marriage (perhaps before adulthood)? Did she graduate high school? Has she always worked these menial jobs full time or sort of cycled in and out? Because, depending on those answers, I become a little more openly hard-hearted. Repeatedly fucking up what should be obvious decisions because of a lack of self-control doesn't make me feel for you.
If you go to page 3 of the report, you see a pretty stark data visualization. I've attempted to summarize it here:
These numbers drop drastically as each step is completed, starting with finishing High School.
Much like crime being concentrated in a handful of super-repeat offenders, it would seem that non-violent but "I don't have my shit together at all" people are hyper concentrated as well. Maybe a lot of them party on reddit, that wouldn't surprise me.
I know there are some other folks on here who like to dabble in the genocidal, but I do not. I don't want to round up the "poor 'n stupids" to walk them off a cliff. I don't want to sterilize them. I don't want to have them knife fight on Netflix (Hobo Wars 6!). But allowing them to exist in a kind of poverty limbo that also slowly bankrupts the nation seems like a literal negative sum game; everyone who plays leaves worse off.
I mean, I don't disagree that anyone in that situation in their 50s or 60s has probably made a long series of bad life choices. I don't think many people exhibiting even a modicum of common sense and responsibility wind up old and penniless through sheer catastrophic misfortune.
And yes, the people who fuck up like this are probably concentrated in certain demographic groups.
All the being said - what do? Like I said, being hard-hearted may feel righteous, but then you have a population of elderly poor people eating cat food, so to speak. I'm okay offering a very sparse social safety net for those who done fucked up their lives, but I'm not okay offering nothing (or something like poorhouses). Not just out of soft-heartedness, but because I think there is a genuine case to be made that some people are just born... well, not able to do better. And some people who could have done better have the misfortune of being raised by people who sucked as parents and didn't teach them any better. And some people really do hit a run of bad luck (a woman who decides to be a SAHM in good faith and then her husband ends up gambling away all their money and does a runner really can leave a single mother in terrible straits, through no fault of her own but not being able to see the future). I don't think you can really say that every one of those people "deserve" to suffer. Maybe a lot of them do, but we also can't realistically separate out the "deserving" poor from the undeserving.
Is there a solution that doesn't leave poor people on the streets and also doesn't bankrupt us? I'm sure there is; can our politicians construct such a workable solution? Eh...
Well, yes. But it would probably cause some serious issues with the market and bubbles.
If the government takes $50,000 for every birth within the USA each year, and puts it into a broad market fund returning 6% a year (this is conservative), at age 70, that's worth $2,953,796.51.
Everyone who makes it to 70 automatically gets $3 million. At 4% per year (considered the "safe" withdrawal rate) this is $120k per year. Current max social security per year is $45,864.
There are 3.7 million live births per year in the US. Times $50,000, that's $185 billion. Per year.
Current social security disbursements, annually, are about $1.4 trillion.
So, there, I've solved social security, right?
Maybe, but maybe (probably) not.
People, and the politically ambitious among them, will inevitably see this $3 mil as "theirs" - They will want to withdraw it early, or be able to take loans out against it etc. If we allow people to include this payout in their wills, you'll have all sorts of fun family fights about who gets to go to the lawyer with Mom. If all of this is allowed to happen, we're right back in the same situation as at present and, for an added bonus, we get a massive doom credit bubble to wait on to explode.
This involves putting tax dollars directly into the market. Lot's of people have problems with this on principled grounds (which are valid). The pure financial economics of it are also worrisome - every year, the market can count on $185 bn of super patient capital arriving. That will fuel risky bets left and right.
The one upside I can think of is that people who choose to live frugally can do so with a very real sense of 'reward' coming to them. Entrepreneurial types will maybe decide to take the risk and start-the-thing in their lives. Most will fail, but many more people taking risks like that could actually propel the general advancement of society forward.
You can math out some solutions, sure, but @Amadan's point remains - what do when the bottom 10 - 20% find a new and inventive way to short circuit the system? "DIE IN THE STREETS" is an attractive edgelord position, but even median pop culture level moral thinking detests that.
The answer is we'll muddle through. I see a comeback of multigenerational households. I see a return of old school style "poor houses" and weird alt-poverty encampments (think Slab City, not Portland Tent Camp).
The problem with this sort of thinking is that the stock market isn't a magical money machine. There's no particular limit on money being invested- banks create money out of thin air all the time. The reason stocks appreciate is that we limit how much money banks can create, and that the economy overall is growing. If the government throws in an extra 10 trillion dollars into the stock market, all that happens is that stocks overall grow slower because they're weighted down by all this useless government money.
Is this your serious explanation of how equity appreciation works? Or is this kind of a short hand for something else? I can't tell.
If it's the first (i.e. serious explanation) this is a categorically incorrect understanding of financial markets.
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The 6% is not the real return but the nominal one. Adjusting for inflation by the time the newborn is 70 $120k will be extremely mid.
No, 6% is the real return. Link
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This is fair enough.
The better data point would've been to hit me with would've been "what about people who save something, but then have it gobbled up by medical issues later in life, or some other tragic event?"
The simple solution is what used to be the default solution - you have Old Timer's insurance in the form of Social Security, and it only kicks in at a truly advanced age. "Retirement" in the American vision of it is not something that can endure. People live far longer now and, due to some of the cost diseases I mentioned earlier, it's just plain harder to save the necessary amount to finance a 20 or 30 year retirement.
I'm optimistic that people will be comfortably working into their 70s by about the 2040s. I do believe this is a good thing. I've seen retirees go through cycling phases of anger and depression because they feel they've lost purpose by not working, even if they are totally financially self-sufficient. Cognitive decline without social interaction is a real thing and seems to me (anec-datally) to be more severe in older folks.
But what to do about those folks who can't even work a semi-BS laptop job after 65? Or who have medical issues (probably lifestyle related) that simply makes not-dying a herculean daily chore.
My answer here is I don't know. Which is an unsatisfying answer. I can say, however, that the math paints a pretty stark picture - if we keep paying out for healthcare and social security the way we are now, we're bankrupt as a nation by 2030. That is a path that doesn't just look like India, it would look up to them.
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