I just read The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovitz. It’s an incredible book and talks at length about the issue in the article.
A word about this:
“What technology and trade have done, however, is displace millions of Americans from their middle-class jobs, and send them hurtling down the income ladder into less remunerative occupations.”
It’s not that simple. It’s not just trade and technology.
The causes of the erosion of good middle-class jobs are extremely complex. I’ll talk about just one here, since I don’t have too much time:
Tax law works to advantage higher tier workers over middle class workers. It costs much less in payroll taxes to hire a single superskilled worker at extremely high compensation than it does to hire a bunch of mid skill workers at middle class comp.
Quoting from the book:
“A simple example illustrates the special burden that the payroll tax imposes specifically on middle-class labor. If a bank deploys midcentury financial technologies to issue home mortgages using twenty mid-skilled loan officers who each earn $100,000 per year, this costs the bank and the workers, taken together, $306,000 in payroll taxes. By contrast, if the bank were to switch to the current mode of production and displace the mid-skilled loan officers with a single Wall Street trader who earns $2 million, this would cost the bank and the trader only about $90,000.
“Where two technologies of production are economically equivalent, but one requires twenty mid-skilled workers while the other requires one super-skilled worker, the mid-skilled approach currently faces an average payroll tax rate over 10 percentage points higher than the meritocratic approach, which produces an aggregate payroll tax burden over three times as great.
“The payroll tax, in other words, substantially suppresses mid-skilled employment and wages and fosters super-skilled employment and wages. (Indeed, if the super-skilled worker can get capital gains treatment for her income, by styling it as founder’s shares or carried interest, the income tax adds a further bias, on the order of 20 percentage points.)”
While 306 vs 90 is nothing to scoff at, we're talking about 200 / 2000 = 10% of a difference, in the extreme and unrealistic case you quoted. So in less extreme cases it would be just a few percentage points.
And in Sweden it's 25, the numbers are probably similar across all of Europe (and sometime increases due to employment benefits). And don't mention paternity leave.
Required and actual are very different animals. Just b/c the govt doesn't say you must doesn't mean employers don't provide good benefits. Reddit always says race to the bottom but a quick look around doesn't support it.
Where are you located that retail workers get anything close to 20 days of vacation annually? (Which is also separate from sick time, maternity leave, etc.)
Even at a fairly cushy corporate job I don't get 20 days of vacation time.
If you work in retail you expect not to have mush PTO. I do consider myself lucky my job offers 6 weeks vacation plus sick/personal time off; but this is one of the reasons I've stayed with them b/c of this benefit.
I still do not think the government should dictate to private businesses in this area.
Parent is clearly comparing present day to two generations ago to make an argument that there's been a general positive claim. Present day Germany is completely irrelevant to their point.
Even if you were to take that at face value, it's not as if Walmart retail workers are getting vacation time to visit their relatives in a foreign country more than once a year.
I'm 41, born when my parents were in their very early 20's, and my Grandpa missed Korea during his draft, he was out before it started. You must have much older parents.
Thank goodness the economy is moving in the right direction.
The US has low unemployment, rising wages, and a robust stock market. If any of these were reversed, things would be different. At least we're on the right trajectory.
As some of the posters here note, automation could reduce job prospects in the near years ahead. I'm hoping retiring boomers (including myself) will open enough slots to compensate for this.
The charts show that wages are at record high levels, and are trending in the right direction.
I suppose we could hope that the record was set even higher, or that the trend was moving even faster in the right direction?
My point is that things really are good. We can always hope for better, but we need to understand that these are good times. (They won't always be so.)
That low wage workers have been treading or below water with their wage growth vis a vis inflation and necessity costs (which have risen as much as twice the rate of inflation) for decades now. Things are not "good” just because we may - may! - be at the precipice of a return to sanity. In many respects they are far worse than they've been in quite some time.
It’s clearly societal choices: wages in the US for the poor and lower middle class are really low compared to the cost of housing / decent food / health care / education.
The lower middle class can afford decent food, just some of them don’t want to eat within their means or aren’t cost conscious.
Actually I think innumeracy is a big problem for a lot of people with low incomes. I have a relative who I suspect is innumerate and it’s both fascinating and sad when you get insight into their budgeting/estimation abilities.
The living conditions of poverty decrease cognitive capacity. So, in the cases where low-income households are not exceedingly proficient at stretching a dollar, there's an explanation for that, outside their control.
In any case, your first statement is objectively wrong (they can't afford decent food), and it's incredibly insulting on both a personal and intellectual level to compare people who are unable to keep themselves from dumping hundreds of dollars on luxuries to people who are splurging on, say, a full lunch instead of the PB+J they'd have time to pack otherwise.
>innumeracy is a big problem for a lot of people with low incomes
the wavefront of the system of global capital since agriculture has been the liquidation of peoples for whom mass codified exchanges of increasing complexity didn't compute
It’s worth noting that the “decent food” you’re referring to takes time to prepare. Time is something that the lower middle class doesn’t have a lot of.
Even 30 minutes of prep and cooking time can be too much to expect from someone after commuting home from their two jobs.
You’re getting flak for this comment and I think it’s because people aren’t interpreting your point of view fairly. There certainly are many cases where people are legitimately struggling to make ends meet (and I don’t think you’re saying otherwise) but I think you are absolutely right that another big problem is that many people are making ‘enough’ money but simply don’t know (or don’t want to) spend it wisely.
It isn’t just the lower class, either. I know far too many people that make six figures and still complain that they live paycheck to paycheck, but meanwhile blow $500 at the bar every week, or buy a new $300 pair of shoes every month, or a new $1500 iPhone every year. There is a weird phenomenon where even people with means will prioritize luxuries and then complain that they don’t have enough money to save for a house or save for retirement. You see this on HN too, with several recent examples of posters saying that their $300k/year FAANG salary is too low and they can’t afford to live on it.
Exactly, I don’t want to delegitimize poverty, but I do want to bring up that a lot (maybe not even most, but a decent chunk) of people with money problems have spending problems rather than earning problems. I also know people with very high incomes that spend a lot, and now that you bring that up, it reminds me that the problem in aggregate definitely has to go deeper than innumeracy (though I still think this is a problem for a lot of people).
The issue I see with a lot of people in particular is spending too much on cars, food, (especially eating out) and clothes. If you make $150k+ in the Bay Area, whatever. But a lot of people with lower incomes get caught up in this. Where I’m from you can live by yourself decently on just $25k-40k a year, but you don’t have a lot of room for error.
Wow, that fancy talking sure makes me think you're smart. Maybe you can help me. If I make x and everything I need to live costs x+y, what do I do? Die slowly...? Work a 27 hour day?
I’m not saying the system isn’t rigged against poor people. But I do personally know people who are just bad at budgeting or frequently get ripped off because they don’t know how much things are supposed to cost, and probably wouldn’t need to ask for help at the end of the month if they changed how they spent money.
I know a lot of upper middle class people in the Bay Area as well who don't know how much stuff is supposed to cost and get ripped off all the time as well ;-).
Poster you're replying to wasn't talking about people who struggle to put food on the table. They were talking about lower-middle class people who truly don't (or can't) understand that buying a $40,000 truck with 18% interest for 7 years isnt a "good deal", its horrible, financially ruinous decision.
Do you have data for this? Everywhere I look puts the US among the very best.
For example, here [1] is UK by quintile:
In 2017/18, the average UK household income before housing costs was:
top quintile: £52,000
second highest quintile: £34,700
middle quintile: £26,400
second lowest quintile: £20,000
bottom quintile: £13,100
The average UK household income after housing costs was:
top quintile: £47,700
second highest quintile: £30,900
middle quintile: £22,800
second lowest quintile: £16,100
bottom quintile: £9,200
Here [2] is the US, 2018 quntiles: 13,775; 37,293; 63,572 ; 101,570; 233,895
PPP Adjusted means adjusted to cost of living [3]. Adjusting the incomes above gives for the bottom 20% of US $13.7K income, for UK $13.1K.
From all the data I can see over many countries, the US poor and lower middle class are doing much better than almost any place in the world.
The US is huge, numbers in one area can be very high or very low and skew things significantly. It doesn't help most American's if salaries are pulled up (in the average) by a high cost of living area, and housing is pulled down (in the average) by a different area 300 miles away.
You see this alot in school data. The top 90% of schools would, if averaged, put the US in top standing. However, those bottom 10% pull us down (alot). The big fight in America right now is whether we cut those bottom 10% and say EOBAD's (GOP), or work to help them catch up (Democrats).
You're not looking at cost of education (the UK is a European outlier on that one) or healthcare (a disaster in the US), or price of vaguely healthy food (just compare a middle-class Safeway or Walmart to a middle-class Carrefour in France for example), or the cost of cars, going on vacation (super expensive in the US), the number of holidays, etc.
Direct money comparaisons doesn't explain everything unfortunately, and if you just look at that the US is clearly ahead..
Do you mean pre-college? In which case the US spends more per pupil than OECD average by quite a bit.
If you mean college, then most OECD countries have nowhere the number of people in college as the US. And there are ample cheap local colleges in the US - people choose more costly ones because they can.
>healthcare
Yep, I stated that one. We're about twice the per capita cost as OECD countries. That cost is spread through the system, including doctor and nurse salaries being quite a bit higher. This is likely due to Baumol's Cost Disease, since almost all higher skilled jobs in the US pay about twice OECD countries. So to drive our cost to OECD levels, you'd need to mandate locally low salaries for doctors and nurses, which would result in lower quality care.
I'm not sure what a solution is here, but it's highly nontrivial.
>transportation
Gas far cheaper in the US than OECD average, and likely cheaper than most if not all OECD countries. Or did you mean in city busses? In which case ours are similar. Or did you mean metro tickets? Again, same cost. Or are you talking about intra-city routes, in which case again we're similar costs.
Please clarify with data.
>not to mention bad public services...
All depends on where you live. To compare the US (by area and population) to somewhere else, you'd need to include the entire EU, or all of OECD, in which case you're adding places with terrible services.
If you want to pick small, nice countries, then pick small, nice states, and again, very similar.
> This is likely due to Baumol's Cost Disease, since almost all higher skilled jobs in the US pay about twice OECD countries. So to drive our cost to OECD levels, you'd need to mandate locally low salaries for doctors and nurses, which would result in lower quality care.
The bureaucracy of billing in the US is something magical that somehow manages to be worse in outcome and number of people involved than French bureaucracy (and the bar is high in terms of badness)
Rent is higher in some areas due to market forces. If I have an apartment and can rent it out for $2500/month why shouldn't I?
A 1 bedroom in my immediate are rents for @1800/month. Go 5 miles down the road and the same space rents for $1000-1200/month. Differences? "Desirability" "newness" "better schools (which makes no sense if you don't have kids" "atmosphere (I read everyone looks like me)"
You can go into some older areas of the city and find rents below $800/month.
The difference in price between an efficiency / 1br / 2br is often negligible. Explain the market force cause of this.
Let's consider why older housing is so much cheaper for a second.. Property tax isn't recalculated until you update the building or rebuild on the property. So it's a huge disincentive to ever change any buildings, split lots, etc.
> If I have an apartment and can rent it out for $2500/month why shouldn't I?
Perhaps because “you” value morals other than “make the most money I possibly can”? Or you want to provide housing that’s affordable by those who do the blue collar, nearly-minimum-wage work that powers our modern cities?
Profit isn’t everything. I’ll even go so far as to say that the current expectation to get “maximum profits at any cost” is a (“The”?) driving factor in the problems we lament in our society.
Yes profit isn't everything. Providing a safe, clean place to rent is foremost. But - if $2500 is the market rate for that living space there is no reason not to charge the market rate. The goal of a rental space is to meet those forces. A lower wage worker should expect less amenities, but not should be expected to live in an unsafe dirty place.
Not sure how zoning and codes raises housing prices? Poor codes would result in cheaper housing (with no alarms or sprinkler, weak roofs that collapse under snow load, thin walls etc). And zoning can definitely reduce housing costs. In my city developers were required to mix single-family and multiplex in neighborhoods.
The opposite also happens: barring multi-family dwellings that would reduce costs, and enacting codes that would allow for cheaper, but still safe, dwellings. The former is happening in pretty much every city, and there's no shortage of reporting on it, so I'll leave that to you, but for the former, I would specifically look at the laws that are forcing advocates of tiny houses and backyard apartments to continue fighting. Toronto recently reformed their laws to allow for the latter, after years of pressure.
Suffice it to say, these situations are far more common in cities than the ones you've described.
'suck' is a relative term based on some standard. Is the standard chattel slavery? Every single job in the US is spectacular in comparison. Is the standard some cushy s/w dev job at a megatech company? Most jobs suck in comparison.
The word is there to create a catchy headline. The article very much goes into the why:
* Many jobs provide poor opportunities for advancement if desired.
* Many jobs provide poor compensation relative to cost of living.
* Many jobs lack stability, either in pay, hours, or continued employment.
* Many jobs provide limited agency to improve working conditions or business practices.
The last one is something that even I, a holder of a cushy tech job, grapple with. Most of my job is fine, but it's painful to deal with boneheaded and poorly thought out management decisions that management neither cares to justify nor is willing to accept feedback on.
There's a lot of "I'm in charge, so we're doing it my way, which I know is perfect because I decided it was" in American corporate culture, with little avenue to course-correct, as the most frequent response seems to be retaliation for bruising someone's ego.
"pollster asked 6,600 U.S. workers what they saw as the defining characteristics of a “good” job, then used their answers to construct a “job-quality index.”
The article, which I'm sure you've read, links to a survey in which Gallup attempted to answer your question. They asked people exactly what features they look for in a quality job, then asked people if their jobs meet those standards. The summary specifically mentions "autonomy, opportunities for advancement and job security."
It's interesting to note that expectations for the limits of what's acceptable for labor are defined by, "Is it as bad as slavery?"
And for what it's worth, there is indeed "jobs" in this country that are objectively as bad as slavery. Most Americans do not work them, but they do help shape the market most Americans work in; and, in some cases, they are outright competing with them.
Compared to the average job back several decades ago (for a large part of the post war period).
Of course most people, being less talented than us, are lesser humans, and so deserve to have crappier jobs, hours, pay, and lives. (Well, not really, but probably many think that way. They might not say the "lesser humans" part out loud, but they're OK with people having lesser jobs and worse conditions for them and their kids, even if they work harder than them -let them eat cake and work smarter, they'd say-. They're OK as long as its not them of course).
I don't think the title of this article is good or portrays what it is really getting at. It is not really about having a cushy job that you like going to, but instead more about how jobs available today don't pay well.
The pay does not match up to inflation, healthcare costs and cost of living. Put the cost of higher education into that mix and it just adds to the problem. So many are stuck paying off high students loans to only be able to get mediocre paying jobs.
"only 40 percent of Americans currently have 'good' jobs."
Meaning head of household jobs. That is a problem!
Thats still all relative though. If everyone made between 10-15 bucks an hour, 15 bucks an hour would be enough to pay for anything that matters. Chinese investors aside, the reason an elementary school teacher might have trouble affording an apartment in Manhattan is because they're competing with people who can afford them. Such as the s/w engineer with the cushy job.
Right, the problem might arise from when you have some people making $9/hr and others making on the order of $1k-100k/hr. Those two groups both occupy and influence the markets, and if you don't keep that gap small enough you risk people not being able to afford the cost of living. I agree that if you paid everyone $10-15/hr, no one would be producing any goods that no one could afford.
What else can you expect in a mass-manufacturing-based economy; where even the act producing or manufacturing locally is worthy of pride?
Margins need to be as razor-thin as possible in order to complete, and payroll is often one of the largest expenses.
As a result there will be a significant group of jobs by which little experience is required and turnover may be high - but since the jobs don’t require a lot of skill, the high turnover rate is not an issue.
For this job group, there is no reason to improve the working conditions, as, from the outset - these workers are never expected to stay for long.
An individual like a Junior Software Developer working on a large codebase that‘s existed for time, gets more valuable to the employer over the years, as their knowledge of that company’s particular codebase grows, and how the workflow of their company functions.
A Junior developer, then, has a career path - as they demonstrate their knowledge in the codebase they move from Junior to Intermediate to Senior and thusly by the time they may reach management they have demonstrated an aptitude in it.
Labor is one of the largest expenses in part because it has to account for the inefficiencies introduced by turnover (including on-ramping, i.e., training). Many of the jobs deemed "unskilled" actually do require skill and experience to perform in a proficient manner.
It's true that anyone can flip a burger or poor a cup of coffee, just as it's true that anyone can hunt-and-peck a command; it's something else to be able to manage a kitchen and dining room with one or two assistants during peak, 6 hours into a shift that was scheduled with only a week's notice, observing food safety practices and producing the correct order from dozens of options in a timely manner and with unflappable hospitality, as many food service jobs now require of their employees. This while people complain about the difficulty of hosting family for dinner once a year.
Class, race, and gender associations have much to do with our perceptions.
The thing about unskilled jobs is that ability of being able to complete a task is a pretty low bar. You can always increase productivity through work experience.
The question then becomes at what "time to task completion" and "size of task repertoire" does a job become economically viable for an employer. I tend to think that the line between unskilled and skilled, barring educational or professional requirements, parallels the line between a dialect and a language: "skilled" work is "unskilled" work with a union.
Right. That's the stated policy, for jobs that pay a few thousand dollars a year short, at full time, of making a bare-bones life affordable. So for those who have to have a second job, or who rely on inadequate public transportation, or who are at the whims of supervisors who don't observe policy, that is a major problem.
Payroll, in fact, is a very small slice of manufacturing costs. Actual components, overhead, utilities, equipment,etc. all are larger pieces of the COGS. More automation, IoT compatibility are the keys to reducing costs. Less real estate, more remote logins for support (the folks on the other end of that call earn, too).
The “Trump's America” phrase, rather than the more correct “21st century America” (it’s been this way for a while now) makes the whole thing a bit suspicious, too.
Thankfully you can create your own job or at least start moving in that direction. It's easier than ever to do so and can often learn everything you need online. And signs point to this being increasingly the case in both respects.
Jobs that suck are that way not because they need to suck, it's because it's in the interest of the people offering them (people with more power than the people they are hiring) to offer them in the most humiliating, dangerous, and cheapest way possible. If you don't like it, you can be replaced.
> because it's in the interest of the people offering them (people with more power than the people they are hiring) to offer them in the most humiliating, dangerous, and cheapest way possible.
"cheapest" is obvious, but why "most humiliating, dangerous"? What incentive do the latter serve?
It's a way to tip the turnover scales in favor of the employer. Dangerous jobs weed out the people who care enough to complain about conditions that are less dangerous but still degrading. If you're willing to put up with situations where people lose limbs or die, you're probably not worried about lunch break violations. You also have the option of giving a "problem" employee the worst tasks until they decide to leave.
"Humiliating" is also good for employers, when they can get away with it. If you make your employees put up with undignified conditions - long hours, short breaks, arbitrary rules, embarrassing or onerous security policies - you appropriate their focus or attention either directly or through the stress of having to put up with those circumstances. That's less time and cognitive power to organize, budget properly, find another job, or really plan for the future in any way.
Your job as an employer is to squeeze as much work out of your employees as possible. That means doing everything legal to keep them from leaving (have to make back that training investment), or to have the option to quickly dismiss them if they're sub-optimal or causing problems.
I'm working from the perspective of having worked in retail and supply chain, but HN's main demographic should listen up: crunch is a solved problem. Think about what your employers have to gain from not implementing those known solutions.
> Your job as an employer is to squeeze as much work out of your employees as possible. That means doing everything legal to keep them from leaving (have to make back that training investment), or to have the option to quickly dismiss them if they're sub-optimal or causing problems.
If one accepts this point, both "dangerous" and "humilating" are counterproductive for the employer, since these properties of jobs provide a good incentive for an employee to leave as soon as he/she can afford it.
Humiliating? You're a cog. Cogs don't get treated like people.
Dangerous? See cog. And cheapest.
If you're a business owner running any kind of business that requires physical labor, then you've probably got five things in your favor automatically over your employees: money, a lawyer on retainer, experience dealing with litigation, a system that has been designed to favor you, and insurance.
Most poorly paid employees don't know their legal rights and they don't really expect the system to work for them, either, so in the event that a serious injury occurs, they will usually just sit there and take it. If you drive in the cities of Harahan and Gretna near New Orleans, you will find billboards of maritime injury lawyers all over the place. Why? Because ships are huge business, working around them is extremely dangerous, they are insanely profitable, people get hurt working on them all the time, and employees don't know their rights because there's zero legal incentive to educate them past the bare minimum HR deems necessary.
"Dangerous" is a tradeoff between potential liability for the employer and saving money. Greedily pursuing short-term gains can often make workplaces more dangerous than they need to be.
"Humiliating" can be inherent to the structure of a job (it can feel humiliating to be obligated to do unpleasant tasks, or even simply to be stripped of personal agency), or it can be a source of pleasure for the employer. Some people enjoy dominating and belittling others, and subordinates without alternative jobs available are a ripe target.
> Some people enjoy dominating and belittling others
I suspect that's partly behind the preference for foreign workers who are tied to their employers for visas: they'll accept a lot more abuse than somebody who can just pick up and find another job tomorrow.
Because you want to instill fear. As an employer offering shitty jobs, you probably want to make it 100% clear to your employees that they can easily be replaced. "Humiliating and dangerous" can "help" instill fear in people living hand to mouth.
If work was fun it would be called vacation. If you actually like your job and find it stimulating then you are lucky - myself included. You typically get paid to work because it’s something you wouldn’t do for free, but is useful to someone else.
Not to mention that it's not true that "someone has to be a garbage man" (anymore so than a woman must "clean the dishes" in a household). People could be responsible for cleaning up their own shit, or take turns to do it.
The same way Japanese schoolchildren are made to clean their own school (toilets etc) - and in many armies, soldiers do that for their units too. So, no some specific person relegated to clean up others' shit is not "required".
I am constantly amazed by the guilt people feel that others have to work jobs that they feel are “beneath” them. No, we don’t need some sort of utopian society where we all rotate jobs so we all get to experience what being a garbage man is like. You are an elitist that believes “dirty jobs” are shameful and something to feel bad about. You must live an exhausting life. I’m happy there are people all throughout society who still get stuff done and keep the world turning.
An honest job is no more demoralizing or humiliating than we make it out to be. And, most importantly, no one owes us a job here in the US. Your skills are what determines your worth in our byzantine and feudal job market. At the end of the day, the US labor pool has been commoditized, much of this government-sponsored. Like in any commodities market, there are a few winners and lots of losers. Like that form of 'legalized extortion' we call the US health care system, the H1B guest worker visa program and our ailing infrastructure, much of this is due to our Government's actions.
I feel like a lot of these articles ignore the fact that conditions are better than ever for almost everyone. Inequality as an absolute metric is not that relevant if people have more real purchasing power. And a job being undesirable is not relevant either - people shouldn’t feel entitled to getting exactly the wage they want, doing exactly the job they want, living exactly where they want, and so on. Their purchasing power is what ultimately matters.
Note that per IMF data, the US is higher on GDP PPP per capita than the Netherlands, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, ... that is, the countries often put on a pedestal by people on Twitter or Reddit: https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/profile/OEMDC/WEO
I don’t think it’s a straw man. I was responding to this part of the article, which suggests that jobs should also be of a certain minimum quality:
> What’s more, the jobs that our “blockbuster” economy is creating aren’t just lackluster in monetary terms, but in other measures of job quality, as well. A recent Gallup survey illuminates this point. To assemble a more fine-grained portrait of American working life than federal wage and employment data can provide, the pollster asked 6,600 U.S. workers what they saw as the defining characteristics of a “good” job, then used their answers to construct a “job-quality index.” The resulting metric reflects not only a given job’s level of wages and benefits but also whether it offers career-advancement opportunities, stable hours, a sense of purpose, the ability to change unsatisfying aspects of one’s employment, and job security, among other things.
The article seems bent on making this point. Earlier on the article, it notes the following in even more vague terms:
> For the median job-seeker in Trump’s America, the odds may be good, but the good jobs are an oddity.
To me I feel this is textbook entitlement, expecting everything to be perfect, and expecting work to be more than a voluntary two-party exchange of goods and services that participants undertake in search of utility. Isn’t this just greed and seeking luxury in a different veil? It is possible to have jobs that provide in all these dimensions but I think because everyone would want those conditions, the competition would be fierce and would diminish some qualities (like pay) as a result. If one desires extraordinary workplace circumstances they must differentiate themselves through talent or hard work. It can’t be something everyone gets for “free”.
Taken at face-value, your comment reads like "a significant portion of the population should not expect to live with the same quality of life their parents had, in the same city that their parents live/grew up in"
People should certainly have an expectation that their quality of life could be the same if not better than their parent’s, 100%. Why should anybody be guaranteed to live in the same area they grew up in though? Why should anybody have the right to live in any particular area, especially at a particular QOL?
A word about this:
“What technology and trade have done, however, is displace millions of Americans from their middle-class jobs, and send them hurtling down the income ladder into less remunerative occupations.”
It’s not that simple. It’s not just trade and technology.
The causes of the erosion of good middle-class jobs are extremely complex. I’ll talk about just one here, since I don’t have too much time:
Tax law works to advantage higher tier workers over middle class workers. It costs much less in payroll taxes to hire a single superskilled worker at extremely high compensation than it does to hire a bunch of mid skill workers at middle class comp.
Quoting from the book:
“A simple example illustrates the special burden that the payroll tax imposes specifically on middle-class labor. If a bank deploys midcentury financial technologies to issue home mortgages using twenty mid-skilled loan officers who each earn $100,000 per year, this costs the bank and the workers, taken together, $306,000 in payroll taxes. By contrast, if the bank were to switch to the current mode of production and displace the mid-skilled loan officers with a single Wall Street trader who earns $2 million, this would cost the bank and the trader only about $90,000.
“Where two technologies of production are economically equivalent, but one requires twenty mid-skilled workers while the other requires one super-skilled worker, the mid-skilled approach currently faces an average payroll tax rate over 10 percentage points higher than the meritocratic approach, which produces an aggregate payroll tax burden over three times as great.
“The payroll tax, in other words, substantially suppresses mid-skilled employment and wages and fosters super-skilled employment and wages. (Indeed, if the super-skilled worker can get capital gains treatment for her income, by styling it as founder’s shares or carried interest, the income tax adds a further bias, on the order of 20 percentage points.)”