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A brief history of nobody wants to work anymore (twitter.com/paulisci)
465 points by soheilpro on July 20, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 609 comments



Yeah, people don't want to work when they make crap wages, don't get any real time off (maybe not even paid).. don't get paid if they are sick, can't enjoy having a kid because they can't even afford it.. and worry about breaking the bank for every little medical thing. worry about having to stick at a shitty job because "it has benefits"

Healthcare for all that has 0 to do with employers and is near "free".. guaranteed time off, sick leave, maternity leave, and real assistance on early childcare (as in nearly free nurserys etc) would fix like 90% of the US's problems when we talk about things like "people don't want to work".

But this will never happen so where we are.


If that were the case, people in France would be obsessed with wanting to work :)

The improvements you list are all good things, but they’ve got zilch to do with wanting to work


Ask anybody in France if they want to work in the U.S. Unless you're in tech or some other in demand field where the pay is a significant increase I doubt many would be willing to.


30 years ago people would have said yes perhaps (American dream), but now it has become apparent the US is a very broken country for ~90% of its population. It's actually shocking how bad it is when you think about fundamentals (health, food, security, education). We have many problems in France, they look like micro problems when looking at how painful it is for most to survive in the US.


As an outsider, what boggles my mind the most about America right now isn’t healthcare or inequality. Its gun violence.

Unreal that schools have active shooter training and no one seems to even care. The fact that there is a non-zero chance your kid might be shot at school is completely absurd.


Kids are like 80x or more likely to kill themselves than to be killed in a school shooting. It's not even close to the top of list of real issues affecting the country. It's just an easy one to get clicks and political favor that doesn't require us to do any real socio-cultural analysis - just ban guns!

I think active shooter training time would be better spent on counseling, therapy, PE, recess, or just literally letting kids fuck off and hang out with their friends for an hour.


Firearm deaths just overtook auto deaths as the leading cause of death in children and adolescents in the US: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2201761

Unclear the portion that is suicides but homicides are the fastest growing segment beyond unintentional poisonings


From the article:

> Although the new data are consistent with other evidence that firearm violence has increased during the Covid-19 pandemic,5 the reasons for the increase are unclear,

Seems like there is a pretty obvious candidate for that, lockdowns.

Still, only time will tell, as they go on to say with the rest of that quote:

> and it cannot be assumed that firearm-related mortality will later revert to prepandemic levels.


This bundles in firearm suicides with firearm homicides, obscuring the real issue.

When most people say "gun violence" they do not mean gun-as-tool-used-in-suicide, they mean nonconsensual use of a firearm against someone.

Suicides are way up. Gun murders are up too, but they're still pretty low in the scheme of things. They're "safe to completely ignore" low if you're not in one of a few specific counties in the US where gang violence causes 70-90% of the gun murders.

The movie plot/evening news gun violence stuff that you hear about is so rare as to be safely ignored in all parts of the US.


Making guns harder to access probably reduces suicide rates as well because there are few faster, easier methods of suicide than a gun[1]. I think it's valid to lump gun suicides with other gun violence for this reason.

> The consensus among public health experts is that there is strong evidence that reducing firearm suicides in contexts where more-lethal means of attempting suicide are unavailable will result in reductions in the total suicide rate (see, for example, Office of the Surgeon General and National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, 2012; World Health Organization, 2014; for review, see Azrael and Miller, 2016).

[1] https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/suicide.ht...


There's actually better evidence gun control will reduce suicides than homicides.


Yet the US suicide rate is lower than other developed countries that have no guns.



South Korea isn’t a developed nation?


One developed country with few guns having a higher rate but dozens with few guns having a lower rate is not a very strong argument in favor of your point.


Yes it does.

It shows there is zero correlation.


Only in a simple world where any given phenomenon can only have a single cause.

For example, imagine we find that higher speed limits increase the rate of automobile accidents in a given area. That finding doesn't preclude that poorly maintained roads might also increase the rate of accidents. So just the existence of an area with a high level of car accidents and very low speed limits doesn't necessarily mean that there is no correlation or causal link between speed limits and automobile accidents. It may just mean that the area suffers greatly from other causes (like poorly maintained roads).

Similarly, I think it is fairly intuitive to assume that there are probably a host of causal factors in suicide rates. For sure, means isn't the only factor but it is an important one.

There's been research into means reduction, and it does seem to have an effect on reducing suicide. The hypothesis is fairly intuitive: many suicides are a response to a crisis, and a human in crisis-mode is not always a great problem solver; lack of an obvious means sometimes gives people some extra time to reconsider.

You can read a high level summary of some of the research here: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/risk/


Is this data like way off or something? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-deaths-firearms


Yes. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-deaths-firearms is the correct data. The US is worse than most other developed countries, but not that much worse.


Did you mean to repost the same link I did?


I did not. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/suicide-death-rates is the corrected link. My HN reader did not update the location bar after clicking to the correct page.


Amazing that you can look at kids being shot in primary schools and then try to analyze it statistically.

This doesn't happen anywhere else on the planet outside of war-torn countries. Saying that "actually kids are more likely to kill themselves" is just about peak cope.


How else would you analyze the issue?

A binary analysis would lead us to conclude that gun regulations are completely bereft of any benefit whatsoever, given that gun violence, even mass shootings/spree killings, happen in countries with quite strict gun control - I mean, the former PM of Japan was killed via firearm just this month! But that is not the case. There is a clear gradient of occurrence and effectiveness of regulation. So, we need to move into the realm of statistics.

And the statistics are that over the course of the decade from 2010 to 2019 ~350 kids were killed in school shootings, and ~26000 took their own lives.

My assertion is that given these numbers, an inordinate amount of resources, political capital, and conversational bandwidth is being spent on what is actually a rather rare occurrence and that this is largely a waste compared to what we could be spending said resources, political capital, and conversational bandwidth on - namely, solving the problems that affect broad swathes of the populace and that I, and others, believe actually drive people to commit such violence in the first place.

Or, we can spend the next century fretting about a statistically vanishingly rare occurrence, keeping the blue and red tribes divided, making little to no progress on the existential problems that we as a country, culture, society, and species face, as the world becomes increasingly uninhabitable.


> given that gun violence, even mass shootings/spree killings, happen in countries with quite strict gun control

They absolutely do not, not even remotely close to the scale and frequency in the United States. At least not in countries with equivalent socio-economic metrics as the US (El Salvador does not count).


>They absolutely do not, not even remotely close to the scale and frequency in the United States.

I thought we weren't analyzing gun violence statistically?


We weren't analyzing school shootings statistically, since the statistical incidence of that happening should be as close to zero as possible.

But since you walked down the statistical path anyway, the least you can do is not be completely wrong about it.


I see that you have a hard time following an argument and the rhetorical techniques I used. I will break it down.

I compared the rate of school shooting deaths to suicide deaths for the purpose of pointing out the outsized amount of resources the issue takes up.

You claimed that it is wrong to analyze gun violence statistically.

I, for the purpose of demonstrating the absurdity of such an assertion, analyzed gun violence using a non-statistical and binary approach.

You then took exception to me conceding your point for the purpose of argument and using said non-statistical approach by then bringing statistics back into the mix and arguing that the frequency of gun violence is much higher in the US than other places.

So, which is it? Can we, or can we not use statistics to analyze gun violence? If we can, then we can compare the statistics across regulatory regimes and social, economic, and cultural contexts and show that gun violence can be affected in degree by those factors. If we cannot, then we cannot show that regulation is effective, since gun violence still happens in highly varied regulatory regimes and social, economic, and cultural contexts.

I would argue that statistics is an appropriate approach since, in my opinion, it allows us to come to a better reckoning of reality. Ultimately, your view is up to you. But you can't have your cake and eat it too here - you have to either admit that the use of statistics is appropriate, or that aforementioned factors are irrelevant to gun violence occurring. They are simply mutually incompatible views.


> I see that you have a hard time following an argument and the rhetorical techniques I used. I will break it down.

In this one sentence you betray yourself as uninterested in debate, and instead just like to hear yourself talk. The person you are responding to offered an interesting comparison, that of stats from the US versus other countries (and, I might add, they gamely came to your turf, which you subsequently tried to dismiss). Instead of doing the hard work of revising your views in the face of a potentially fruitful comparison, you dismiss it out of hand and assert your self-righteousness.


>The person you are responding to offered an interesting comparison, that of stats from the US versus other countries

They did the exact opposite of this. They asserted that it is wrong to examine this issue statistically.




Right, that was spaceman's original post.

Spaceman posted > rbj challenged that stats should be used > spaceman answered, alluding to stats widely searchable > rbj dismissed the use of stats.

Edit: Re-reading through all posts, I see I am incorrect in this summary.


> I see that you have a hard time following an argument and the rhetorical techniques I used. I will break it down.

Classic. They're not having trouble following your argument. They just disagree.


They’re not just disagreeing. They’re asserting that you shouldn’t analyze the issue statistically (I.e. they reject the notion of putting it into context) but defending the non-zero rate of gun deaths in other countries with statistics.


They clearly disagree. But they've done so very poorly, as I'm sure you can see.


> But they've done so very poorly, as I'm sure you can see.

This reads as appalling smug. Whether spaceman_2020 made a good argument or not, you are quibbling over ultimately unimportant figures when the situation remains that mass shootings of children in their schools are orders of magnitude more common in the US than other developed countries.

You should also be appalled by the adolescent suicide rate involving firearms - that's also not normal.


Yeah, it's really fucked up.

I just think that, given the status quo, the best approach to reducing all forms of gun violence is to just generally make life better for everyone, and that the resources spent on trying to wrench guns from the hands of the citizenry are much better spent on just about anything else.


> But they've done so very poorly, as I'm sure you can see.

Can't really hear your argument, if any, over the smug.


Fair. I've been told I can be a real asshole when I get to arguing. Sorry.


How do I report a comment on HN? These comments can’t be serious


They seem serious to me, and well-argued.


click on the "1 hour ago"


And since you agree that it is useful to compare school shooting statistics between countries, then you should also agree that it would be more effective to spend more time and resources combating suicides than school shootings. The relative difference in mass shooting rates based on gun control strictness is much smaller than the relative rates between mass shooting deaths and suicides.

This is not an argument against gun control, but against spending so much time and effort fighting for that gun control at the cost of letting slip the lower hanging fruit that could prevent more deaths.


It’s really quite simple, you didn’t have to spell out your confusion so elaborately:

Statistics deals in degrees; violence against children is something that is sufficiently cognized in absolutes.


If we shutdown all schools we would have 0 mass shootings at schools.

This is the only moral choice when dealing with absolutes.


Not really, that’s just one (extreme) proposal. I understand the self-gratifying impulse to write something like that though: it absolves the responsibility and work of addressing the problem, and frustrates the conversation away from finding solutions toward justifying the need to find a solution at all. It even makes you feel clever for a half-second.

A cute rhetorical parlor trick.


You said it was an absolute. Once we start weighing the costs against other things we care about like education it becomes a relative cost.


This is a principles based analysis. Pretty common in public policy.

Principle 1: Children should not be victims of arbitrary violence

Principle 2: Children should be educated

These are compatible principles. Your proposal (one of many potential proposals) is to undermine principle two rather than addressing the source of the issue which is violent third parties.

And to forestall any further swiss-cheese a priori logic: this is not something fantastical. There are other societies with have honored both principles one and two, and have experienced zero, as in ABSOLUTELY zero acts of mass violence in educational settings.


this is unironically my solution


policy decisions and budget allocation should an emotionless utility function that allocates what produces the best outcome with maximal efficiency.

To do otherwise is to be biased one way or another.


> How else would you analyze the issue?

Um, I don’t know maybe morally? As in, it is morally abhorrent and unconscionable for children to be preyed upon in school, one of the places they should safe by definition.


Okay.

I agree that kids should not be preyed upon in schools.

Now what?


Get rid of fucking assault rifles. Ban their sale. Mandatory buybacks. Jail time for violators. There are lots of other problems contributing to school shootings, e.g. alienated males due to retraction of empire, loss of manufacturing jobs due to financialization of the economy, erosion of mental health safety net due to privatization and disinvestment. All of these issues need to be addressed. But when the patient is bleeding out, you first STOP THE BLEEDING.


That won't be happening. The second amendment is a thing. Demographics and opinion polls show that we won't be getting rid of it any time soon. Assault Rifles are in common use, thus will not be banned any time soon. The current regime seems poised to expand, rather than restrict, the types of arms which we have the right to bear.

This is ultimately my point - we have a lot of other avenues to address the problem rather than this, IMO, fruitless attempt to deal with the guns.


Of course it's hard to do, but that doesn't change the fact that getting rid of most guns is clearly and obviously the way to significantly reduce the amount of gun violence in the US. Contesting this is too silly to take seriously, like an alcoholic saying "I know I've been fired from my last three jobs for showing up drunk, but we have lots of other avenues to address this..."

And just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's impossible. If one side can stack the Supreme Court with people who suddenly realize there's no constitutional right to privacy, the other side can find some judges to suddenly notice the "well-regulated militia" part of the second amendment, and act accordingly.


> The second amendment is a thing.

Gun-control opponents... generally choose to ignore the first clause altogether, hoping that no one notices that there was never an unabridged right to gun ownership.[1]

The solution to the gun-control issue and, perhaps, to some of the lawlessness in our communities is for the states to invoke the Second Amendment and require gun owners to join a militia.[1)

The 2nd Amendment says well-regulated militia shall not be infringed, it's the right of the people. Gun owners should be drafted into militia and whipped into shape. Whether regulation works or not is incidental because the 2nd requires it.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1987/08/22/t...


Contemporary (mis)interpretation of 2A is relatively recent. Nothing is impossible in this realm.


Careless deference to the 2nd amendment (more generally, deference to "the constitution") is among the reddest flags you can throw.


Not really deference. Just a cold analysis of the state of things.


You can't just say "the 2nd amendment" and assume we all mean the same thing. Radical misinterpretation is way too common for that.


What do you think it would mean?


That's a good question, and an illustrative one. It means what supports my argument, considering I have only invoked the amendment by name rather than by any specific consequence or ruling. I hope this helps to illustrate the sham of simply calling out "the constitution" or "the 2nd amendment" as a reason.


I am pretty sure clear backpacks will solve the problem. I read about it on twitter.


> Get rid of fucking assault rifles. Ban their sale. Mandatory buybacks. Jail time for violators.

I understand your perspective, and I believe I understand how you arrived at it. I even largely share your concern - but I don’t think you fully realize just how repugnant it is to many people.

Have you considered how many lives your proposal would cost, or how likely it would be to succeed in any measurable way?

This is not a rhetorical question. I would definitely consider myself part of “American gun culture.” I would resist disarmament with lethal force if necessary. That statement may be somewhat shocking in this context it wouldn’t so much as raise an eyebrow amongst gun owners.

… and this is about banning one kind of weapon. One kind. An ill-defined class of firearms that are used in a tiny fraction of crimes. How many deaths would be worthwhile to make that happen?

> But when the patient is bleeding out, you first STOP THE BLEEDING.

Attempting to disarm the US may or may not “stop the bleeding” - but I’m extremely confident that it would create many times more patients.


> Get rid of fucking assault rifles

There hasn’t been an “assault rifle” used in a school shooting for decades. “Assault rifles” are highly regulated— it’s nearly impossible to own one. There have been a fair number of sporting semi-auto rifles used in mass shootings.

Can we please stop describing these weapons as something they are not? The “AR” in AR-15 means “ArmaLite Rifle”. ArmaLite being the company that originally developed the weapon.


> There hasn’t been an “assault rifle” used in a school shooting for decades. “Assault rifles” are highly regulated— it’s nearly impossible to own one.

Respectfully, aren't these definitions just semantics about firing capability?

My understanding is the mass-shooter weapon of choice, the AR-15 is semi-automatic-only (ie not an assault rifle [0]) as they do not have select-fire capability, meaning the capability of a weapon to be adjusted to fire in semi-automatic, multi-short burst, and/or automatic firing mode. Semi-automatic fire means that one shot is fired upon each depression of the trigger. [1]

Regardless of firing capability, there is "overwhelming evidence that the AR-15 could bring more firepower to bear than the M14" [2] battle rifle [3].

This evidence is borne out in our schools [4]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle

[1] http://www.weaponslaw.org/glossary/selective-fire

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle#M16

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_rifle

[4] https://archive.ph/IJKT6


> Respectfully, aren't these definitions just semantics about firing capability?

Statements like "ban all assault rifles" require semantics, and the entire discussion around "which weapons to ban" is entirely semantics. If this person genuinely means "assault rifle", then you already can't own these as a civilian (generally, unless it was made before 1986 and you pay a ton of money for it). If this person means "assault weapon", then we're talking about a poorly defined class of weapons, which are largely based on cosmetic features.

> My understanding is the mass-shooter weapon of choice, the AR-15

The AR-15 is the most common rifle in the country. It's a popular rifle because it can do everything. It's cheap, you can hunt with it if you want (larger magazines are popular for hunting feral hogs, which are infesting the south), you can shoot sporting competitions with it. If you want to shoot a different caliber, for example to change to .22 for cheap target shooting, you can pop two pins, swap to a second upper, and go ahead and plink away at your soda cans. With it being the most popular platform of rifle in the US, of course it pops up in mass shootings. Wanting to ban the AR-15 is like wanting to ban RAM 2500s because they're the "truck of choice for drunk drivers" [1].

> "overwhelming evidence that the AR-15 could bring more firepower to bear than the M14" [2]

A potential, but never materialized, military AR-15 that they're talking about here, would have been select-fire. Then that military AR-15 would be an assault rifle. This has no bearing on semi-automatic AR-15s not being an assault rifle.

This is the third uninformed comment from you that I've needed to respond to today, loaded with more sources but lacking comprehension.

[1] https://insurify.com/insights/car-models-most-duis-2020/


Okay, ban all that stuff too. Why do people need more than pistols, shotguns, and basic rifles? I can’t own a nuclear weapon. So clearly there is a line.


Do you know how many people are killed by rifles per year in the US?

...

Around _400_[1]. That's ALL rifles. Hunting rifles, bolt action, "assault weapons", whatever, in a country with ~300M-1B guns and a population of 330M. While we should look at why these deaths happening, banning the tool used to commit such an incredibly low number of crimes is just silly. I'd compare it to trying to ban swimming pools because 390 people drown in them per year [2]. "No one NEEDS a swimming pool, ban them all!"

People like you that want to go off and "ban everything" while being completely uninformed and refusing to do any kind of simple research are the worst kind of voters / citizens.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in...

[2] https://www.edgarsnyder.com/statistics/swimming-pool-statist...


The problem with the pool argument is that a pool isn't designed to kill. Guns are. Hunting, self-defense...doesn't matter.

Not saying I agree with this line of thinking, but that is a common retort.


Guns _are_ designed to kill, and yet they (rifles) still kill around the same number people as pools. I take this as further evidence that the "assault weapon problem" is blown completely out of proportion in the media.


The 2nd amendment says: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." [0]

My understanding is that it is up to the courts (ultimately the US Supreme Court) to interpret the Constitution, and define things like "Arms", "security", etc..

> I can’t own a nuclear weapon

Careful what you wish for. If personal nuclear weapons ever become a thing, they too may be "Arms" "necessary to the security of a free State". It is hard to understand some rulings of the Supreme Court.

At the time of writing the 2nd Amendment (December 15, 1791), the accepted "Arm" was a musket, with a muzzle velocity between 1425 fps (434 m/s) and 1700 fps (518 m/s) with a ¾” (19.05 mm) diameter ball (. 640 caliber), and an approximate weight of .9 oz (25.5 g) [1]. Today the court accepts that an ArmaLite AR-15 is an "Arm", with a muzzle velocity of 3,300 ft/s (1,006 m/s) using a .223 Remington cartridge with a 55 g FMJ bullet [2].

The momentum of the AR-15 round is therefore approx 55,330 gm/s compared to 13,209 gm/s for the musket ball (ie more than 4 times greater). Too many American shooters make the mistake of thinking these modern "lightweight" weapons translate into less lethality, but it is the increased momentum from higher muzzle velocities that does the devastating damage to soft tissue and bone.

Take a look at the X-ray of a leg showing a bullet wound delivered by an assault rifle used in combat compared to an X-ray of a leg that sustained a bullet wound from a low-energy bullet, inflicted by a weapon like a handgun in Philadelphia. [3]. The trauma surgeons of the 19 children killed in the Robb Elementary massacre reported "They were so pulverized, he said, that they could be identified only by their clothing." [4]

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-2/

[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15740773.2019.16...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.223_Remington

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/health/parkland-shooting-...

[4] https://khn.org/news/article/trauma-surgeons-uvalde-mass-sho...


> At the time of writing the 2nd Amendment (December 15, 1791), the accepted "Arm" was a musket, with a muzzle velocity between 1425 fps (434 m/s) and 1700 fps (518 m/s) with a ¾” (19.05 mm) diameter ball (. 640 caliber), and an approximate weight of .9 oz (25.5 g) [1]. Today the court accepts that an ArmaLite AR-15 is an "Arm", with a muzzle velocity of 3,300 ft/s (1,006 m/s) using a .223 Remington cartridge with a 55 g FMJ bullet [2].

Why is it that political philosophy that hates constitutional originalism in every other case wants to try and selectively apply some weird quasi-originalist argument not to the amendment itself but to two individual words within it?

If the amendment was written before muskets were common would you argue in only applied to swords, bows, slings, and catapults? The amendment is about providing the populace with a mechanism to keep tyranny in check, its not about caliber and projectile ft/s.


You're throwing a lot of numbers around in an attempt to look like you know what you're talking about. Ballistics and wound cavities are much, much more complicated than just "more momentum == more deadly".

Example: The US military just replaced the .223 with .277 Fury for exactly the reason that the .223 is _too fast_ and doesn't shed enough energy when hitting a target.

Furthermore, you're mixing grains (gr) and grams (g). A 55gr (grain) bullet is 3.56 grams. A 0.9oz musket ball is 25.5 grams. So your momentum calculations are (11'067-13'209) grams * m/s for a musket and 3'581 grams * m/s. So the musket actually has 3+ times more momentum than the .223 round.

Musket balls are absolutely huge, there are effectively zero modern rifles which shoot a .640 caliber round. The .223 is a very small rifle round.

https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-worse-to-be-shot-with-a-mu...


I'm "throwing ... numbers around" and including citations precisely so that someone like yourself can illuminate where my understanding is incorrect. I appreciate your clarification between grains and grams.


Good, then go edit your comment to reflect reality.


This does not even get into the expanding, or hollow-point, bullets used in the AR-15's to open upon impact and cause more damage to their targets. [0]

[0] https://archive.ph/kCfK4#selection-781.2-784.0


The purpose of hollow points is to reduce over penetration, so the bullet doesn’t go through the target and injure someone else behind it.

Can you stop with the nonsense? You produce it faster than I can correct you.


You jail a father, kid gets mocked in school because the father is in jail and he kills some mates with a knife.

I don't believe any of the points you make are drivers of violence at all. You perhaps failed to analyze the typical issues.

I do agree that a society might want to ban guns. Policing is much safer and there are a lot of other advantages. Fewer deaths too of course. But I heavily doubt the presence of guns is reason for an increase in violence among younger people. On the contrary, I think some people are well underway to create self-fulfilling prophecies. Security at schools is part of that.

There is a recent increase in crime but certainly to none of the factors you mentioned. I live happily in a country without access to assault rifles. But we probably disagree on what constitutes drivers of violence.


It always surprises me to see people proposing a blanket ban on these kinds of guns despite the fact that all school shooters were young men under 25 years old.

You could just limit sales of these guns to folks over 25 and make everyone much safer.

In fact, every single school shooter was white...


By binary analysis, it sounds like you mean to claim that 99% effective isn't close enough to 100%. For most people that would be enough. Because I don't know how else you could conclude that gun regulations are bereft of any benefit whatsoever, even hypothetically, without manufacturing such an unfair hurdle to obfuscate the obvious: gun violence requires access to guns.

It seems like you want to say that broader mental health problems are more important than gun violence, but that's only more reason to restrict access to guns. Most other places in the world are able to recognise that mental illness and guns are a bad mix, and act accordingly. The US has had nearly one third of the mass shootings in the world since the 60s yet people like you continue to defend access to guns as though it's not a contributing factor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...). That alone seems to point to one of those broad problems affecting the populace. It doesn't have to be the only cause, to merit a treatment.

The rest of the world doesn't view gun access as a given, or even a good. It's earned and revered, or prevented, but never normalised. It's why Abe's assassin had to make his own gun, because Japanese laws didn't make things easier for him. It's why here in Australia, even gangsters don't even have guns, for the most part https://youtu.be/BYsXCnxbnj0?t=461

But we don't judge the effectiveness of these restrictions by some bogus standard of absolute zero gun violence. We judge them by assessing our rare incidents of gun violence, and whether we think we think we could or should have done more to prevent them from obtaining and using a firearm.

And when we look at the numbers of mass shootings in the US, particularly in sensitive places like schools, we wonder how in the world you can think you're doing enough.


This approach assumes a moral equivalence to all gun violence. I believe people tend to assign a significantly higher negative moral weight to the murder of children in general, and children at school in particular. You may disagree with that weighting, but it’s an entirely consistent and valid model.


I don't see the moral difference between taking a gun and shooting a kid and bullying and harassing a kid until they are driven to take a gun and shoot themselves.

Both are horrific, but the latter seems even more horrific because it includes not only death, but psychological torture before the death.


Most folks outside the USA (where I live) that I've worked with / spoken to say that we're completely insane and it's embarrassing that we allow the incredible amount of gun violence that we do. All my coworkers overseas think it's unreal and really intolerable that we allow the level of gun violence that we do.

People need to quit embarrassing themselves trying to somehow reason away why the USA is an outlier via some kind of cope metric. It's the guns.


you could start by using actual data

your 80:1 stat seems pretty dubious -- do you have a source for it?


I like how it's an argument that mocks gun regulations with the fact that more kids kill themselves with guns than they do each other.

Firearm related injuries are the #2 killer of children after automotive accidents[1]. The rate of firearm related deaths for young people went up nearly 14% between 2019 and 2020 alone.

I do agree with the importance of socio-economic solutions, though, even before gun regulations.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmc2201761


Yes the fear isn't that your kid is being shot by a school shooters the fear is that your child must.kive in a society where school shooting and the long chain of developmental problems that caused these issues has been fully normalized.

We have enough food and housing for everyone right now, except in some popular places, why exactly have we become so desperate? Why can't we give up some economic growth and use the resources we have on general human well-being?


> Amazing that you can look at kids being shot in primary schools and then try to analyze it statistically.

You have to. For effective policy you need to distance yourself from the deed no matter how terrible they are. All other venues for grief are better than policies motivated by retribution, which will very likely not lead to constructive outcomes and resulting in repeats. Otherwise you end up invading random countries because someone attacked you.


There is a psychological dimension to your kid having to confront the possibility of being shot in school being mere numbers of deaths.


What else should you do when considering legislation? Should we legislate by blindly trying to stop anything bad? That doesn't seem like a good idea.


I agree with your sentiment but I wish your claims were true https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_massacres_by_...


Man, your own list is filled with a) third world countries, and b) actual terrorist attacks.

You're being disingenuous if you're trying to claim that, say, the Beslan School Siege is the same as the Columbine school shooting. One was committed by a terrorist organization with a political goal. The other was just a couple of fellow students.


Man what is the relevance of this comment? The existence of Beslan on that page has nothing to do with US shootings - the gp was just referring you to US stats that contradict your comment. Nothing to do with Beslan.


[flagged]


Obvious race baiting is obvious.

Say what you mean instead of being a fucking pussy and dancing around it by asking pointed questions that we have to then fill in the blanks on.

Do you mean to say "people in Africa and the diaspora thereof have a shit culture and the places they reside end up being war-torn and using child soldiers?"

If so, say so. If not, please clarify because I may just not be quite smart enough to grok your meaning if it is otherwise.


It’s a problem that is taboo.

And if the taboo suddenly blew up? I believe I’d actually blame it on culture, not race.

We can do amazing things with culture. Let’s try. But we can only tackle it if we can address the taboo problem.


Which you continue to dance around and refuse to elucidate.

Speak clearly.


>Kids are like 80x or more likely to kill themselves than to be killed in a school shooting. It's not even close to the top of list of real issues affecting the country.

But what's the comparison with the rest of the world here? Are you trying to counter the claim that gun violence is a uniquely American issue? Or are you saying that even higher rates of youth suicide are an even more American issue? Because suicide happens everywhere, but unless the US is doing remarkably well on this, that 80x figure is still far far lower than any other developed country. Where, you know, a non-non-zero chance of shootings means infinite more chance of suicide, most other places in the world.

You're dismissing an acute problem with common sense solutions behind issues that are common enough to almost be normal, in order to justify doing nothing. It's like someone's pointed at your bleeding foot and you've said it's fine, because you've also got high cholesterol.


I elaborated here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163407

But TL;DR: I think that the juice is not worth the squeeze and that it is just another issue for the two tribes to fight about while the ruling class continues to destroy the human habitat and loot our country's wealth.


The number of school shooting victims in the US looks small compared to the number of suicide victims, and it also looks small compared to the number of cancer victims, or the number of car crash victims, or the distance to the moon in inches. But all of those seem like ways to distract people from comparing it to the number of school shooting victims in other countries.


It would also help to have mentally healthy streets and neighborhoods that kids and adults can safely play in. Ideally without worrying about violence of any kind.


Taking away guns does not solve the reason for which they become used by some people.

The cost, such as politically and time & energy to lobby, would be better spent making the social net better, or add more mental health services that target more people, and to prevent people from getting to a state of destitution (and fall into crime).


I generally agree. However, I’d say “both/and” is reasonable. Yes, let’s avoid a society filled with destitution—the market actually works better when you take care of people. Also, let’s stop the proliferation of murder machines. A conservative court should recognize that there is not an individual right to bear arms except by the convention of the court. The second amendment supports well-regulated militias. The current court is not conservative so much as cynical.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed”


I don’t understand your reasoning. US is the only country in the whole universe that has an active shooter problem in schools. Why in the world shoot kids in the first place?


>Why in the world shoot kids in the first place?

I don't know. I certainly don't think anyone should be shooting kids.

>US is the only country in the whole universe that has an active shooter problem in schools.

Because we have guns that are relatively available and a handful of wingnuts that want to hurt kids.

That said, it is not the only place that has a violence against children problem. Not even the only place with a violence against children in schools problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China


Agree and disagree. I dont think it is as simple as an issue that just gets clicks. It is a real issue because it is insane. Where I agree is, no one wants to do any real analysis to figure out how we got here because, its not a simple a problem. It is a problem with a lot of sources, and being able to tackle this, will probably help in other areas (like suicide rates).

Good way to word it. Suicides alone are an NP hard problem. Homelessness is an NP Hard problem, etc. Mass shooting could be a sort of NP Complete problem. If you can come up with solutions that prevent mass shootings, those same solutions will probably greatly reduce the others.

Just to name, a probably short, list of sources.

- We have a poor gun culture. Guns used to be viewed as tools, now they are some cool gadget that is apart of someone's identity.

- We often ignore and stigmatized mental health issues. If you want mental health, you are seen as weak or pathetic. When in reality, we probably all could use some sort of neutral third party counseling at the very least to talk about issues we individually face out loud.

- Insurance coverage is pretty shitty for mental health. My last employer had good benefits, good medical benefits, but it only covered 3 or 4 mental health appointments. Other than that, it was a decent plan.

- We probably should honestly evaluate the process of purchasing a firearm. You can be placed on a no-fly list for suspected involvement in terrorist activities, but can still purchase a gun? Doesn't seem to make sense to me at all.


As a parent of kids in public schools in a state that has open carry laws, school shootings are definitely top of the list of things I hate about America. And yes, I do think banning guns is on the table for me as a solution to this problem. I would wholeheartedly vote for representative who support banning guns. Spare me your lecture on 2A, if you think your rights to carry assault weapons reigns over the life of kids, then there is not much to debate about. Its astounding that gun proponents refuse to accept that Kids exists in all other countries across the world and kids are kids with their video games, all of their insecurities and mental health problems but America is the only country where school shootings are rampant.


They can both be problems?

US Teen suicide looks like around 8-11 per 100k, age 15-19, depending on year (source: https://www.americashealthrankings.org/explore/health-of-wom...), with 9 states over 20.

Compare to Germany, 184 between age 15-20 (https://www.aerzteblatt.de/int/archive/article/213427) from a population of 5.41 million (https://www.statista.com/statistics/454349/population-by-age...), or 3.4 per 100k.


> It's not even close to the top of list of real issues affecting the country.

They do have active shooter drills as routine part of education. And schools have cops in them routinely and Americans talk about it as normal. You cant those wish away, those are very really affecting the country.


> Kids are like 80x or more likely to kill themselves than to be killed in a school shooting.

Sure, if you limit the numbers to just school shootings. Why not count all kid deaths by firearms? A kid is twice as likely to die by bullet than by suicide.

School shootings are just the currently most visible form of kid death by bullet.


Their point wasn't the risk relative to other causes of death for children. Their point was that the US is the only country in the world where this happens, frequently.


For school shootings, it’s rationally absurd to worry about those rare events. It’s like worrying about dying from a terrorist attack or a plane crash in France. The probability is mathematically non zero, and the country makes a big deal when that happens, but it is statistically a non problem.

Being confronted with an armed robber in a home invasion is more of a problem in the US (but France has its own fair share of violent crime). Outside of that I think the bulk of gun violence is suicides and gang on gang violence.


>It’s like worrying about dying from a terrorist attack or a plane crash in France.

The aviation sector is one of the most regulated on earth and has extreme safety standards for exactly this reason: we don't want to crash.

Societies also implemented security measures after terrorist attacks. Especially after Bataclan in France.

These are extremely rare events because we take measures to prevent them.


> Societies also implemented security measures after terrorist attacks.

i would argue that those measures are costing more than the attacks themselves. It's security theater - high cost (in terms of time and resources), high visibility (politically). But doesn't really prevent any terrorist attacks, because terrorist attacks are fairly rare all things considered.

So you can say that those terrorists' attack succeeded in making the lives of those they attacked worse, and it's because we let them dictate due to "fear", rather than rationally ignore them.


>These are extremely rare events because we take measures to prevent them.

When you use the TSA and Patriot Act as an example of meaningful, useful legislation, you're probably not on strong footing. One is considered an expensive boondoggle jobs program, the other is tasked with illegal mass spying of US citizens and deprivation of rights. Neither shows any strong evidence of preventing terrorist acts. Its legislation like these that give gun owners pause of any "common sense" gun control solutions implemented based on emotion.


Apexalpha was talkimg about bataclan in France. The european context is super different from the US context. For example this year someone killed one person in a Amoklauf (~schoolshooting) in germany with a sports crossbow. These things will now be put under weapons regulation, and will be basically unavailable to the general public. As they should be. What does anyone really NEED, a crossbow for?


>What does anyone really NEED, a crossbow for?

This isn't a very compelling argument, and it's kinda intellectually dishonest because you wouldn't accept any answer I gave you. You are now acting as "dear leader," who decides what individuals do or don't need.

Why does anyone NEED to go over 10 miles per hour, why does anyone NEED more than one pair of shoes? Why does anyone NEED coffee, tea, beer, lots of things, why does anyone NEED a fast computer? Why does anyone NEED cologne or perfume? Why does anyone NEED dessert? Why does anyone NEED fashionable clothes? Why does anyone NEED art? How do you even justify that outside of a profit motive in a way you will accept? See it's a trick you are playing.

Of course to answer your question, a gun would be the preferred tool. If you ever go camping in the woods, they are certainly handy. If someone tries to rape or murder you, it would certainly come in handy. If you were a woman (or a man even) and attracted a crazy stalker, invaluable. If you have a massive plague where the police stop working and society stops functioning correctly, it would certainly come in handy. Remember covid?

>These things will now be put under weapons regulation, and will be basically unavailable to the general public.

Of course, someone will kill someone with a bow and arrow, then it will be banned, then someone will kill someone with a knife, and they will ban the "scary looking" ones. Then someone will use a slingshot and those will get banned. You know it's all just a theatrical overreaction at that point to placate the hysterical masses.


Lol. All the things you listed are more or less harmless to others, or general purpose tools/forms (mihht dispute art in this regard but I'm personally very willing to accept the dangers that art poses). A crossbow is an updated medieval weapon, that by the way, lower aristocracy (knights) at that time, tried to declare a warcrime, because it could penetrate the state of the art armour... What's it with the desserts? They are tasty and, if you're not scared of crazy clowns that try to embaress you in public, more or less harmless.Certainly not a weapon. Our forests here went through some thousand years of culture and there really isn't anything a manly man would need to defend himself against. Maybe the ones on the border to/in czech republic, but where that is the case, these areas are natural reserves, and you're not supposed to go there unless you leave no traces. Certainly not shooting left and right on animals for some sporting fun.


Well there is possibly enjoyment in all of these things. Now you might say: "yeah thats true for weapons also". And that I think is precisely the problem. Why do you think the enjoyment of having a weapon, owning it, feeling the potential power of it, should be acceptaple? If you want to argue then why I dont make that argument for other things, I'll habe to tell you: There is a word for people who argue like that: imbecile. Stop playing stupid games by seemingly following sime logic, that is purely linguistical and onedimensional and take responibility for xou're critical cognitive capabilities, by realising that weapons are a different category than desserts and computers, and try to realise that the enjoyment of something that is made to kill might be a perversion, not a right.


>All the things you listed are more or less harmless to others, or general purpose tools/forms (mihht dispute art in this regard but I'm personally very willing to accept the dangers that art poses).

Yes, but why do you NEED them, isn't that the argument you made?


> For school shootings, it’s rationally absurd to worry about those rare events.

Rare events that only happen in America.

I don't know what kind of parent looks at a rare event where their kid might die and says "yeah, I'm okay with that".


You can make them extremely rare to non-existent. Why the US people do not jump at the opportunity is beyond me.


"School shootings are mathematically irrelevant", what a take.


Talk about normalisation of deviance!

I've read that more children have died of gunshot wounds this year than police officers have died in the line of duty.[1]

Granted, there are probably more school children at school than there are police at work on any given day, so ... of course children are more likely to be shot at a school?

But then again, here in Australia we have reasonable gun control after that mass schooling in Tasmania all those years ago ... and the country still turned to shit ... so?

While were here, anyone else got any arguments no one would intentionally make?

1. https://en.as.com/latest_news/more-children-have-died-in-sch...


and thousands more died due to motor traffic accidents (https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/prelimina...)

The outrage always happens on politically charged subjects, but worse outcomes happen on the roads, and nobody talks about it as though it was normal.

Kids should fear crossing the street more than an active shooter. While i don't disagree that gun control is a good outcome, the difficulty of achieving it in the US is real. Effort is better spent addressing the root cause of gun violence, rather than attempting to take the guns away and just hope that the violence doesn't occur.


> Kids should fear crossing the street more than an active shooter.

And in most countries, they do.


School children don't cross roads inside classrooms.

There's enough concern to go around to work at improving both.


"My child died but I can take comfort in the fact that his death was a statistical anomaly!"


It's true, though. If you were to live many lives in a row, when would be your first time getting shot? "News" agencies are great at distracting attention from real issues: cancer, chemicals contamination, healthcare prices.


That's very true. There's an unprecedented amount of distorted news too. I never believed it until I got a worried message from a friend about wildfires in our area. There are none. I had also read an article in my local news about devastating wildfires in his area, of which there are also none at his place. These were both generally well-respected mainstream media outlets. That's not saying we shouldn't focus on climate change ASAP, but it looks to me as the news broadcasts have an agenda to keep people in fear.


Exactly. As I tell my son, the news organizations are no different than other vendors. They have a product to sell (fear, societal divide) and do their very best to continue selling it to the masses. And, astonishingly, people eat it up day and night.

For the people who live outside the US and consume our "news", it must seem our country is falling apart. From gun violence, to wildfires, to racism, to homelessness, we truly must be living in a 3rd world country. However, my experience does not reflect any of this. Yes, these issues exist, but everyday I can go to the grocery store, put gas in my wife's car, walk downtown, take a trip to the lake, visit a neighboring town, etc - all without fear. People of differing backgrounds/colors talk pleasantly with each other, neighbors help neighbors, etc. Totally different from what the "media" is pushing these days.

My advice - walk/run away from the media and don't attach yourself to any political party. Your emotional state will thank you later.


If the statistical relevance fails to capture the underlying practical relevance of a phenomenon, it’s usually the job of the statistician to explain why.

One way is examining the dimensions of analysis. A simple counting exercise and declaring “well it’s just not relevant,” despite contradictory qualitative evidence is really simple-minded and an abuse of statistical reasoning.

But this is typical of non-research thinking, in non-academic contexts so forgive me if I come off harshly.


No such thing as "practical relevance". It doesn't matter that sharks or bears look scary: hard stats say that both dangers are imaginary. Same for guns.


“Practical relevance” (funny use of quotes here) is the end-goal of statistics, and what makes it worth studying in the first place. On its own, the practice and theory of statistics is actually fairly vulnerable, not exactly “hard” in the sense we’d use for conventional mathematics.

The principles we use for relevance, and other techniques we’ve built upon them are axiomatic: there’s no real reason they persist except as a form of historical convention and necessary standardization.

What makes statistics useful is when it’s able to capture quantitatively something that exists practically, i.e. material phenomena. When the stats don’t square with reality, it’s not exactly reality’s fault, so to speak. It’s the statistician’s job to understand and explain why the statistics, or the techniques thereof, failed. This is the red meat of “hard” statistics, how the field refines itself, and it’s also the most fun and challenging thing about it.

When eye-to-eye with a provoked bear in real life, I’d be curious to see if any statisticians would dismiss it on statistical grounds. My bet is zero because they know the limits of their discipline.


It captures the reality very well. Emotions don't increase the likelihood of meeting a bear.


> If you were to live many lives in a row, when would be your first time getting shot?

Statistically: that time I lived in the US.


For children it is diet. I bet that our children's diets kill more than guns.


>Outside of that I think the bulk of gun violence is suicides and gang on gang violence.

Good job those gang bullets aren't allowed to hit anything other than gang members!


No, school shootings are like a weekly event in the US. They are not “exceedingly rare”.

Do you seriously think the traveling public would accept a plane crashing every week?


There's someplace where the chances are exactly zero?

The fact that schools have active shooter drills says more about the disclaim-all-liability culture of schools here than it does about gun violence. The more pervasive gun violence problem is outside of schools, and is more a result of a systemic collapse of order in inner cities. The lone-wolf school shooters just make better headlines.


There is no such place. American gun control advocates like to point to the UK, where we completely banned (certain kinds of) gun after a major school shooting and haven't had any since, but there's been enough near-misses where some kid got to the point where they could have shot up their school if not for rethinking at the last minute that even here the chance of one happening is obviously still above zero.


But like, I would expect similar headlines from all around the world had this been true. Meanwhile, the one place you see these news from extraordinary often is America. (Second runner are former ISIS territories where they terrorist attract girls schools occasionally.)


There's a Twitter thread discussing the outcome of the police investigation after the Uvalde shooting, which discusses how teachers should have known better than to leave door opens, as that clearly complicates defending against school shooters.

From a European point of view it's incomprehensible how that is even a thing.


Yea but nobody wants to work anymore.


Hahahaha


Or that they need security in the first place... Lacking its own will for some reason I fear we will see similar developments in Europe soon. But even that is not a pressing issue, it is an issue that draws attention and is use for political jousting.


> The fact that there is a non-zero chance your kid might be shot at school is completely absurd.

This is an ironic demonstration of why larger problems in the US are not addressed. Someone always starts off talking about an issue then "think of the children" rears it's head. Do you believe there's a benefit from the whataboutism when "think of the population" is far more important? The larger societal issues are more likely issues on which there is plenty of low hanging fruit, versus this hand-wringing about children which will not promote any short-term improvements.

To quote Daryl Zero: Now, a few words on looking for things. When you go looking for something specific, your chances of finding it are very bad. Because of all the things in the world, you're only looking for one of them. When you go looking for anything at all, your chances of finding it are very good. Because of all the things in the world, you're sure to find some of them.


The American dream, you have to be asleep to believe it. -- George Carlin


Exactly! The US is great for the top few percent, but for the rest of the population they’d have a much better life in any Western European country.


Just raise the minimum wage to $50 an hour, problem solved.


As has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, most of the problems can be solved better by treating people with respect rather than raising minimum wage through the roof.

By that I mean universal healthcare, guaranteed sick leave and childbirth leave as well as minimum 3-4 weeks vacation a year and a good unemployment system.


I agree with you, but let’s not rule out the wage issue, like it’s crazy that people need to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, but also finding dependable workers that take pride, that’s I think about respect, I am sorry but how I’m supposed to take pride if I do a job well done, then at the first issue the company is just going to lay me off to maximise bonus or dividends?


For sure, there is also one other thing I forgot to mention which is access to affordable (and not unhealthy) housing. With all those in place people wouldn’t be so dependent on their employer. I see a lot of FI/RE stories focusing on the importance of having fuck-you money in order to be able to stand up to your boss. Well if you live in a decent welfare society you can do that without $4M.

This would in effect force employers to pay better.


I understand many places in the USA you can be legally fired for no reason and with no notice. That is surely harmful to the development of a sense of trust and loyalty towards one's employer.


All those things are absolutely necessary to raise to an objectively higher standard like that of western Europe.

However, due to the hedonic treadmill, after people get accustomed to it and take things for granted, people will find reasons to be unhappy and frustrated and claim that they live in the worst possible times etc.

EDIT: just to be clear: I'm not saying that since people will complain there is no point in improving, nor I'm saying that you don't have to listen people's complaints since they just don't know how lucky they are. It's important to keep improving more and more, since there is still room for improvement. What I'm saying is that it's hard to compare the quality of life in different places just by measuring how many people are complaining here or there.


But you don’t need universal healthcare if people are compensated well with a living wage.

With $50/hr you will have your pick of providers.


Until you lose your job which is kind of the point.

Besides if 50 dollars an hour becomes minimum wage for everyone you can bet your years salary that healthcare providers are going to raise their prices accordingly.


People will work for little money or even free if living expenses are low and they enjoy their job.


Seems like inflation would then jump a fair bunch to match?


That is actually the primary reason why a minimum wage hike wouldn't be as harmful as many people think. People at the bottom consume their wages which generates more jobs than someone who just dumps more money on their portfolio.


This doesn't work when the economy is already close to full employment, full consumption of available energy, and full capacity on critical parts like ICs which it's hard to expand the production of. Without any excess slack to increase production in order to fill that increase in consumption, it just has to come out of other people's consumption through inflation reducing the value of their wages.

It's also not at all obvious that this is better than someone just investing a bunch of money. After all, the way investments ultimately make money is by supplying people with what they want at low prices, which means that investment money floating around can lead to innovation which supplies people with more stuff using less resources, increasing the amount available for everyone can buy with their wages.


This falls foul of the glassmakers fallacy - money invested in a portfolio will still be used for something, so it is generating economic activity.


Some jobs would just disappear. No one is going to pay a greeter at Walmart $50 an hour.


Good because that is very creepy.


I agree. Jobs that isn’t possible to pay a living salary for don’t need to be done.


People still need meaning on their life and plenty of money to support their family.

Plenty of public works projects we could start and pay people $50/hr.


Let’s try it and find out


Jeff Bezos' daily income is about $175 million. Tax him at a marginal rate of 90% and that's about 1500 $50/hour workers compensated for right there.


You are mixing his income with the increase in his net worth. Those are not the same thing. The $175 millions are the increase of the value of his stocks. Until he sells those stocks, he earns a total of $0.

You can't really tax "increase in net worth", because net worth can - and does fluctuate both positively and negatively, As opposed to income which just accumulate more or less linearly.

Imagine Jeff Bezos stock has a perfect seasonal effect: on odds years, he gains $1 billion and on even years, he loses that amount. We can all agree here that Jeff sin't getting any richer, on average and thus should not be taxed since he is not getting any stable income. Yet you would want to tax him, every odd year, on the $1 billion - which is unfair, unless you also give him back that tax money every even year. This means firing those workers and asking them to give back their undue wage - which you can't do of course.

The way we solve this is by not taxing the increase in net worth, until he does actually sell the stock and converts this increase in stock value into what is called realized gains. At that point, his net worth won't fluctuate anymore since he sold the stock for cold hard cash. And we tax him on that cash amount. You might argue that we should tax him more on those realized gains - which is fair discussion point.

But trying to impose a tax on virtual net worth increase is a quite risky path because you would also need to pay billionaires when their stock portfolio decreases. And although everyone wants to tax billionaire when you hear about them having a fantastic month on the stock market (even tho these gains haven't been realized yet), but no one want to send them money when a headline says "$25 billion wiped out in a single day" (and rightfully so).


In the Netherlands, there is a small wealth tax. It fluctuates based on net value of holdings. Pretty straightforward, actually.

Personally, I wish the income tax for high earners could be deferred for the first year or two. It’s like, right when you are first building wealth, it goes away so fast… but then, once you got wealth, why not plan to pay a percent or two a year in tax?


Some people still believe in the fantasy of trickle down economics and the Laffer curve, so they push for lower corporate and marginal tax rates that help the wealthiest. The vast majority of people do not benefit as the money flows upwards and concentrates with the wealthiest over time. Some redistribution is needed to promote equality and fairness. Instead, what we have at the moment is a system where the wealthiest are able to avoid taxes and end up paying a lower marginal rate than the middle classes.


Capital dividends and interest payments are proportional to how many assets you own. Profit pays interest and dividends. People pay for profits in the form of higher prices.

Consumers who spend a majority of their income on food, energy and housing are paying more in than they get back because the income they receive from assets is smaller than their living expenses aka the income share of labor is less than 100%.

Imagine being so rich that you can live off dividends, there is no reason for your wealth accumulation to ever stop. The amount you pay into the economy is much lower than the income you derive from your assets.

This is the reason why there is a constant flow of money toward the top. When you think about how a market economy worksy the above is completely illogical. The entire point of markets is to trade which means those who have too much give to those who have too little in exchange for monetary compensation.

Why doesn't the same happen with money? Why isn't money flowing from those who have too much to those who have too little in exchange for their labor?

Instead, those who have too much get more and those who have too little get less, this is highly inefficient.


It’s a start, but really everybody needs their taxes raised a good bit to support a minimum wage for the poorest people.

To get to $50/hr I imagine the middle class will need their federal tax doubled, at least.

But do you want to live in a civilized society or not?


Why downvoted? Do people not care for the poorest?


> 30 years ago people would have said yes perhaps (American dream)

I can relate to that... in the 80s USA was the dream for us kids. But now... I'm so glad I don't live there. France is indeed extremely generous. I wish more french people would realize this.


This is hyperbole.

For most people, especially any French person who'd move to the US, all of those indicators are fine, and, income is considerably higher than in France, if not 'free time' and guaranteed access to healthcare.

Yes, the food in many ways is not good, but it's fine. There is no 'security' problem - Manhattan is generally safer than Paris, and US has great educational institutions unless you live in a ghetto.

It hasn't changed that much over 20 years other than what you see on TV.

Attitudes towards work have changed, our material standard of living is considerably higher than it was 2 generations ago, and people are considerably less willing to do manual labour for example. Ironically, wages in semi skilled and skilled labour are actually not that bad.

What we have now is a 'new white collar working class' - large swaths of people who went to college and have expectations they wouldn't be managing restaurants.


This is what happens in a country overtaken by corporations, unlimited campaign contributions, and profit above all else.


The US is better than the median country in the world on all the metrics you list.

Yes, it’s worse than France, which is part of Western Europe, the most developed and best-run part of the entire world.


I guess being better than a random third-world country (yes, that’s what median means here) is seen as a great accomplishment? Not sure why you would choose to comment this, it’s like a grown adult bragging about being able to beat up a toddler.


Why is your prior that the US should be doing better than third-world countries?

Where did I claim it should be seen as a great accomplishment?


The world has a lot of poor countries, so settling for “better than the median” is a very low bar. On the list of GDP per capita, the median countries are South Africa and Peru.

If the US ever gets near the median on these global lists, it would be the result of a collapse worse than the Soviet Union’s.


You're forgetting Ukraine.


All of this is true. What’s your point?


https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/news/databl...

The facts are as exhaustive as they are exhausting. There’s one simple conclusion from all of this. We’ve been tricked. We’ve been told that America, like most other majority-white countries, deserves the title “developed economy”. It does not.

A bit polemic but an interesting perspective. Maybe it's just the case that the us IS a "third world' aka >developing county<


Yes, that's my point; I'm happy at least someone understood it instead of downvoting me.

People love talking about how the US is the worst developed country across so many categories, without grasping the point that if something is clearly an outlier from everything else in a category, the definition of the category itself is flawed.

The US isn't that bad of a country in that sense that if you knew you were going to be born into the US, and you got one optional re-roll, you shouldn't take it. But for some reason that isn't totally clear to me people (though I have some hypotheses), people seem to think that we should be doing dramatically better than we are, and the fact that we're not in an even higher percentile of best countries to live in is some sort of unconscionable moral failing.

My hypotheses for the source of this idea:

* Pure racism -- people think "the US is a Western country with a European-influenced culture; why shouldn't it be doing as well as all the other countries that fit that description?"

* People confuse wealth with development. They think "of course [country X] is fucked up, because it's poor, but the US doesn't have that excuse". However, they are actually two independent axes (despite being correlated, of course).

* The existence of so much "America #1" propaganda makes people want to hold the US to a higher standard -- if country X has problems, well, at least they're not going around claiming to be the best country in the world.

* The ironclad pop-cultural dominance of the US in the Western world means it's on people's minds way more than random median-quality countries.


I often have a chuckle when I see US companies bragging about their « generous » policies which are systematically bellow the legal minimum in France.

This being said, a lot of IT professionals here don't take all of their paid leave. It's not uncommon for me to see people forced into a vacation by their company so they don't get into legal trouble. I don't think they would mind working for a US company (I wouldn't). Working in the US is another thing, and very much an acquired taste.


IT has indirect pressures that often pushes people not to take time off. Unlike many professions, I'm often expected to basically 'catch up' to some degree with everything I've missed or am behind on after taking off.

Time off is more valuable to labor where the average unit of time to complete a desired amount of work is fairly small. For work that takes a lot of time to contribute too, you get no realized break, just a granted "delay" in deadlines.


even with the increased pay, I see people cite it as a purely temporary move: work in the US for a while when you're young, save some money, and go home


And yet the US leads the world in immigration every year, year after year. Economic migration to the US is a very real thing and is likely due to people in the US having the highest disposable income in the world.[1]

Also, almost 2/3 Americans are on free or subsidized health insurance through Medicaid, Medicare, Tricare/VA etc. which have nothing to do with employment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...


This is a terrible metric. In basically half of the world immigration allowances are supply limited, not demand limited. If France wanted to import a similar fraction of immigrants as the US does tomorrow they could with the ink of a pen.


Not when Macron and co. tries every day to erode social benefits acquired by more than a century of political struggle.

Work in France is importantly a vector for socialization. This seemed to be a foreign consideration to a lot of Americans from what I've witnessed. It's so easy to get fired in the US that considering coworkers are more than acquaintances -- trying to make friends -- is a "bad investment."

Most French people would also rather say that work is "chiant" (boring) rather than bad.


Many in the US look at socialist ideals as though they are evil and will destroy everything. Just as many seem to confuse them with communism.

Importantly, socialist and communist societies are different, and there is no successful nation that is purely one or the other. Successful nations with high standards of living and overall higher than average levels of life satisfaction have socialised elements, such as healthcare.


France is not a socialist country. It just has a somewhat okay welfare state.


Never claimed it was a socialist country. Did point out that socialised health care was a feature. Unsure what's being clarified here, or why.


And it has that thanks to socialists


It seems that France, more and more socialist at the time since 1929(?), didn't want to attack the socialist-communists: German National Socialists + URSS in 1939/40 because of their alliance. and that would be why the need to surrender was so important despite pretty-okay infantry, chars and generals.


What? France surrendered because they realized they would lose the war whatever they did. Also Vichy France was very much Catholic right-wing.


> chiant

When hearing French people using the word chiant (comes from chier=to shit) it shows to me the sequel of decades of education destruction in the country, as they are hundred better or more diverse words to express the emotion behind "chiant".


Don't think alternative words quite convey the same meaning/weight.

Something like pénible for example doesn't feel quite equal, more something I'd use to describe someone. Bassinant would not quite feel as heavy as well. Barber/barbe may be.

Overall chiant/faire chier is just much more common and conveys the meaning quite well and accurately when it comes to work.


It's actually the same thing just on a smaller scale (apart from the fact that people in France are rarely "obsessed" about work at all) - the jobs people don't want to work are the, relatively speaking, shitty ones. Nobody wants to work weird hours at the airport with a long commute, or police emotional/drunk people at a stadium, or run around serving food for hours at a time for comparatively little pay. Those jobs are much better than the equivalents in the US, healthcare/time off/etc.-wise, but they're still shitty jobs compared to the rest of the job pool.


Salaries are terrible in France - a senior dev earns maybe 60k euros (~60k USD).


The way salaries are expressed in France is needlessly complex, and doesn't translate to anything in the USA. So when you see 60k€, what it really means is: 84k€ (before taxes, healthcare, retirement, etc.) and 40k€ (after all taxes).

Where the 60k€ comes from is... complicated, but has to do with the distinction between taxes, employee social contributions and employer social contributions. That's three layer of "taxes" or tax-like stuff, giving 4 different ways to express the salary: "total cost", "gross", "net", and "net after taxes". [1] Usually companies advertise the "gross" salary.

Yes, taxes are really high, but that includes a generous retirement pension, a generous employment insurance if you lose your job, you won't get bankrupt if you get sick, universities and Grandes Écoles are free [2] so your kids won't need to get into debt to study.

That said, overall you are probably better off at a FAANG in SV...

[1] Calculator: https://mon-entreprise.urssaf.fr/simulateurs/salaire-brut-ne...

[2] Except fancy private business schools that can be very expensive. Most STEM Grandes Écoles are free.

EDIT: seems I'm wrong, and actually it is similar in the US. My bad!


Is that different from the US? Employers pay half of social security and Medicare, as well as payroll taxes.


> That said, overall you are probably better off at a FAANG in SV...

Lol, probably? At FAANG, you can retire with a house at 35-40. In France, you retire with a small flat at 70.


> In France, you retire with a small flat at 70

while working at a FAANG? hardly. sure, you'll be paid 150kE instead of 300k$, but it's still more than enough to be in the top 5% of the country


I'm guessing there's way less positions at FAANGs in France per million people than there are in the US. Hence, it makes them more elite and not a fair comparison.


It sounds the same. We call the 84k figure “fully loaded,” 60k is salary, and 40k is “take-home.”


> Yes, taxes are really high, but that includes a generous retirement pension

Are the France state pensions that much higher than in the US? Average US social security pension is around $1700 per month IIRC.


International comparisons are difficult, because the numbers are rarely comparable. The US system is based on paying large amounts of money to people, who then use large amounts of money for paying for various services. The European system pays or subsidizes many of those services with tax money, while nominal wages and benefits are lower.

The US social security is not a pension system. It's a welfare system designed to pay for basic necessities for those with no other substantial income. Its nominal target is replacing 40% of income, though that decreases with income. Mid-income people already receive less than 40% of their former wages.

Mandatory pensions typically replace 60-80% of income. Their purpose is to support retirement without a substantial decrease in quality of life. The French system, as far as I understand, is rather generous, aiming to replace 70-80% of income.


Take a look at the maximum pension payment (which you'd get as a programmer in the US making more than > $147,000 per year) between France and the US.

France: €1,714 ($1,714 USD) per month in 2022 [1]

US: $3,345 per month for someone who files at full retirement age [2]

[1] https://www.cleiss.fr/docs/regimes/regime_france/an_3.html

[2] https://www.aarp.org/retirement/social-security/questions-an...


Not a specialist at all: I relocated to Japan, and have only worked about one year in France... But you are missing a (big) piece of the French pension scheme: the Agirc-Arrco system, which is mandatory and complement the base system your link is referring to.

Someone at 60k€ should expect a total retirement of roughly 3,200€/month (back of the envelope calculation). Someone making 150k€ would expect a retirement of about 7,000€/month (again, back of the envelope calculation). Making 300k€, you would expect close to 14k€/month (again, back of the envelope calculation). I think that's pretty much the maximum you can get, it doesn't scale much further than that.


Off-topic: any reasons related to the current topic that you relocated to Japan?


Absolutely none whatsoever.

Financial concerns didn’t weight at all on my mind when deciding to move here, so I can’t tell you if it’s better or worse.

I strongly doubt it’s better, especially for retirement, but I could be wrong.

So I’m not even sure why I’m arguing about cross border salaries or retirement benefits…


The Agirc-Arrco is a separate, compulsory system that has separate contributions to the state pension.


Of course, who knows how long Social Security is actually going to last, given the repeated Republican tactic of squeezing money from its line items to give to tax cuts instead.


Macron is pushing for similar things in France.


They're bad compared to the US were devs are treated like rockstars, agree. That being said, you get free healthcare, free schooling, much more holidays, maternity leave, gun control laws, nice cities to live in, etc.

I'm one of the few that left to the US and followed the money, but I was the only person in my class going abroad every time I've done it. That being said, I'd be nice to go back to Europe just for the quality of life.


What's so terrible about that?


It's the fact that prices are similar to the US. The only exceptions could be housing in the coastal US cities. Even so, with a 60k salary you won't be able to afford to buy anything bigger than a shoebox in Paris, if that. And if you live further out, and need to commute by car, gas is more expensive than in California.

Also, the 60k are probably before income tax, which as far as I understand, is higher than in the US.


60k gives you ~3200€/month, which allows you to rent kinda easily a 30m² apartment in Paris or banlieue prochaine (suburbs) - even better if you go further out. In addition very few people commute with a car in Paris, most people use public transportation (usually up to 1.5 hours if you leave really far from the city), which costs 75€/month and by law if you have a CDI (Contract of indeterminate employment) it's half payed by the employer (IDK if it applies to other forms of employment, but it's a fair assumption).

Of course if you live somewhere else than Paris it's even better, and in every case you also count in universal healthcare.


> 60k gives you ~3200€/month, which allows you to rent kinda easily a 30m² apartment in Paris or banlieue prochaine (suburbs)

Easily does a lot of heavy lifting. I'd doubt you'd find a 30m2 in a nice neighborhood. Source: I looked last year. I was also specifically talking about buying.

> Of course if you live somewhere else than Paris it's even better

You'll probably be making less than 60k in that case, if you can even find a job…

> and in every case you also count in universal healthcare.

It depends. If you break your leg or something else critical, sure. If you need any other kind of care (hospital stay, glasses, or even some dental work) you better have a "mutuelle", which seems similar to the US model of employer provided health insurance, in that not everyone has it. Also, this comes out of your 60K, and part of it is included in the tax base, so it isn't completely "free".


> You'll probably be making less than 60k in that case, if you can even find a job…

Paris has the largest job market but there still a lot of jobs around the country. In my area, which couldn't be further away from Paris, senior profiles take 65-80k gross/year.


> I'd doubt you'd find a 30m2 in a nice neighborhood

meh. I make less than 3200 net/month and iI live inside a 33m2 2 pieces in a completely normal part of the 20eme, if I'd go to other still nice but cheaper parts of Paris/banlieue prochaine on the metro I could probably do even better.

About buying, I've lived in places with an higher buying cost/rent price. But still, the market is mental and buying an house in the 2nd most expensive city in the world is completely different to live a decent life off a salary like 60k/year (which is medium-high compared to the average one in Paris, which is 48k/y).

Of course more aristocratic arrondissements are much more expensive and the Paris house market is completely mental, but that's another issue.

> You'll probably be making less than 60k in that case, if you can even find a job…

Mah! Other sibling comment already addressed that

> It depends. If you break your leg or something else critical, sure. If you need any other kind of care (hospital stay, glasses, or even some dental work) you better have a "mutuelle", which seems similar to the US model of employer provided health insurance, in that not everyone has it. Also, this comes out of your 60K, and part of it is included in the tax base, so it isn't completely "free".

It's mandatory and for the bigger part payed by the employer. Anyway, that's the concept of "taxes" in Europe. One could argue that the US model of health insurance is better, but that's easily proven false.


30m2 is absolutely tiny though - that's 323 sqft.

I should hope they can 'kinda easily' rent that.

Remember that in the US most decent jobs (certainly any which would pay €60k in France) include health insurance so then universal healthcare isn't such a big benefit either.


>I should hope they can 'kinda easily' rent that.

Ask the Germans, where you basically have to wait for someone to die, so that an apartment comes on the market for renting.

Maybe it's better in France.


Okay, cool.

So you work full time in a highly skilled career and you can afford to... rent a flat, as long as you keep working full time forever.

That's.... nice, I guess?


> So you work full time and you can afford to... rent a flat

fixed that for you. welcome to modern society :)

(also, you kinda forget to realize that 60k is much higher than most of what skilled job positions currently offer, except for the tech bubble, where senior profiles in Europe - especially in Paris - make way more than 60k)


Whatever, the point is, renting a flat is not some sort of fantastic lifestyle aspiration.

"Congrats, you're not homeless!"


Freshman interns make like double that.


Yes, compared to software engineers in the US it isn't much. But the US is the poster child for overconsumption, it shouldn't be the norm. 60k in France is above average in one of the richest countries in the world.

Paris is a collection of shoebox apartments, if you want to have a larger house, don't go live in Paris.


Yeah, Paris isn't good for comparisons with the rest of France. My French colleague insists that Paris should not be considered part of France! :)


It amazes me how utterly ignorant the most privileged people in the world are about the stupendous luxury in which they live.

60,000 USD is 58,000 Euros at current exchange rates, which equates to a post-tax annual income of 37500 Euros in France.

If you were only supporting yourself, that would place you in the top 1.6% of earners in the world. It would be an effective income 17x the global median.[1]

Now, these are estimates, and some of the underlying data is outdated, but the basic point is clear. It would provide you with, relatively speaking, a historically and globally unprecedented level of affluence. After that point more money is going to do almost nothing to improve your well-being - doing creative and meaningful work, having good relationships, having a well balanced mind, etc., is going to be far more important.

[1] https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i?income=...


You mistake the concept of money with the concept of wealth. Not the highscore-like number on your payslip is what matters - but what you can get with it. Just ask someone from Zimbabwe how they feel being a vingtiollaire [1].

So ... yes, technically, if you earn 37500 Euros post-tax, you are the 2%. And if you live in Laos, you're living the good life. In Paris, however, things will be hard.

[1] https://kagi.com/proxy/5653f337-ac74-470a-8651-231e5f3fee60....


Click on the methodology, it adjusts for purchasing power.


In very broad strokes. 37500 in Metz is very different from 37500 in Paris.


> Salaries are terrible

France is a two-system country. In "real France" (Switzerland and Luxembourg), SWE average salary is CHF 1,06,713 per year. (1 CHF ~= 1 EUR)


Readers beware: Do not read 1,06,713 as ~ one million as I did.


Maybe before covid/remote work was freely available.

I recently interviewed around (in France), the low ball offers were 90k euro base.


And your income tax is like ~45%...


There is wanting to work and then there is being able to tolerate work. Good working conditions improve the latter.


On the one hand when I made crappier wages I was real concerned with liking what I was working on, but then I got my first real good wages and that needing to like to perform went away. But then after a while I was used to getting good wages and then I started having the need to like what I was doing again.

Good wages after a bit are not going to help you if the work sucks, but it is a good initial motivator.


Good wages can help you do what you like but in parallel and can also earn you some time. If you save some you can buy off some free time.


Maybe France is a good place to work because workers actively stand up for their rights.


It has an awfully elitist education and employment system with very little opportunity to break into any of it as an outsider (i.e. from any lower class or from an entire range of universities and majors). It's certainly not necessarily a better place to be than the US, although it does have the benefits such as universal healthcare that are missing in the US.


> [France] has an awfully elitist education and employment system with very little opportunity to break into any of it as an outsider

What are you talking about? Basic education in France is free, the university is open to everybody and is not expensive at all; and if you are a good student you can even go to a "grande école", which is not only free but you receive a good monthly salary just to study there. The entrance exams are open to everybody, and they are anonymous. Please tell me how can it be any less elitist than that!

Of course, there is a lot of social inertia whereby children of parents with higher education are more likely to pursue a higher education. But this is an acknowledged problem and one of the main goals of the system is precisely to solve it.

Source: I am part of the French higher education system to which I entered as a total outsider.

(you are right, however, that the private employment system is awfully elitist: if you didn't go to the right schools it's much harder to get a good job)


Well, nobody has a chance in the us either. There are just various "industries" in need of fresh meat, who create a ilusion of "chance" to churn through idealistic, young people as a cheap labour source for jobs.


I grew up in poverty collecting change from McDonalds drive throughs as a kid, went to MIT eventually, and am now trying to pay it forward.

It does happen…


Hard disagree. And, the illusion of "chance" is what?

Owning a house? Check

Starting a business? Check

Starting a family? Check

Getting an advanced education? Check

The US is full of opportunity and "chances". Just because you feel nobody has a chance does not make it so. Nothing is for free - you need to be willing to put the effort into making it happen.


You should tell my boss who was a refugee that "nobody has a chance in the US". She'd be fascinated to hear your reasoning.


France is full of refugees as well. Loads of countries are. Not sure what the point is.


How many refugees in France end up in managerial roles, working alongside the grads from elite schools?


Not many I'd wager. France seemed pretty elitist to me.

The company I used to work for had the HQ in France, and there, all the devs doing the stressful mediocre pay grunt work, were all Mohamed and Ahmed immigrants from North Africa, while all the suit & tie managers with expensive haircuts doing nothing but have coffee and joke around for 4 hours/day, were native white French dudes.

I wish this was a meme though, but this is my anecdote from my time there.


The point is "nobody has a chance in the US" is clearly false?


> It has an awfully elitist education and employment system

Who cares? France gives everybody mobility, a computer and network, plus free training in case they cannot go self-taught. Most of French new jobs are deliviery and remote work by African immigrants (extensively represented due to France having half Africa as a former trading point, faith territory and colony).


I have this theory that to have a healthy ecosystem you need capitalists to push you in one direction to increase the economy of the country at a global scale, while socialists push you in another direction to increase quality of life for people in your country. The problem is that in the US, it's really hard to have state-wide or national movements, as cities are spread out and there is a real lack of density for protests to happen, for example.


True. Work motivation is usually tied to one of these things:

1) Acquiring status / proving yourself (qualifying for a better romantic partner, etc). More applicable for men.

2) Servicing existing debt (student loans, mortgage, etc)

3) Providing for a family (somewhat similar to 1 - but for future goals)

4) Securing a legacy/reputation

Although the most important drive in work is seeing a path towards upwards mobility (i.e. if I work hard then my lot in life can improve - not in an absolute sense, but in a relative sense. Meaning that I will be better off than my neighbor. This ties in to status games and mate competition from (1)).


I'd like to work as a means of self-actualization [0] (by working on private projects), but it's hard to find the time as this (currently) doesn't pay the bills.

So currently I am at stage 'Providing for a family', while I do a little bit of self-actualisation whenever I can find some free time.

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-actualization


In regards to 4)

I ᴍᴇᴛ a Traveller from an antique land, Who said, “ Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart.[17] Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read, Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “ My name is Oᴢʏᴍᴀɴᴅɪᴀs, King of Kings.” Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair! No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.


Ozymandias was Ramesses II. He lived three thousand years ago. Lots of his buildings remain now, lots of territories he conquered remain part of Egypt, his mummy was found, thousands of people every day come to see his face and hair which remained intact. In Egypt he's known as "The Great Ancestor" and every schoolkid knows his name.


A reading of Ozymandias would say he has secured the legacy.. Even though nothing remains of his kingdom, that statue still stands and boldly proclaims to the world that Ozymandis lived and conquered.


It's all about scope though. Sure he might have lived a couple of thousands of years ago. Humanity still is only a blip on the whole history of the earth.

Maybe in 100.000 years even he will be forgotten as well, but he did get his 15 minutes of fame (relatively speaking), I'll give you that :)


Perhaps the easiest way to secure a legacy is creating the long lasting object with whichever claims you’d like and skipping the actual building of the kingdom


I like that thinking.. I am going to create my own history kinda like how the man who claimed to have conned everyone was lying about him conning everyone (and thus conning a different set of everyone :) )


people want to work, I assure you. they just want a job that pays enough to make ends meet as well as start saving.

any 40-hour/week job should provide that and there are a very large number that do not.

people want to work, they just don't want to be crapped on while they do it.

I guarantee that any employer who pays fairly is not seeing any shortage of applicants.


I had no idea they didn't work in France.


This is lazy explanation that's easy to agree with if you don't think very hard about it. Two reasons:

1. A shitty job at $15 an hour is equally unappealing at $16 an hour. Someone who doesn't want the crap hours, crap boss, and crap customer interactions isn't going to change their mind over an extra buck an hour. The money isn't the problem, it's that companies make it _not rewarding_ to work.

2. Raising pay ratchets up inflation, and isn't a response. Cause and effect are reversed. Unlike food, gas, houses, movie tickets, and restaurants, the amount of money transacted in wages/salary cannot go down. McDonald's can't tell their employees that due to supply and demand, they are only going to make $14.83 an hour this week. Imagine if your company lowered wages due to the "expected recession". You would start looking for a new role. This means pay increases can never go down again after a temporary bump. I won't say it's the cause, but it artificially limits deflation from ever pulling things back. Like an elevator that can only go up.


> money isn't the problem, it's that companies make it _not rewarding_ to work

Lots of people are fine making sacrifices for money, but it sounds like you think that "crap bosses, crap customer interactions, crap hours" are things not in the employers control. Be nicer, have sane schedules, make customers (generally) happy goes a long way.

> Raising pay ratchets up inflation, and isn't a response.

While pay raises have a slight inflationary affect, worker pay over the last few decades FAR lags modest inflation. IF you have to work TWO jobs just to cover rent, then your pay is too low.

> lowered wages due to the "expected recession". You would start looking for a new role

Unless this "expected" recession is fictional, employers do exactly this, but just not in the way you frame it. It's true they generally don't ask for pay cuts, but cutting hours and shifts, drop bonuses and even lay people off. And since it's a recession and many businesses are similarly affected, you just can't "look for a new role".

> pay increases can never go down

In absolute terms, sure. But if future pay raises are below inflation, you actually do lose ground in real terms.


"Lots of people are fine making sacrifices for money"

This line made me realize that, yes, lots of people are fine making sacrifices for money, but that no one is fine making sacrifices for survival. Sure, you can deal with it for a while, years even, but if every day requires a fresh sacrifice then you will wear out and ultimately break.

Maybe less likely if everyone has to sacrifice like this, say in war or famine, we are remarkably good at adapting to our situations.

But, when your friends are buying houses and getting married and having children and going on vacations and you're stuck flipping burgers and paying all of your money on rent and ramen? No, there's a point where anyone would break.


> Unlike food, gas, houses, movie tickets, and restaurants, the amount of money transacted in wages/salary cannot go down.

And when, exactly, looking at 5-years windows has the amount of money transacted for movie tickets, food, gas, etc. gone down instead of up? Not prices from one week to the next or to the next month, when did prices consistently trended downwards for a period of 5 years or longer for a given product?


Gas prices 1932 - 1971?


At least that! For a period some 40-90 years ago we had stable to decreasing prices in gas... In the United States of America :)


A raise to $16 from $15 is a 6% raise and an increase of $2k a year. That is a HUGE amount of money to someone living off $15/hour.

If inflation is driven purely by rising wages (hint: it isn't), why are corporate profits through this roof this quarter?


You are right and the GP is wrong. When I worked for near minimum wage I was very conscious of exactly what I would get in each week's paypacket. Either a couple of extra hours or a small payrise (eg. 40c per hour for being kitchen trained) were a big deal to me.

If you are making say $380 a week, you might have fixed costs of $200-$250 a week. Other costs, maybe $60-100, which are difficult to cut without making your life much worse. And the constant chance of an unlucky break which will cost you $300-1000 and need to be paid straight away.

A small payrise can mean the difference between having $20 left over for everything nonessential, and having $50 - 2.5 times as much. Or the difference between having $30 and having nothing at all. Or the difference between ending the week with slightly more than you started, or with slightly less.


> The money isn't the problem, it's that companies make it _not rewarding_ to work.

What are you even talking about? Of course money is the problem.


Well, yes and no.

Imagine the average software developer earns $140,000 but due to some historical oddity, a company needs to hire people who'll develop software while people occasionally spit on them. They actually had a team of people doing that, and getting paid an average of $130,000, but they laid them off during the pandemic. Now they're finding it impossible to hire.

In a sense this is a money issue, in that I'm certain they could hire software developers who'll let you spit on them for, say, $1,000,000 a year.

In a sense it's not a money issue, in that if they could just remove the requirement to be spat on they could probably rehire for only a modest increase in salary.


I think I'd agree to be spat upon (depends on how often it happens) if that means my salary was doubled. This means my time till retirement is more than halved, which sounds like a good enough tradeoff. Probably also tells you how much I dislike working in the typical work environment.


Do you talk with regular people, outside of the tech bubble often? If money were really the problem, Walmart employees would jump at an opportunity to work at Costco or any of the other higher paying places. OP is claiming that because salaries aren't high enough, people are deciding to stay home and watch Netflix.


> Walmart employees would jump at an opportunity

That's exactly what they do. Most of my family falls in that category, and a desk job doing customer service at AT&T with reasonable health insurance is a big fucking deal. Getting that higher paying job in that market isn't as easy as you think it is.


Yes they would.. except that most places where there is a walmart, there is no costco. They do not have other higher playing places that can accommodate the workforce. I currently live in Seattle and when I drive down to Portland, there is maybe 3 costcos along I-5. There are a tons of more walmarts, targets and other big box stores. Walmart is the largest non-federal employer in US.

Do you really think people work at Walmart because they love the job? Check out /r/target for some insane stories. If forced to choose between insane working conditions or take their chances, some are willing to take their chances.


I think what happened was a lot of those low-tier workers had time to evaluate what they were doing during the lockdowns, and figured they didn't have to be treated like dirt anymore. Some people of course retired, and Covid claimed people too ... so now those low-tier workers had job choices.

And bad employers found their labour pool was more selective. They thought the root cause was Unemployment Insurance and people sitting home, but even after those programs expired they still faced difficulty hiring.

So, I don't think people are siting home watching Netflix; but they are unwilling to work for a crap boss serving crap customer during crap hours for crap money, because there are options.


> Raising pay ratchets up inflation

Studies on local minimum wages (such as Seattle's aggressive ratcheting) suggest that low-end wage increases have negligible effects on inflation.

This has a pretty obvious basis when you consider that the 1% and especially the 0.1% have an overwhelming majority all the money in the economy.


Completely wrong.

1. Nobody is talking about $16, but living wage payment that are not paid to workers. 2. It's millionaires and billionaires who increases the inflation, not workers.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/07/19/ceos-not-workin...


>This is lazy explanation that's easy to agree with if you don't think very hard about it.

And that's a lazy ass response because you only talked about wages and ignored EVERYTHING else. Wages alone, fine I don't disagree terribly with what you said. But it's everything else that is the major issue!

The complete lack of basic benefits- which translate to "I don't give a shit about you as an employee, just do as much work as you can and I'll give you as little as I can, and no one can stop me because there's little to no regulations on what I have to give you".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_b...

>European Union legislation mandates that all 27 member states must by law grant all employees a minimum of 4 weeks of paid vacation

How many people doing the jobs that pay under even say 40k get 4 weeks vacation? Get sick leave? Get maternity benefits? Get any descent healthcare? Those are the REAL problems.


> A shitty job at $15 an hour is equally unappealing at $16 an hour.

See a contrary opinion here:

https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/what-does-shitty-job-me...

(Look for the “Wages, Non-Work Survival Stress, and You” section)

If you are payed better than most jobs you could otherwise do, you may find that it motivates you.


Every time someone calls someone else lazy I am thinking that there is a demotivational element somewhere that actively discourages people from working.


Now that's a lazy explanation. Inflation does not equal pay. That's a lazy assumption folks love to repeat without the slightest evidence. Other than the lazy "It's obvious to me".

Think of a world that worked that way. The only way to make a country work is to have a slave-labor class that struggles for a pittance while simultaneously bidding up the prices on things? I guess Karl Marx would agree, but I don't think he had any more evidence than "It's obvious to me" which is the bar here.


I did crap jobs for $8/hr because I needed to pay rent.


I have read your other comments on the thread too and I am really confused about something - are you saying that life/US treated you unfairly and hence everyone should suffer as you went through (suck it up, buttercup is the phrase I believe)? or are you saying that these crap jobs for $8 are fair?

I did not grow up poor neither did I grow up rich.. but I would love for people in my neighborhood, my state, my country and rest of the world (somewhat in that order) to have a better life with less uncertainties than what the previous generation had. The attitude of "I struggled, so everyone should also struggle" makes very little sense to me.


I'm saying that struggle made me a better, more complete person. It taught me virtues like not wasting time, using money wisely, saving, educating myself, not taking anything for granted, amd ultimately building my own business.

The upsides of struggle don't make as much sense to people who didn't need to struggle. But there are upsides nonetheless, and I would contend that a society without struggle for the individual becomes decadent amd lazy.

That wasn't the reason for this comment, however. It was that when I hear the attitude 'why would anyone want to work for $16/hr', I know I'm talking to someone who doesn't need to work.


Same here. Ironically it's rising rent and gas prices that will force people back to work, rather than pay bumps because bills still need to be paid.


Worker insecurity is a real and intentional thing: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...


On 2)

CEO pay in 2021 went up 18.2% in 2021 and inflation is through the roof. Rich people wealth has exploded and inflation is through the roof as a result. That whole talking point is a scare tactic but inflation is through the roof and normal wages are in the toilet.

Typical humans would save the money to live on through daily expenses.

CEOs spend on big projects with inflating costs, circularly inflating costs.

It’s simple arithmetic and a whole lot of propaganda the rich are the best. Really the masses are just poorly educated (<13% have advanced degrees).


CEOs hiring people for big projects is the cause of inflation? Typical humans save money? I'm not familiar with the world you're describing.


Of course not, you don’t want to think in terms that do not align with your experience and propaganda addled brain.

The Fed was just saying they’re trying to get wages to stop going up; aka CEOs tossing more money at people, and trying to get people to save.

It’s gaslighting while ignoring the obvious trend; decades of CEO pay/growing wage inequality have lead normies into high inflation despite being told paying workers more would be the cause.

The powers that be are not dumb; they intentionally peddle narratives contrary to their intentions all the time; Roe v Wade for example. They’ll conveniently ignore the status quo of paying them more deflating our buying power because barely 90% of country is college educated and won’t question the hierarchy defined for them their entire lives, and the educated are outnumbered so they just play along.

I don’t know how it can be anymore clear; decades of doing what we were resulted in the situation we find ourselves; JIT logistics only the elite can thrive in.


Many people mention "social status" element, which is for sure important, because many jobs will get you basic needs covered. Everyone is well aware of how successful/rich life looks like when you get bombarded with this content from every corner of social media / ads etc.

My hypothesis is that it's not fun/interesting to work on becoming a PRO carpenter (in general), when all the hype (that's hard to disconnect from) is about "You're missing out on crypto bro, that's the future".

I don't have anything against crypto, but you get the example.


>don't get any real time off

I think this cause is highly underrepresented. Many countries get at least a month of paid vacation a year don't they? In the US, it's a slog, year in and year out for most people. Even white collar workers who get 3-4 weeks off are often manipulated into not taking it.

I'd be a lot less burned out every year if I got to take an actual month off.


When people get paid more they still want to work less but because there is immense stigma against retirement and voluntary unemployment everyone is trying to save for an early retirement instead of just working less. People are working hard for an illusion, the population is shrinking, your life savings aren't worth much if there is no one to work for you. Storing labor isn't possible if it isn't turned into physical capital.


the brutal truth is those brutal conditions cause people in the US to work harder than their peers in other first world countries. the american system is incentivising people to work that's all


And what exactly is your point here?


the US system is working as intended. which is a hard truth to fathom for most people.


> can't enjoy having a kid because they can't even afford it..

we never have had as much means to raise kids as we have now. Right after the war families had tons of kids and comparatively were working much harder and with less disposable income that we do. Please don't used that tired argument, it's ludicrous.


>we never have had as much means to raise kids as we have now

And what in the heck does that even mean?

>Please don't used that tired argument, it's ludicrous.

Yeah, it's really ludicrous. The average cost of child care alone is $10k / year. The median income is like 31k in the US. You do the math.


> Healthcare for all that has 0 to do with employers and is near "free".. guaranteed time off, sick leave, maternity leave, and real assistance on early childcare (as in nearly free nurserys etc) would fix like 90% of the US's problems when we talk about things like "people don't want to work".

Let's be real here. Plenty of people have all those things and are still lazy as shit, especially in tech. I work hard enough so that I'm at least somewhat of an asset to my company, but I doubt I'm anywhere near as dedicated to my work as the average Chinese factory worker. If you watch American Factory, you'd notice that the Chinese workers just seem to care more about their work than the American ones. I do think that Americans deserve things like free healthcare, but I also think it's important to maintain a realistic perspective.


The lesson you took from "American Factory" was that the Chinese workers "seem to care more"?

In the west, work is a job, and we work it for (usually) 40hrs a week. The Chinese workers were often hundreds or thousands of miles from their families, living in cramped company-provided housing and seeing their families a few times a year. It showed me that work is a lifestyle.

My impression was that while the company wanted it's workers nominally "happy", productivity was of supreme importance. Safety, legality, and all of that was red tape to be handled in some way, but productivity was most important. My impression was that the workers were all seen as cogs by the management, and all were replaceable.

I'm sure it's true that there are lazy people out there. But I think the point here is that there are people who will do the work in the right conditions for decent money.


I really think the long term way for any of us in a similar position is to found our own company or build our own dream as we see it. I don't like working for anyone either.

I have no sympathy for myself that I've so far failed to have a big hit among the 7 or 8 startup apps and sites I've built in my spare time while working corporate jobs. How am I supposed to have sympathy for someone who isn't even trying, just because wages are shit and they don't get a lot of vacation? Who cares? I've worked some of the shittiest jobs in America. I can bitch as much as anyone else.

People like me not losing hope in my own ability to one day launch something that will make us fuck-you rich from our garage - even if most of us never will - is an essential driver of innovation and overall economic well being. And people who say it's impossible disgust me, because they're essentially just lazy


Despite having failed 7 or 8 times you think the only thing stopping the average person from becoming fuck you rich is laziness? Your solution is for everyone to found their own companies and succeed? Isn't this attitude just a restating of 'pull yourself up by the bootstraps'? Most people are not capable of what you are suggesting but that doesn't mean they don't deserve reasonable pay and healthcare.


Also, to expand on that in a different way: Most businesses require real up-front investment and significant time to operate, so failing even once means at best losing all your seed money and at worst going broke.


> found our own company

This doesn't scale.

The comment you replied to stated facts about structural issues in society. Starting your own company isn't going to fix any of that.


People who support their faimiler through full-time jobs are lazy? I guess you've never met the benefit kings/queens and full-time alcoholics that live in my neighborhood. That would've calibrated your laziness meter.


I've worked in social services, benefit kings/queens are a thing, but they are only a small visible part of the picture. It is incredibly uncharitable to call alcoholics lazy. These are people who very often have very difficult base struggles. It is an extreme luxury to be at a point where you can easily have a well paying stable job, not to mention the freedom and received ability to "create a startup," and to top it off, expect success. To look at all this with a self serving perspective, well that's laziness.


Many alcoholics I know are just leeching money off state and their families. Their main struggle is that they can't stop drinking.

Others are honorable and work (at least intermittently) to support their addiction. One guy is an oceanic ship captain, who work fixed-term contracts, and is 100% sober during them (one infraction would end his career). But, once he's back from the contract, he stops on the first gas station on route from the port to his home, buys a bottle of vodka and drinks it on the spot. This shows that controlling alcoholism is partially a matter of willpower and motivation.


People have been complaining about this since literally before Christ.

“[Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances. ... They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.” -Aristotle


The media commentary is almost always from employers. I think there are some new/developing factors, but otherwise it seems like inevitable tension from one side seeking to pay less and the other hoping to earn more.

One part of the equation that I think is addressable though is unsophisticated employers, for lack of a better term. If you work for a small business, the owner's personality is a bigger factor in your experience - in negotiating, being paid, handling leave (an owner rarely gets formal leave, so some will resent people asking). Being underpaid is one thing, but being underpaid and dealing with a difficult personality who controls everything about your employment is another thing on top.


How does the quote relate to not wanting to work?


Younger people than me bad.


I never believed this until I got older.


I've always believed the opposite and I probably will until the day I die.


except for every generation in America other than the boomers and their kids, who all learned what Aristotle was referring to by the age of 12 or 13. Plus people in every third world country on earth, who would give their left nut to find work, make money and raise a family in America.

There's definitely a crisis in America of people who've never worked not wanting to work. And it's the ultimate first world problem. If you want to tackle privilege instead of getting a relatively shitty job in your 20s... you're probably privileged as hell.


“There’s definitely a crisis of nobody wanting to work anymore, unlike the last hundred years of people saying this”

lol c’mon. The ol’ “$CURRENT_GENERATION is uniquely weak/lazy/bad, unlike $SPEAKER_OWN_GENERATION” chestnut is a nice touch, I’ll give you that.


From what I can tell, people in America generally work and they work hard. American productivity is usually high. I'm not seeing any large waves of unproductive twentysomethings.

It's always strange to me when critics look at this highly productive country, where many people work hard with fewer benefits & protections than other nations, and then call those people lazy.


Do you have any… evidence for this crisis? Or can we just add your quote to the twitter thread?


it's anecdotal but mostly relates to the conversations I have with people - daily - who view their long term prospects as nil, no matter how hard they work or don't. It's recognizable to me as an extension of the Gen X dread of having lower economic expectations than your parents, but it lacks the DIY ethos or even the willingness to bite the bullet and try. I could recount a book's worth of these conversations I've had weekly since before the pandemic among the privileged white college grads in my neighborhood. I was also a wanderer and a slacker and a musician and an artist and I have plenty of sympathy for the sentiment. But at the end of the day I knew I had to work, and they don't have that feeling.


I hope you realize the fallacy of proclaiming a "crisis" based purely on anecdotal evidence.


It's worse than that. Their sample is based on people who have already decided to drop out of society:

> just talk to anyone under 25 here who's living in a van or shooting heroin on the street and they'll explain to you in collegiate level prose why there's no point getting a job.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32162126


> If you want to tackle privilege instead of getting a relatively shitty job in your 20s... you're probably privileged as hell.

So would you consider your comment "tackling privilege"?


> There's definitely a crisis in America of people who've never worked not wanting to work.

Citation needed. Do you have one single shred of evidence that this is the case, to the extent of being a "crisis"?


Yeah. I do. Come hang out in Southeast Portland for a few days and you'll gather what I'm referring to. Seriously, just talk to anyone under 25 here who's living in a van or shooting heroin on the street and they'll explain to you in collegiate level prose why there's no point getting a job.


> just talk to anyone under 25 here who's living in a van or shooting heroin on the street and they'll explain to you in collegiate level prose why there's no point getting a job.

Oh wow. Just talk to any of the beatniks, or the hobos and vagabonds in the greatest generation or...

You can't take a sample from people who have dropped out of society and become drug addicts or to live in a van and make a conclusion about society!

If I took the same sample from of 25 yos from a Harvard lecture theater you can bet most of them are expecting to work 60 hours weeks.


> Come hang out in Southeast Portland for a few days and you'll gather what I'm referring to.

I live in Portland by PSU. I used to live in inner SE off Belmont. You’re 100% talking out your ass. I would put money you don’t talk to anyone OR as others have said are only talking to those living on the street. You’re manipulating things to fit your narrative it’s gross. Please stop.

The subset of people you’re attempting to identify are by and large suffering from mental illness and/or abuse. They don’t need you to misrepresent them and portray them as lazy, bourgeois, and/or unwilling to work. It’s completely disgusting behavior to do so and you should feel shame.


Shame? No, I feel disgust at the bourgeoisie in Pdx who make excuses for them (and try to shame others into doing so. That doesn't work on me). I'm not just talking about the dropouts. I'm talking about the pervasive attitude of people who do work that life's so unfair, that dropping out is a rational and excusable option. That the system is so broken it's not worth fixing.

FWIW I also live in inner SE and it has changed drastically for the worse in the last few years. But I can assure you, one thing hasn't changed, I still talk to tons of people from all walks of life. I can walk a few blocks in any direction and run into a dozen people I know and who know me by name.


I used to live in SE Portland and I distinctly remember an earnest topic of conversation at Roadside Attraction (among people who presumably had the money to pay for their drinks) being the necessity of working for a living.


They do exist... capitalists in Portland, I mean. I have friends who hold the values of hard work. But it's considered a virtue to signal that you think work is unfair and somehow demeaning.

Also, Roadside tends to be a slightly older crowd and generate better than average conversations. I love that place.


These people were my age (mid 20s-early 30s)


However, "kids" didn't get to live with mom and dad till they were in their 20s or 30s either. Outside of the few wealthy families they had to earn their keep starting pretty early.


The wealthy have replaced nature. In the past we extracted our living from the land. Now we extract our living from our wealthy neighbors, at their pleasure.

Ie : I wish I could grow some beans in this field VS I wish my wealthy neighbor would use me.


Not really. In the past, the wealthy owned the field.

In the present, there is plenty of cheap land if you want to live off the grid and grow beans. That's not what people want anymore. They want cars and modern appliances. You can't get those without an advanced manufacturing society, and thus, people work for other people.

But you don't extract your living from wealthy neighbors. You provide a service that you get paid for. What you get paid depends on what you can provide.


It’s like people complaining that “they broke the weather”, because somehow the temperature and rain that day is not in line with long term average, or at least what they remember of this average (like if it ever is).


This is a weird comparison, given that the effects of climate change mean that weather in various places really isn't in line with the long-term average.


Kids are always honest ’cause they don’t think they’re ever gonna die - The Strokes


More like, "nobody wants to work for $12 an hour anymore", or "we won't accept anything less than a Bachelor's and 5 years experience, and won't pay more than $20 an hour, so nobody wants to work anymore". Every time there's these complaints about worker shortages, the only shortage is in pay rate, benefits, and willingness to train.


It's like you need 4 year degree and pass a bunch of screening/background tests and interviews to maybe make $20/hour.


Nominal wages have been rising, real wages have been falling.

A great victory for labor huh.

To be less cryptic, there's a relentless chorus of people advocating for inflationary policies that achieve the exact opposite of their intended effect.


Recently that has been true, but in the long term the trend has gone towards real wages rising.

And we really should be expecting real wages to drop at the moment, that's a sign our economy is doing a good job at reflecting what's going on in the world. I'd be more concerned if they were all going up despite all these issues because it would mean we are at disconnected from reality and that normally comes with a crash after a couple of years

There are a few graphs from the US Fed that show it pretty well. Wages got very static after 2008 and started heading back up once we left the Great recession stagnation era.

Then we have the drop from recent events such as the war with Russia, covid in China causing lockdowns, supply chain issues.

More than likely as things recover it'll start taking up again


Yes, it's good real wages are declining given the inflationary backdrop.

But politicians fighting inflation with higher wages and stimulus checks, as well as the chorus of idiots cheering them on, repeating the same mistakes as the 70s, is quite mindblowing.

How far do consumer sentiment and approval ratings have to drop for people to wake up to basic economic realities?

They didn't have the internet in the 70s, by the way.


How much money do you think $600 actually is?

People have been going on and on as though $600 was too much inflationary pressure.

You get that that is less then 1 months rent, right?


It was over $4T in stimulus, and extended far beyond individual stimulus checks.

Which doesn't even include forbearances that add a few T more in consumer spending power, or artificially low interest rates driven by the Fed

Here's your inflation: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSXFS

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PI

Maybe you can clue some of the others into it. Not like we have the internet and easily observable datapoints that makes it quite obvious huh.

Instead have to hear the inane idiocy of economically illiterate people promoting policy that does the opposite of what they want to achieve


If you include GDP next to those two graphs, then the story is quite different: retail spending is following the increase in GDP, and pay is lagging it: https://i.imgur.com/4VtMsBW.png

The stimulus bumps are quite visible, but subsequent data is right in line.


GDP is just a measure of total dollars spent in the economy. So of course if you print money and hand it to people, GDP goes up (nominally)


But personal income does not, which as noted is already observably a visible spike (from adjacent) in the graph you cited. So where is the driven increase in retail spending coming from since it observably is not being delivered from the government to citizens.


It does via inflation which is why it's rising faster than the pre-covid trend


You have so far failed to point to any metric such explains the inflation, which is what you claimed linking to those metrics did.

So apparently taking about personal income was just happenstance, since you pretty obviously were trying to say "it's rising wages that are doing it" and then have been backpedaling everytime I press you to explain why.

So we face successfully established there's inflation, and you've made no argument as to why we should think it's fiscal policy related rather than supply chain - you know, that big thing which has been stressed and suffering shortages repeatedly the last 2.5 years.


I have explained it, but your bias clouds your judgment, sorry.

Supply of effectively every good is higher than prepandemic. Demand is even higher. Retail sales have exploded vastly above trend due to fiscal injections. This is NOT a supply side issue, this is consumers mass buying which leads to shortages. If it were a supply side issue, you'd see big hits to corporate earnings, instead they became massively inflated due to excess consumer spending.

Personal income is rising much faster than sustainable for 2% inflation. Are you aware that money is nominal? People getting paid more means nothing if prices rise faster than they're getting paid. There's zero inherent value to a dollar.

Inflation is a product of supply and demand, not just one or the other. When there's an imbalance, prices rise to a new equilibrium point.

Go on, cheer for higher nominal wages as consumer sentiment sits at all time lows and real wages are deteriorating faster than any time in history


> Supply of effectively every good is higher than prepandemic.

How can you possibly claim this? Where have you been for the last year? Energy embargos, dramatic slow downs in trade with China, excruciating shortages of basic/fundamental electrical components.

I have to assume that you have ignored all evidence that doesn't support your narrative. The trouble is this inflation would have happened with or without individual stimulus moneys.


"Grain and gas and oil" all suddenly effected by an unprecedented and unexpected war, and disruptions in Asian manufacturing due to a historic pandemic situation, pent-up demand from lockdowns on a global scale, and your response is "nah, definitely not supply issues. No one would exploit a crunch to make even more money..."


It was:

600 a week for people on unemployment on top of normal unemployment.

1400 of stimulus checks to a large percentage of Americans.

PPP loans given to business that large weren't paid back

Lots of little stuff that funded stresses institutions.

Stimulus isn't too blame at all for the inflation we are facing, supply chain limits and war are also responsible.

However, to say stimulus was "just 600 dollars" is crazy misrepresentative and totally ignores that the American stimulus package was literally the most robust and impactful examples of stimulus in the world.


It doesn’t really matter. It’s more money chasing the exact same number of resources as existed before hand. The very definition of inflation.

It’s just bread and circuses.


So take away some money from the 0.01% to compensate. Since that select group of people holds 20% of the total wealth in the US, there's plenty of wiggle room.


This idea just shows the confusion most people have between resources and money.

No matter how much you take away from those 0.01% of people, it’s not going to do much to fight the inflation of the goods that people are worried about the inflation of.

Let’s take food for example. Perhaps the 0.01% might consume 10x more food than regular people at most (factoring in waste). Even if the 0.01% were to be taxed to the point where they can eat nothing, it’s not going to create very much more supply of food for everyone else.

Then there is fuel. The ultra rich probably do consume a lot more of it when you factor in things like jet flights and such. But even if it’s 100x more, it’s not really freeing up so much to actually affect the market for it.

Now what taxing those guys might do is reduce the price of the goods that they do in fact consume more of. Things like housing where the rich will own a lot in order to generate revenue.

And indeed these productive assets were inflated significantly due to the loose monetary policy regime that we have been living in for some time.

But these are not the resources that most are concerned about with regard to cost of living at the moment. That’s food, fuel, etc.


Your claim is that the high price of housing is not one of the pressures on working class people???


unless those housing is all owned by those 0.1%, how does taking away the wealth of say Bezos reduce the rent of working class people?


> It’s more money chasing the exact same number of resources as existed before hand

Because of supply chain issues, it's more money chasing fewer resources. I think people focus too much on the money supply and not enough on supply chain shortages. IMO, the bump in stimulus money given would not have caused this level of inflation without also the decline in supply to go along with it.


Again, it's less then 1 month's rent. Really think about what you're suggesting here.


It wasn’t $600 though:

$1,200 per adult in April 2020, $500 per child.

$600 per adult in December 2020/January 2021, same per child

$1,400 per adult in March 2021, same per child.

A fully qualified two adult, two child household received $11,400. For a median income of 2x $31k, that’s 9% of the household’s per annum income. If you both had a job during covid, as most people did, it’s pure inflation.


This is just garbage. The demand for stimulus was in reaction to the increase in most expenses due to supply chain shortages induced by COVID and lockdowns, and the continuing hike in prices has been due to the follow up war. The record profits - not revenue but profits - the big companies have posted over this time period prove it.

Inflation is measured via a basket of goods measure, and corporations have freely taken all those basics and gone "welp must be circumstance" while posting those profits.

Prices surged before any stimulus was handed out.


How do you define “too much inflationary pressure”? Timing is important and the timing was not great - though obviously there wasn’t much choice.


It feels like the lower you go down the job skill ladder the more the more ridiculous employer demands become. Obv this has to do with supply/demand curve, but it's still frustrating to watch.

My hunch when some these places say they can't get talent or etc. they have a particular idea of what they want: young & low pay & desperate. and all the complaining about labour shortage means: a shortage of low pay workers. Esp here in Canada as there was a couple years where the temporary foreign worker program wasn't fully operational due to COVID.

My wife is trying to get back into the job market after 10+ years out. There's supposedly been a labour shortage here in Canada. She has -- in addition to being a mature functional adult who has raised a family and managed a home -- almost a decade of work experience (in the past) in marketing and some design at Apple, an honors degree in Anthropology with a boatload of academic awards under her belt, an a two year programme in UX research & design from a local university. She has been applying for junior positions and doesn't even get nibbles. Even local retail jobs etc. she's gone for have not responded.


Surely inflation will not help. that said, before the post-war boomtimes people didn't have an option to "not work". Maybe families could put up with the ne'erdowell, but not society.


It is a problem that corrects itself. If people do not want the $12 an hour and can afford not working for those companies, there is no problem. If they need it, they will work for that $12.

You can say the same thing for $250/hour developer jobs. Some might do it for $5 an hour (well or not can be debated), and some wouldn't touch it for $250/hour. Free market. There are many companies out there to choose from. If the person is qualified, they will find it. If they are not, they will need to get qualified to ask for more money.


This ignores power differences though?

The market isn't particularly free when people need to eat

It'd be much freer with guarantees for basic necessities


Basic food income will lead to an artificial reallocation of food to unproductive humans away from productive and growth oriented industries like advertising and mega yachts for the rich.


Owning land that you rent to others is unproductive too, but somehow it is socially acceptable and brings food on the table??


> The market isn't particularly free when people need to eat

> It'd be much freer with guarantees for basic necessities

You do know that would literally just make the problem worse, right? I mean, it sounds good to someone who can't work for legitimate reasons (small percentage of the population), but it also sounds good to everyone who has the capacity to earn their necessities, but would rather have it handed to them instead. It also sounds really good to politicians who seek (re)election by promising everything for free, knowing perfectly well that nothing is truly free. That kind of reasoning is what got us into this inflation mess.

Also, the "free" in "free market" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does.


> You do know that would literally just make the problem worse, right?

Depends what you think "the problem" is. To my mind the biggest problem is the hours of human life wasted on performative make-work while most citizens in a supposedly rich country barely spend any time on things that are actually fulfilling for them.

> Also, the "free" in "free market" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does.

On the contrary, this looks to be one of the minority of cases where the term is used correctly (which makes it a bad term, but I fear we're stuck with it).


> To my mind the biggest problem is the hours of human life wasted on performative make-work while most citizens in a supposedly rich country barely spend any time on things that are actually fulfilling for them.

The idea that citizens of a rich nation has some natural right to live a fulfilling life just because the country happens to be rich, is hubris on the one hand, and also entitle on the other.

People work to obtain the resources to live off. Some can produce _more_ (due to luck, or skill), and those are the ones who would be able to give up productive work and focus on "what's fulfilling" (aka, climb up the maslow pyramid).

Some people don't get to do that climb - that's just reality of scarcity of resources today. Until the day the world becomes like star-trek, where people's basic needs a completely covered without any labour input from any humans (in which case, they spend time exploring the galaxy!), it cannot be that all people fulfill their higher needs in the maslow pyramid.


> The idea that citizens of a rich nation has some natural right to live a fulfilling life just because the country happens to be rich, is hubris on the one hand, and also entitle on the other.

> People work to obtain the resources to live off. Some can produce _more_ (due to luck, or skill), and those are the ones who would be able to give up productive work and focus on "what's fulfilling" (aka, climb up the maslow pyramid).

But the biggest factor that enables them to produce more is the society around them. So the idea that the surplus should go to the individual rather than the society seems pretty entitled. If we're a rich country, we should be able to allocate those riches in a way that produces the most benefit.

> Some people don't get to do that climb - that's just reality of scarcity of resources today. Until the day the world becomes like star-trek, where people's basic needs a completely covered without any labour input from any humans (in which case, they spend time exploring the galaxy!), it cannot be that all people fulfill their higher needs in the maslow pyramid.

But the patterns for how we'll live when resources are virtually unlimited will be set today. And by most objective metrics, we're already far past the level of having enough for everyone to live on - even the very poorest have food and shelter (and most rich countries manage to provide them with healthcare and education). Conversely an increasing fraction of increasingly many jobs is, as I said, performative make-work rather than something that actually increases societal resource output; those jobs are a dead-weight loss.

We need to start being ok with people working less and retiring earlier. Otherwise our lives won't get better no matter how much more productive we get.


I thought the current inflation is primarily driven by high energy prices and disrupted supply chains and those are primarily driven by war and the pandemic?


You are pretty much spot on, Japan tried to massively increase the money supply and that didn't really do anything, if anything it proves that interest is a vicious cycle, once the interest rate is too high to be serviced, you must borrow more money to service the interest which is a positive feedback loop. If you refuse to pay interest you basically stop the vicious cycle.


> I thought the current inflation is primarily driven by high energy prices and disrupted supply chains and those are primarily driven by war and the pandemic?

Nope. You'd be wrong. It's the trillions of dollars unnecessarily printed by the fed. A large part of that went to business owners who didn't actually need it, but took advantage of all the "free money" (and who could blame them when the gov't practically gave it away). That money was quickly invested into real estate and equities markets, leading the way for inflation in the rest of the market, albeit with some delay.

And we're not even at the worst yet.


Hm, where I live real estate and equities are currently down, but inflation is up. Maybe it's different in the US.


"Basic necessities" doesn't really lead to any kind of fulfilled life. It's but a safety network, a staging area to help people collect themselves and have another attempt at a better life.

If living in such conditions is better than working some of the jobs that sustain large parts of society, I'd say it's about time to reevaluate some things. Are we ok with a society designed to sacrifice some percentage of its people's lives?


Actually, if you think about it. If people have enough food and water to survive and reproduce everything beyond that is optional and at best an opportunity cost. Not growing as fast as possible isn't what causes poverty, not having enough food or housing causes poverty.


What do you mean that reasoning got us into this inflation mess? Down below you say it's due to the fed giving free money to the 1%.


Whose responsibility is to provide free money or the difference they need? Market is not to provide food to people in need.


To be fair, you are correct, someone has to work for that food, which makes a UBI funded from work very unfair to the working class.

Instead, we should tax incomes that have very little to do with human work like CO2 taxes or land value taxes to fund UBI. In essence, the UBI grants people a basic CO2 exemption and a small share in the land of the planet. I would argue that is fair.


The availability of desirable jobs and wealth isn't distributed very effectively. It mostly just clumps together and benefits a tiny elite at the expense of our societies and species. The free market never works for very long before hoarders take most of it.


> The free market never works for very long before hoarders take most of it.

I'm not sure you understand how a labor market works. There may be (and often are) local/temporary inefficiencies, but if "hoarders" are taking most of it, then why are there so many unfilled jobs across the country – including high-paying jobs?

Similarly, if employers aren't compensating employees fairly (which may be the case while the market adjusts to inflation + recession), they can only do that for so long before the market effectively forces them to pay/treat employees more favorably (no government intervention necessary).


I don't think these are mutually exclusive. There can be a local deficit within an industry, and we might not be able to meet that demand with our labor pipeline.

At the same time, there can be an overall deficit of meaningful work for decent enough wages at the societal level.

The hoarders can selectively employ people who will make them richer, all while the rest of society continues to crumble around them. That's what's been happening in America for decades. Either you're in the upper class or things or actively getting worse.


> The hoarders can selectively employ people who will make them richer, all while the rest of society continues to crumble around them.

The magical device on which you're reading this comment would not have been possible without companies employing people they thought would help make the company richer. It's not a zero-sum game; we all benefit as a consequence of capitalism – from the richest of the rich to the poorest of the poor.

Have you ever owned a business or hired someone? If so, did you deliberately select employees who would not help the company be successful, and if so, did that somehow help prevent societal collapse?

I hear so many lies about the "evils" of capitalism (from all sources, not just here); I fear people are starting to believe them, as we're slowly being brainwashed into joining the next reboot of "let's see – again – how badly we can screw up the world with communism".


Capitalism fails the moment there is prosperity. Have you ever wondered why people starved during depressions even though there was an abundance of food?

People complain about central banks and low interest rates or about the decline of the west not because of a lack of prosperity, no the problem is that there is too much prosperity in the hands of the wrong people.

During times of actual scarcity, people are busily and happily working to get rid of the scarcity which is why we constantly try to create more jobs and why we constantly induce artificial demand increases, to maintain the scarcity that capitalism demands.

> fear people are starting to believe them, as we're slowly being brainwashed into joining the next reboot of "let's see – again – how badly we can screw up the world with communism".

You can abolish capitalism by introducing an actual free market, not one in name.


> we all benefit as a consequence of capitalism – from the richest of the rich to the poorest of the poor.

This is one of those "myths" of capitalism -- "everyone" benefits. While I'm a recipient of the benefits, I also realize that it's a system with flaws that drives inequity and preys on the poor.

I'm not sure that the impoverished really benefit from the constant stress of working 3 precarious part-time jobs to pay for rent and food, with little to no time for family or leisure. But, hey, latest tech gadget is cheap, so that's a universal benefit, right?

I always thought the American Dream was to own a house through hard work. Now working at multiple places barely covers your monthly expenses, forget buying something. Decent housing shouldn't be an intractable problem, but looking through the capitalistic lens it sure seems to be. But pretending that places where it fails are "lies" and that we have to become the Soviet Union is just fearmongering. Perhaps there are social interventions that could help?


I don't think it's anywhere near that black and white. My specific complaint is with the free market being hindered by overconcentration and monopolists. There is a vast chasm between that and whatever you perceive communism to be. Technological progress doesn't depend on the world being controlled by Google and Apple. And even if it did, I'm not convinced the smartphone is a net positive for society. Shrug. Many shades of gray in our world, and economy too.


I'm not sure the mechanism works as simply as you describe. Money is still cheap, so employers can hold out while waiting for conditions to return to normal, whereas employees generally don't have that option. It's not at all clear that the game simply resolves to employers paying more, locally or on average.

Prices can be sticky in more than one way it seems, and that might make for some interesting economics.


The free markets are not efficient. That’s the core reason why there are mismatches between price and value.


i'd say the free market is more efficient than a command economy. Even if it's not perfectly efficient, it's quite close.


Well, in some cases. There are actually industries where command models outperform market models and industries where they are competitive.

A mix of market and command is necessary. But this whole thing isn't really relevant because both markets and command systems have very wide variety in implementation.



>Every time there's these complaints about worker shortages, the only shortage is in pay rate, benefits, and willingness to train.

No, it could mean that the market is booming and pay rates haven't caught up. IE, what happened during the Covid-era of 0% interest rates.

It could also mean that handouts are making people not work as hard or not wanting to work for less in general.


Isn't that just a longer way to say that it's a shortage of pay rate, benefits, and willingness to train? If the market is booming, and pay rates haven't caught up, aren't they short?


The "its the handouts!" theory was tested when different states deprecated unemployment benefits earlier than others and did not see any significant changes in their labor market.

Also, those "handouts" have long since expired and the labor issues remain.


Nobody ever "wanted" to work, and that's been true since at least the agricultural revolution. People work because they have to, and stop the minute they don't.

Today still, in some parts of the world, lower echelons of society are called "the working class", because needing to work is very effective at discriminating between haves and have nots. If work was somehow desirable in and of itself, it would be the other way around: the working class would describe those lucky enough to have a job.

People complaining that "nobody wants to work anymore" are usually people not working themselves, who fail to understand that in order to find someone willing to do your own laundry, you have to pay them a fair wage.


The colonial landowners had a similar problem.

Pay the locals a fair wage and they'd quit after only a few hours, having made cash sufficient for their needs. The landowners weren't getting enough work out of them.

The solution : pay the locals less. Thus they need to work more.

Is that how it goes in USA?


> The colonial landowners had a similar problem.

>Pay the locals a fair wage and they'd quit after only a few hours, having made cash sufficient for their needs. The landowners weren't getting enough work out of them.

>The solution : pay the locals less. Thus they need to work more.

It's a nice allegory, but it doesn't make any sense. You're basically claiming that the colonial landowners were so dumb that they were paying the natives well in excess of the market clearing wage? Seems unlikely to me. It's almost as unbelievable as saying that jeff bezos used to pay people $50k/day to clean his house, but the cleaners would stop coming in after the second day, so he paid the workers $100/day instead.


>Is that how it goes in USA?

C'mon....We are more sophisticated now.

We constrain housing supply and ensure high inflation.


> Nobody ever "wanted" to work [...]

Not even remotely true. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say things like "retire? but then what would I do?", or how many people work like their job is the only thing in their lives that means anything. I'm talking about here, on HN, the site you are currently reading.


> people say things like "retire? but then what would I do?"

And what happens when they do retire? Do they keep going to work? Or maybe they can't retire because they don't have retirement benefits.

But when people live in a country with proper retirement benefits, they actually do retire, and somehow they manage to find meaning elsewhere.


Yeah, I personally find it pretty sad, but what can you do. Point is, while I don't want to work, "no one wants to work" is clearly false.


I think the main difference is working because you HAVE to vs working because you WANT to.

Very few people work in something they truly enjoy. And so logically they try to do as little as possible.


Plenty of people want to work in the US. It's just that the US keeps deporting people that so desperately want to work there. Some of these people literally risk their own and their family's life to get to the US. With unemployment levels historically low, there are simply not a lot of locals looking for work for every job position to be filled. And certainly not when the wages are too low, the work is hard, and employers are exploiting them and generally treating them like trash.

The rational thing to do, which goes against the xenophobic tendencies of the general public (they are taking our jobs), is to do what every growing economy has to do: grow the labor market by providing access to willing labor from outside that market. Whether it's slaves, illegal immigrants, or simply making it easier for migrants to enter legally really does not matter as long as people are able to get to the jobs that need doing.

There's work to be done and there are people willing to do the work. Bring them together and the work gets done. Cut off the labor supply and you get issues with businesses struggling to get things done. Unless of course they can afford to pay market rates. And with inflation being a thing, those market rates are going up, not down.

The US has imported lots of cheap labor from abroad pretty much throughout it's history and especially during its boom periods. Sometimes as slaves, sometimes as refugees, and sometimes just by providing visas to those who wanted them. It wasn't always pretty of course but there are now large communities of people in the US with roots pretty much all over the world.

There's no shortage of people looking to get visas to work in the US. Just an artificial shortage of visas. How many million people do you need? They are there. At any skill level. All you need to do is let them in.


Could also stop deporting the people that are already here working. My girlfriend in college was from India, was here on a student visa and graduated with her Electrical Engineering degree fully paid for by scholarships. Not sure on the details because we weren't super close after she graduated, but she continued staying here and worked under that same visa for maybe 2 years before it ran out. Her company couldn't get her an H1-B in time and her application for a permanent residence didn't go anywhere because it's basically a lottery. So they shipped her back home after dropping $40,000 on her education. What a waste.


Or just pay citizens more? That seems easier.


Exactly! Wage growth and tight job market has been the promise of anti-immigration politicians for so long. It’s shocking so few are out there taking credit for it. Must have never been about economic anxiety.


Yes, plenty of people want to work in the mediocre circumstances of the US labor market, but only because they come out of a war torn or impoverished country.

No sane US citizen wants to work their ass off for minimum wage and minimum benefits. And why would they? Why give away your precious limited time for free, so some corp. can benefit from it?

Employment is supposed to be a situation with mutual benefit for employer and employee.

Flooding the labor market with cheap work force that doesn't complain when you break their backs is exactly what will worsen the situation. What we need is LESS people that are happy to have their backs broken for peanuts. And unions might help achieving that.

Employers need to come up with better compensation. THAT is the only rational thing that should happen right now. And the tighter the labor market, the earlier that will happen.


The US could of course choose to be more like Europe in that regard. But you should know that Europe has the exact same challenges for the exact same reasons. People don't want to be nurses or harvest strawberries or do anything that is a combination of under-payed and hard. That work gets done by people willing to do the work. There are lots of seasonal workers from Eastern Europe that show up to do that work in e.g. Germany and the Netherlands, lots of foreign nurses and doctors as well. The UK decided that it did not want to be in Europe anymore and now it has a labor shortage. Because it literally closed the borders for that labor to enter the market that until recently was able to travel and work there.


Yep. Migrant labor is basically exploitation of the poor by the (comparably) richer societes. There are estimated a couple hundreds of thousands of Polish women in Western Europe (mostly in Germany) who are live-in nurses/maids for elderly people who can no longer live by themselves. They get paid a pittance by local standard for such a hard and often humiliating labor. Same for foreigners doing construction labor etc. This way, a typical German of Frenchman can have a semi-slave doing cheap construction for them or taking care of their aging parent, so they don't have to. Without the migrants, these people would never afford such services, and their standard of living would be in effect much lower. Interestingly, a lot of people don't see it that way - I guess you still have to be middle-class to afford a Eastern European economic slave, so working class being don't benefit from that - and, at the same time, the migrants are lowering wages for the jobs that they do.


But it's not exploitation if the participants are willingly choosing the option. The immigrant worker receives a higher pay doing what you call "humiliating labour", than they could in their own country. If this continues, at some point, the wealth of the migrant would increase, and eventually, they will also demand a higher wage.

This will mean that wealth of the wealthier country hiring migrant workers will slowly osmose. This is what seems to be happening in china (where labour is slowly becoming more expensive overtime - not to the point where outsourcing is not worth it, but many companies are looking at south eastern asian countries as a new source of cheap labour).

The only scenario in which this breaks down is when the migrant is defrauded like those in Quatar and Dubai, where they are indeed treated as slaves by having their passport confiscated etc.


> But it's not exploitation if the participants are willingly choosing the option.

That's some very technical/amoral understanding of exploitation (I guess this kind of thinking helps many people in the West sleep at night. Whilst the reality is that our standard of living is only made possible via other people's suffering). Consider a scenario: a guy goes for a stroll into a forest, has a heart attack there and needs immediate help. I see him and propose "I will call for help only if you will work for me for free for the next 10 years.". Of course, he willingly obliges. In your book, is that exploitation or not?

> The immigrant worker receives a higher pay doing what you call "humiliating labour"

It's what most people would call "humiliating labour". The old people these pseudo-nurses have to take care of curse at them, treat them as their slaves, make sexual advances towards them etc. All the while they're required to be in their house 24/7, sometimes with a Sunday afternoon off. It's arguably worse than prison, all for the privilege of earning 1600 euros per month (while being locked up in somebody's house in a foreign country, 1000 km from your family).


> In your book, is that exploitation or not?

the law has something to say about that - a person under duress can void the contract they sign as they are not of sound mind (and dying due to a heart attack could be easily construed as under duress).

But a migrant who considered their options, not under duress (except the "duress" of unemployment in their own country), and chose to work overseas to earn more than they could at home, is not really exploitation.

> The old people these pseudo-nurses have to take care of curse at them ... It's arguably worse than prison

they could leave the job, and probably should if they feel mistreated. I don't doubt that there's bad apples and there are migrants who feel they are "stuck" with not much other choice but to "take it". I really don't believe that they are stuck - and if it was due to lack of education and knowledge of possible choices they can take (for example, dobbing on employers who mistreat them), they would - and this is a lack of regulatory safeguards etc.


The law is irrelevant. Most reasonable people would agree that that starvation or social alienation is a form of duress. The law doesn't, sure, but law and morality are orthogonal.


[flagged]


I'm American in this is one of the most sensible comments I've read so far.


The comment you are responding to is dead for some reason, so I will quote it here:

This comment is non-sensical. If you're not from the U.S., why opine on U.S. immigration policies?

I will answer the question: If you are not from a particular country, it makes perfectly good sense to advise it to engage in disastrous policies, disastrous to its citizens, if those same policies could potentially benefit you in some way. That's why jillesvangurp is recommending insane immigration levels to a nation not his or her own.


I think a good explanation of the phenomenon is detailed here: https://youtu.be/ZuXzvjBYW8A (it's a 50 min talk and targets the UK, but it's applicable to the Western world IMHO).

The summary is:

- People are working more and reaping less and less from their labor

- Social security is getting both worse and less accessible for people in the working age

- Working people in general have a much harder time entering the house market and when they do the bang for the buck is way worse than in the past

- Retirement plans are getting worse and worse

- Millennials and younger people will likely have to drastically reduce their carbon footprint by as much as a factor of 8 compared to the previous generations if we want to hit climate goals for the century

Apart for the carbon one, the others are things I am also witnessing both in Switzerland and Italy. And with these premises I don't find surprising that people consider "working hard" or even working not worth it.


> Apart for the carbon one, the others are things I am also witnessing both in Switzerland and Italy. And with these premises I don't find surprising that people consider "working hard" or even working not worth it.

It's interesting that in places like China, where conditions and pay are basically unimaginably worse, people still don't have as much problem getting motivated for entering the workforce.


I guess you've never heard of the "lying flat" or "let it rot" movement happening in China?


I've heard about it, but upon closer inspection it seems to be just a media fad. In China, most people simply can't afford not to work - their parents are struggling farmers and won't support a useless adult child, like is the norm in Japan (the Hikkikomori phenomenon).


Almost all of these are very short term trends at odds with this twitter thread.


The twitter thread is the observation that "nobody wants to work anymore" isn't a recent phenomenon; it's entirely likely that the reasons change with the years.

I imagine that a large part of the issue is that productivity increases seem to benefit the top and not the bottom. I haven't thoroughly reviewed all the snippets, but my casual view is that people are complaining that younger people aren't willing to do the work that the complainer used to do without complaining, ignoring the fact that the nature of work has changed significantly over the decades, with significant mechanisation/automation. IIRC one of the examples is that youngsters don't want to break rocks any more (I exagerate perhaps a little there).


In 14/15th century after Black Plague, so many people died that it was impossible to find working force. At the time "wages" were not following inflation, so people were usually slaving for food. As many relatives died, people inherited homes and land of their cousins. Suddenly, no one wanted to be a servant anymore and work for the lords. Only way to attract working force was to triple or quadruple usual rates.

I live in UK, and current inflation of ~10-15% will quickly eat all your savings, house/flat prices almost doubled. Just in 2 years what was 200K now is 350K, what was 400K is 700K. Meaning all you worked for years will be diminished in just couple.

Wages are not following inflation since 1970, while profits of shareholders have skyrocketed.

So, when I read "No one wants to work", I read it as:

- "No, one wants to work, for the money I would like to pay them",

> What is the level of skills and amount of money you are willing to pay?

- Highest level of skill, and if possible I would like to pay nothing.


I mean, yeah? Who the heck wants to work? I love my job, but there are absolutely more fulfilling things I’d rather be doing with my thing than selling my labor to build someone else’s vision. It’s weird that that’s at all controversial.


The phrase is usually trotted out in comparison to the Good Ol' Days, when people did want to work. The person complaining about it has a memory of Their Day, when people were eager to show up on time, do quality work, do it efficiently, and without a Sense of Entitlement (i.e. for shit pay).

I've caught myself thinking this a few times. This twitter thread is a great antidote.


Once you adjust for inflation it was actually good pay. Pay you could buy a house with and raise a family - in your 20’s!


Buy and own outright before long too. With a job that only required a diploma and two arms.


What are you going to do about that? Introduce a land value tax?


If you're building your own vision, that's working too.


I guess it depends on your definition of "work". Starting a company would be working on my own vision, in a sense, but my paycheck would still be beholden to market forces. I want to spend time on ideas that are important to me without worrying about monetizing them — programming experiments, games, music, etc.


Even then, Good on you that you actually love your job, most aren’t that lucky


Thank you! I don't take it for granted. Honestly, I had no idea that the things I was into as a kid would end up paying the bills; I feel like I was just a little nerd who unintentionally stumbled into a lucrative career.


I’m assuming you’re a dev - your love for programming / SW engineering hasn’t waned huh?

Been in the industry for more than a decade and am suffering from CRUD / new tech churn fatigue. Also have had a taste of having my own product business and schedule but can’t make that financially work yet, so slogging through…

There are fine days though, eg when investigating a tricky bug or being deep into a problem, but I’d cap it at “like” my job, rather than “love”


Oh, I also have CRUD and new tech churn fatigue. Plus a deep cynicism about the industry! That's why I've found my way into a job that doesn't involve building a CRUD app at a company that's not a giant VC-backed unicorn. I recently hit 10 years in the workforce, did some soul searching about what I wanted the next 10 years to look like, and made a career move (which is itself a big privilege) to try and get there.

That said, words are squishy. Maybe "like" would be a better descriptor. But either way, I feel pretty happy where I am!

(I still don't want to work though lol)


I want to not work so badly I have a whole fund just for retirement.


Who wants to...

"...do what they love doing"

"...build their dream"

"...help people in a way that is truly needed"

"...create shareholder value in a mind-numbing hellhole for minimum wage with a boss who constantly complains about your lack of motivation."

Anyone who says, "nobody wants to work anymore" is outing themselves as a lizard-person who lacks awareness, people skills, and even the most basic level of empathy for their employees. Never work for somebody who says this.


As an American in (Germanic) Europe, I was struck by how positively people think of the word "competent". In America that sounds like "not doing your best" or "having no passion". Here it sounds like "doing your job properly". People expect the plumber (or more to the point, the waiter) to do their job, but they don't expect passion or excellence.


I'll take competent over passionatly aiming for excellence every time. Especially since competence gets the job on hand when it has to be done, even if the job is quite the opposite of glorious or fancy.


Well nowadays companies are looking for passionate and competent employees, which meaning is very different with dictionary.

Oh, and they require for the candidates to learn the companies business end to end before or during interview process, otherwise you're less passionate with our company.


Even better: buy in 143% into the company vision, because we all know culture beats strategy, and all culture flows from vision. Or some such...


I think it's three cultural artefacts:

1. American ethos really instills the notion of 'Follow your passion' as a dogma.

Life is complicated, and shit happens, but for americans that genuinely means you failed. (I see this a lot when I try to discuss homelessness and social protection in the US).

2. Follow up from that, 'everyone is special' or 'destined for great things' is a constant movie theme

3. Americans _really_ peg a lot of their self-worth to work.

Without fail all the americans I have met open the conversation with 'So, what do you do?' as if how I will be judged is wholy pegged on where I am on the totem pole and how much they can infer income from my occupation. You have made the person as an individual undissociable from the worker as a contributor to someone else's wealth or the gold standard of the self-made man.


These may be of the main reasons for the (now routine) shootings in US and their absence in Europe, even in countries where practically everyone owns a gun. If the culture is holding people up to an impossible standard, there's bound to be A LOT of frustration.


After several decades of working in the US the main problem from my perspective is that delusional employees, favored and enabled by management, destroy a lot of trust among their coworkers and that adds a lot of workplace stress for many people.


Your comment is super unclear as to who and what you're talking about. Delusional? Enabled?

You've said, "the main problem". Are you talking about something that affects most of the working population?


It's related to The Gervais Principle [0] which sees the company as a hierarchy of sociopaths at the top, clueless in the middle, and losers at the bottom.

However I think the specified hierarchy is not required for most workplaces. There is a lot more variety in where the sociopaths reside, and I consider both the clueless and sociopaths to be delusional. Deluded might be a better term for both.

0. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...


How are the sociopaths deluded?


It’s the same in Asia - you don’t get the constant “do you like your job?” type questions - everyone knows it’s just that - a job.


Those quotes are great.

It kinda seems like they are lamenting that THEY THEMSELVES "do not want to work anymore" on some kind of work, try to hire someone to do the work THEY THEMSELVES don't want to do, and then they go around slandering other people that never wanted to work on it in the first place.

It isn't that others don't want to work ANYMORE it is that others never wanted to work on it AT ALL.

That's a different problem. Maybe people saying this just need to be honest about it?

Try saying "I DON'T WANT TO WORK ANYMORE on this shitty work, but how about you give it a try?" See what happens?


I do not want to work because government eats too much taxes of low-qualified workers (me) and eats too little taxes of high-incomers. Having nothing with a goal to receive maximum possible of spare time works not bad for me.


What country are you in? In the US, that's basically the opposite of reality.


In the US, low- and lower-middle-class income households often do face very high effective marginal tax rates - sometimes north of 60% - due to the combination of direct taxes and benefit cliffs and phase-outs. State income taxes and benefit programs can exacerbate this. Slightly dated reference (2012) but [0] is still pretty representative.

[0] https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments...


Loss of benefit is not a tax.


It functions like a tax in that it decreases the net amount that you receive for working (more). If you lose 40 cents' worth of benefits for every additional dollar that you earn, it doesn't matter that your "real" marginal tax rate is only 25% - earning an additional pre-tax dollar only makes you 35 cents richer, just as it would if your marginal tax rate were 65%.

Also, while some of those benefits are less fungible, others have phase-outs that are functionally identical to taxes at the margin. For example, if you get subsidized health insurance through healthcare.gov, every additional dollar that you earn directly reduces your tax refund by up to ten cents, on top of your marginal tax rate.


I believe OP wanted to say that work gains are taxed way higher than capital gains but didn’t know how to phrase it.

Average sallaries are obscenously taxed. In my country having a cheap rental/airbnb grants you a better income than an average full time job..


Capitals gains aren't income earners though?


He distinguished between workers and "incomers".


I hate to give a video [1] as a proof of something, but at least this one is short and well-made.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXCGbAv8YPw


That is an interesting video but I think it is engaging in a lot of sleight of hand. Let me go over some examples of what I mean -

1. If you take the video at its word, then it is still the case that the richest are paying more taxes. In the final graph the richest decile is paying over 30% while the poorest is in the mid 20's. The curve is slightly crescent shaped, with the poor 20-30% paying less than the poorest, but beyond that the trend holds that richer pay more. The video summarizes this slope as "mostly flat".

2. The video adds 15% for payroll taxes to the poorer deciles even though the video says that 7.5% is paid by the employee and 7.5% is paid by the company. The video explains that "economists have found that in practice companies pay their part of the payroll tax by just paying workers less." The video doesn't offer any source for this claim. If you Google the claim you see it is, not surprisingly, disputed by economists. It's not a plausible claim in the first place, and if you are allowed to support a claim because some economist somewhere might have said something kind of like it then you could really claim anything. Once you adjust the 15% the video incorrectly added to every lower decile back to 7.5% then the trend of the rich paying more, which was always present, becomes even more prominent.

3. The chart shows the richest 400 Americans as a column on par with the other deciles. This is visually deceptive because it causes you to think of this category as being a similar kind of thing - but it is not, it's a much smaller and extreme group. These people made massive amounts of money from stock in huge companies, gains which are often unrealized, and so taking this small group and graphing it next to deciles distorts what is being shown. How would the graph look if we added on the 400 poorest Americans? And why would we do that except as some rhetorical trick?

4. The video is uninterested in net taxation. That is, poor Americans get significant transfers of money back from the government. For some groups this is substantially more than they pay in taxes which would make their net interaction with government profitable. I can't really agree that a group "pays" X% in taxes if they receive from government transfers more than they paid.

5. The video description says that "All of their data, which we used to produce this video, is available on their website." But it's not. At least, I hope it's not all the data they used to produce this video. There are a few unexplained Excel sheets with some unsourced and unexplained data on the "Tax for Justice" website, but nothing like what I would expect to underlie the claims made in these figures. For example, I wanted to look at how they calculated the sales tax rates, since those varied by state and I thought that the poorest people might be spending more in categories that have no sales taxes (e.g. food) - but... maybe I didn't look hard enough, but I couldn't find anything like this. Just some random tables with numbers.

6. The top decile earns about half the income for the country. They also pay the highest tax rate. So, it's pretty obvious that, in objective terms, most of the taxes are paid by the rich. Even if, pre-benefits, the poor paid tax rates that were only ~10% lower than the richest decile, the richest decile would still be paying substantially more objective dollars in taxes.

7. It's also a bit weird to me that Vox, nominally a news organization, would just uncritically repeat the work of left wing activists out of Berkeley. Is regurgitating advocacy what a news organization is supposed to do?


2. This is the term if you want to find more results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence

Employers pay taxes + net wages and employees only receive net wages no matter who the government says is paying a tax; it should mostly be shared based on price elasticity

Although most people don't understand that well, which likely affects behavior irrationally:

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/11/15/economists...

Another consideration is that wages are sticky, so while tax burden might be shared more based on price elasticity for new offers, new taxes probably would actually fall upon the side the government says (since employers are unlikely to adjust pay up/down for existing employees just because one side has to pay more taxes)


How are they wrong? If you got paid $100 this week and are taxed 20% you are left with only $80 to live with and make do with. If you got paid $100,000 this week and are taxed 80% life is great because you have $20k in your pocket this week you didn't have before. Sure the rich pay a higher proportion to taxes perhaps if they aren't skirting the rules, but they make so damn much already that they could stand to be taxed even more and not see much of a shift in their lifestyles, whereas people on the bottom end of the ladder are pretty tapped out.


Because people making even 500 dollars a week essentially are only taxed for social security. Complaining about the poor being taxed too much just doesn't make sense in America. You can complain they are exploited by employers and the government doesn't protect them, etc. But high taxation? That's just not the problem.


This example of course only seems reasonable if you focus on the level of extremes you chose


No, it's correct in the US too. Unless you are in the absolute lowest tax bracket, you're paying a larger percentage of your income via various taxes than billionaires are.


No, it's not, and no, you aren't. Tax brackets only increase in rate. Tax rates don't start coming back down for the super rich. If your income was in capital gains you would pay the capital gains rates. If the billionaire's income came in through salary they would pay income tax.


But they mostly don’t get paid in salary do they so it’s a strawman. The amount of tax paid is proportional to the general utility of the money (wrt day to day living), rather than the inverse. It’s dumb


Perhaps you might want to learn how people actually get taxed before complaining about brackets. There are plenty of taxes out there that have jack squat to do with income brackets, and poor people pay a higher percentage of their income towards those than many other people while also having a much higher opportunity cost per hour worked.


The richest take out loans though. Those aren't counted as income or capital gains


But I can't choose whether my income is in cap or income and the people with the most in capitalism pay the lowest effective tax rate.

Who cares how you came by the money? It is fungible.


I dunno, this type of thinking about taxes strikes me the same as a guy who watches the news and spends the whole week angry over a story which, had he never heard it, it would have never been known to him. I.e. because it was an event half way across the world.

In this case, taxes and how much anyone pays are irrelevant because you're not those people and because the real consideration with work is to ignore the immutable circumstantial limitations and decide if the exchange of time and toil is worth the post tax currency you'll be compensated with and what you can do with that money.

If I'm living at home and soon going backpacking in Southeast Asia with my $4/hr(post taxes assuming minimum wage of $7) for 6mos, it'll give me a ton of utility. Meanwhile the guy who smokes 3 packs a day at NY state rates and pays $2000/mo for a studio apartment, much less so.


what kind of taxing scheme would make it so you want to work again?


> what kind of taxing scheme would make it so you want to work again?

I stopped wanting to push my business forward when my govt has forced me to get computers and internet access in my grocery store for sending info about each transaction. That equipment slows down a number of people which I can serve per minute. The software I have bought is ugly as hell and prints 5cm of advertisement on each paper check I use to give to a client. Excuse me trees, I do not know how to fix that.

In a perfect world, RMS' advice about tax rate based on the fraction of any given market that the company controls seems a good start.


How's the government supposed to know your market share without those computers though?


The way they did it for hundreds of years before computers


Replace need-based welfare programs with universal basic income. Everyone survives, but you always have an incentive to earn more money. Plus you eliminate layers of bureaucracy that does need testing, poorly.


UBI is constantly touted as a panacea to everything, but it only seems to work when not everyone gets it.

When everyone gets it, it becomes baked into rents or mortgage payments, and I've never heard a convincing argument about how the money just doesn't go to rent seekers over time


Time for nationwide rent control to keep prices from surging past UBI then. The argument against rent control has always been that investment will go where there isn't rent control since this maximizes profit for the investor. However if you give the investor no alternative then the law of TINA suggests that if they would like to have exposure to the U.S. housing market the only option is to invest in the U.S. housing market, and if the entire market is under rent control then there will be no winners and losers based on having local rent control ordinances in place or not.

Another solution is to invest more in our public housing stock. Private apartments could march up sure, but they'd be competing with the government building with subsidized rents designed to be affordable under the UBI plan, which would put downwards pressure on prices.


Plus you have a flood of unskilled/uneducated migrants from abroad, that are aware that they can get it if they cross the border and get residency or birth a child after. This continues until the whole system "suddenly" collapses.


Are the immigrants receiving ubi?

If so how?

If not, how are they cheaper than somebody who only wants to work for fun?


> When everyone gets it, it becomes baked into rents or mortgage payments

True, unless there’s a land value tax. But a man can dream.


Then the land value goes up to match rents and thus the ubi.

The ubi receiver still loses and needs other support


Land value taxes lower the value of land. The UBI recipient can conserve his share of land and rent it out to someone who needs it. That will result in an overall increase in economic efficiency and that surplus can in theory be used to buy products and services to meet the basic necessities of the recipient.

Alternatively, the recipient can run a homestead on his share of land.


You can increase the land value tax all the way to 100%. In the limit the UBI can be paid for entirely by land value taxes, which leave no surplus for land owners. It’s very easy for a UBI to end up benefiting only the non-working and land owning classes but it’s avoidable.


I don’t follow. Why would UBI make GP want to work when taxation is the cited issue? Don’t they already have an incentive to earn more money?


That’s basically what happened with the stimulus checks, and big surprise now we have massive inflation.


You really think the $1200 we got two years ago has made any impact at all on the prices we see on supply constrained goods today? Most of that money probably evaporated into paying off credit card debt or allowing for some breathing room from rent.


We got $1200. The people who didn’t work at all got $30k plus in unemployment.


30k plus while you are unemployed is not a very significant amount of money in many places in America these days. Not enough to make a dent in inflation imo compared to the wider supply chain crisis that is driving inventory shortages and price hikes on goods.


It’s a year of salary for an enormous amount of people. Insane how out of touch or intentionally misleading you are.


People were also getting $10K, $20K, $60K in unemployment.


Well yeah, when 25% of households have a wage earner who lost their job due to COVID that will send a much larger hit to the economy than those unemployment payments ever could. Even then they merely helped people float along.

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/09/24/economi...


Taxes on liquidity and land value taxes.


Low qualified workers don't pay any taxes though?


Income maybe not, but consumption taxes affect them disproportionately.


This only hurts you.

You don't work because of this than you don't gain new skills than the chance you are getting hired is even less.

Then you are imprisoned with the little money you get and be more and more dependent while it gets harder and harder for you to get out of.

And why? Because you think it's not fair that you work for your own part of the taxes everyone needs to pay.


If the total effective tax rate was higher for higher earners and lower for lower earners we could collect the same total tax and leave more money in the hands of people with less. This is only one way to achieve making work pay more, of course.

If we did that, GP might be willing to work since the effective pay rate would be higher.


Nah, they'd find someone else to blame for their problems


That might or not be the case. That doesn't matter in my argument.

And I'm not even against your idea.

Not working costs you money indirectly and keeps you were you are.


Of course it works against it. Yes, there is an opportunity cost to not-work. That cost gets higher as work is better compensated.


You seem to have missed the “having/owning nothing” part. It’s an admirable goal.


One important point I realized is that each of us costs 20.000€ per year (France) to the state, for sidewalks, prisons, police, politics, etc.

If you are poor and provide less than 20k€ to the state, you’re making others work for you.


Focusing on the percent of income paid in taxes is a trick to convince poor people to vote to raise taxes.

Income = Rough approximation of your contribution to society.

Income Taxes = Penalty for contributing, but also another contribution to society.

Not only are poor people not contributing (by definition of being poor), they're also convinced their tax contribution is too high.

Poor person: "My taxes are too high, I contributed a whole $20 to society through a 20% tax on my $100 income. That's not fair, the guy who contributed $100k through tax only gave 10%."

If I'm being radical, I'd propose a flat tax amount (not flat rate). Everyone pays $20k/year. Don't have $20k? Take out a loan and get another job.


This is one of the most short-sighted views on taxation I've ever read.

Tax enabled the infrastructure and social structure that made your income possible in the first place.

Tax is a fee that the government uses to invest in its country to stimulate economical ans social development. Paying tax will in the long term benefit your net. income.

Effectively, the 'poor person' is netting $80,- for their time. The 'other guy' nets $90.000,- for their time. Those are the only figures that count, and they look very bad for the 'poor guy'.

Some people think they are 'better' persons because they pay more taxes. I argue, they are persons who took home way more income: the tax is just a fee that they pay for being allowed to live and work in their country. The price for the opportunity that they received to earn $100k.

If you feel "better than others" because you pay more taxes, you are a very sad individualistic person.


Why do you frame work as a reward and not a chore?

Yes, contributers are better than freeloaders.

By your logic, a dog walker is equivalent to a doctor, and given only enough resources to save one of their lives, we should toss a coin.


>Not only are poor people not contributing (by definition of being poor), they're also convinced their tax contribution is too high.

By this logic sending a job overseas to lower paid workers makes the exact same job contribute less to society. It also means all unpaid work contributes nothing to society. This is particularly absurd with opensource software that generates millions or billions for big corporations.


Correct, once the labor pool is expanded to include those people, the value of the work is re-adjusted, since value is relative to all options available.

I did mention income being a rough approximation, implicitly acknowledging unpaid work. Yes, I agree that open-source contributions should be counted as charity donations in regards to taxes.


>Don't have $20k? Take out a loan and get another job.

hahahah oh my god hahahaha. Nah I can't even argue with this, it's so backwards.


?woH


Think of the percentages in terms of time instead. So, for example, a 20% tax means you work one day a week for the government and the remaining 4 days of the workweek for yourself. It doesn't matter how much you make during that time - it's a "best effort"-based system.


That's an insightful way to think about it. I just realized we're operating under large scale Feudalism?

Poor people work 1 day/week (or so inefficiently that it should be considered 1 day/week), and therefore should be paying a 100 tax. Exactly what I was saying.


Continued:

Poor person: "I don't buy from McDonalds because it's unfair their prices as a percentage of income are higher for me than for rich people."

That's how retarded it sounds to me hearing people talk about taxes as percent of income. Yet that's somehow the dominate narrative.


Good point. Does the poor person have a choice not to eat? To not pay for health care? In your attempts at sarcasm you quite clearly indicate what's wrong in US society.


Yes, those are choices.


It's interesting that virtually everyone who complains about people not wanting to work are those who are set to disproportionately benefit from the labor of someone else. So when they say "nobody wants to work anymore," what they really mean is "nobody wants to devalue their own time and labor to fill my pockets."


There is infinite demand for underpaid labor.


Have you considered that maybe we don't need everybody to work full time? We have not had enough jobs for everybody to do meaningful work for a while, and (maybe to stave off social unrest) we kept creating bullshit jobs (google the essay from David Graeber!) to keep those people occupied.

I have always been fascinated by stories about explorers making first contact with a previously unknown tribe in the Amazon rainforest and discovering that they work maybe 2 hours a day and take the rest off for sleeping and social things.

In my experience most "full time" work is performative at best anyway. You pretend to work while wasting time in meetings or on Facebook, and then, maybe one or two hours a day, if you are lucky, you get to do actual work that is actually needed by someone else.

It's not just about the salary.

Our lifetime is our only truly irreplaceable resource. We shouldn't be wasting it like this.


I've been down voted repeatedly for this suggestion, but still think it's a good idea. Instead of raising minimum wage, require all jobs to offer like 3 or 4 months paid vacation a year. It will benefit everyone, and those who need more money can work a second job while on vacation from the first (so they won't actually be working more hours and will have 2 incomes). The poor having 2 jobs will also give them leverage to get out of manipulative work situations and it will increase market mobility. There will also be widespread family and community benefits.


While there are definitely inefficiencies all over the place, companies generally don't hire people to do make-work. If it was simple to just pick out the people doing 10 hours of work a week, they'd find and fire those people. It's just not very easy.

Your lifestyle is supported by people working pretty damn hard. The people picking your amazon order and making your food at a meat plant are not playing grab ass on facebook for 80% of their shift.

8 billion people can't enjoy a hunter/forager lifestyle on this planet.



It reminds me how, from Socrates till now, adults and elderly people systematically and constantly criticize young people for being arrogant and lazy.

It seems to just be how the world works...

See https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/63219-the-children-now-love... for Socrates.


What if we made them lazy? The idea that the generation we brought up is to blame is ridiculous.


Ridiculous but very consistent throughout history.


The other side of this is that the low-pay employers complaining about this are also just flat out lying. Apply to the jobs they post, and it'll turn out it's not full-time at minimum wage - it's "10 hours a week, scheduled whenever I want" at minimum wage.

Nobody wants to work that job, because that job doesn't pay enough to live off, and having your hours randomly moved around (i.e. the well known phenomenon of employer retaliation by not giving someone any hours in a week but not firing them) screws with your ability to pick up any other work, or look after children or anything else.

This is before we even get to the disparity between rent, cost of living and minimum wage in most (possibly by now all?) areas in the US.


10 hours a week at unknown hours determined 20min before start time is the new standard.

Agile/JIT labour, the kinda stuff techies have been arguing for for decades


Ngram of the linked idea using the same phrase:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nobody+wants+t...


I think we lack a "societal mission", if that's even a term. We've got no vision of a future we can come together to achieve through hard work. As much as it pains me to say this, at least in the 2000s-2010s we told ourselves we were going to reinvent the world by building software startups and make every mundane thing in our lives smarter, with software. Maybe half of that was BS, but it sure felt like we were aligning as a society to do something. Now, it feels like we're just putting out fires and fixing stuff as it's breaking.


Now is the time for meaningful work. We really need to restart the WPA (1). It wasn't just a civic infrastructure program, it also supported musicians, playrights, artists, because "Hell, they’ve got to eat, too" (2). It's amazing how many tested solutions from the progressive era of this country would be turnkey today if we could only muster the political will. The country is so much more fractured than it was in this era as well, labor in the U.S. will never be a unified political force like it is in other countries or even like it was in this country during this era. Media has kept it fractured and headless for decades.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Project_Number_One


Hope that the collective mission doesn't end up being surviving yet another war.


Gold. I'd add that even people who have those "get paid to do what you love!" or "dream" jobs don't want to work, most of the time. Working, approximately meaning doing things on any kind of schedule, is hard and I've never met anyone, no matter how passionate or talented, who wasn't just getting through it by doing the minimum, some of the time.


Bingo! Why aren’t more people complaining about the _schedule_ part of fulltime employment!? Work would be so much more tolerable if there wasn’t damn standup at 930 every morning


My standups are at 8:30, and we like it! You must be from $LAZY_GENERATION

Think I'm going to go carve some more bits for the computer. Kids these day, get off my lawn.

When I was a boy our Nintendo Was carved from an old Apple tree And we used garden hose to connect it To our steam-powered color tv. But it still beat that ancient Atari 'Cuz I almost went blind, don'tcha know, Playing Breakout and Pong on a video game Hooked up to our radio.

And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse Barefoot, uphill both ways, Through blizzards in summer and winter Back in the good old days. Back when Fortran was not even Three-tran And the PC was only a toy And we did our computing by gaslight When I was a boy.

When I was a boy all our networks Were for hauling in fish from the sea-- Our bawd rate was eight bits an hour (and she was worth it!), And our IP address was just 3. And you kids who complain that the World Wide Web Is too slow oughtta cut out your bitchin', 'Cuz when I was a boy every packet Was delivered by carrier pigeon

And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse Barefoot, uphill both ways, Through blizzards in summer and winter Back in the good old days. Back when Fortran was not even Two-tran And the mainframe was only a toy And we did our computing by torchlight When I was a boy.

When I was a boy our IS shop Built relational tables from wood, And we wrappered our data in oilcloth To preserve it the best that we could. And we carried our bits in a bucket, And our mainframe weighed 900 tons, And we programmed in ones and in zeros And sometimes we ran out of ones.

And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse Barefoot, uphill both ways, Through blizzards in summer and winter Back in the good old days. Back when Fortran was not even One-tran And the abacus? Only a toy! And we did our computing in primordial darkness When I was a boy.

Copyright 1997 by Frank Hayes, Firebird Arts & Music (BMI) @nostalgia filename[ WHENABOY


XD

After reading the rest of your comment I’m surprised you didn’t lead with “our stand ups are at 5am…”


It’s unhealthy to WANT to work in most jobs in US. If you truly WANT to work you are either doing something you truly love (uncommon) or you have a Protestant induced work disorder. Want people to work, PAY them for it. Not enough applying, PAY more in money or benefits and work life balance. All these “no one wants to work” sayings sound a lot like “my slaves are revolting”.


Is it just me or are most responses here made without reading the linked tweet thread?

I'm wondering how much signal there is in the years in his excerpts. For example, he shows an excerpt from 1981, then jumps to 1999. Is this simply because he just found a few examples across the years and used those, or were there actually less reports during those 18 years?


I think you're putting too much faith in the authors of the excerpts. It's not like the authors have actually identified a statistical pattern that can be shown in data. It's not like this article gets written when some pattern emerges. It's just a dumb and lazy trope to throw out whenever an author wants to moan about kids these days. It's based on stupidity, nothing more.

The first except is written today, in the UK, whilst the unemployment rate is at the lowest level in recorded history. There's literally a quote in there from 1916, The middle of World War 1, are you honestly going to say there was a major crisis of Brits being lazy and unwilling to work hard in World War 1?



+more context: pretty much every groups gone down since 2002 except elder people (55+)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/searchresults?st=Labor+Force+Par...


Actually the 25-54 category has been ~flat since 1990.

The participation rate declining is primarily due to retirement.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/why-did-labor...


Companies don't want workers anymore. They're trying to automate everyone out of a job as soon as possible and don't make a secret of it. Who wants to work at a place where there is no future for humans?


Ok but if nobody has to work why aren't we better off? Isn't it strange that humans fear every day that they keep getting more and more for less and less until they get everything for nothing?

Isn't it strange that the opportunity cost of giving away unneeded capital financial or physical never disappears?


I didn't say no one has to work. I'm saying maybe people don't want to devote themselves to jobs that are in the process of being automated away. I'm saying people are rational actors and are choosing not to work those jobs so they can retrain themselves for a more sustainable job.


I'd like the next Twitter thread to be people saying this, starting with the invention of the windmill or the domestication of the horse. (I agree that economic stability for people is a huge problem and that things move quickly, today, but to say that automation is the root cause is oversimplified(.


I'm not saying workers are against automation. They can see the hand writing on the wall, that's all. Now they want to be coders. They see the future is to be in charge of the automation.


Recently talked to a restaurant owner who complained that "no one wants to work anymore".

Well yes, you fired all the foreign temporary workers during covid, you offer shit wage and then you complain as if it's their fault for not wanting to wageslave for you lmao.


I wonder what they’d tell a server who says nobody wants to tip anymore. My guess would be “find a different line of work”


I don't want to work. Not for good money, not in a fulfilling job, not for the betterment of mankind. I don't want to work, period.


People with money don't want to work either. It's all about rent and returns. ROI, RoC, MRR, etc... Nobody wants to do actual work, they want to "invest" in something that will thereafter pay them money for doing nothing.

It's not just the people at the bottom ;-)


It is staggering how quickly the discourse in tech circles went from "What are we going to do with all of these humans when automation renders their jobs obsolete!??" to "Oh gee wiz! There is a shortage of lifeguards!"


Every single one of those snippets would have become much more accurate and sensical if the phrase was changed to "Nobody wants to work for free anymore".

Which is true for any age, to the lament of cheap employers in any age.


And, to fully refute the BS of nobody wants to work anymore: "More workers now hold two full-time jobs, defined as more than 35 hours a week per job, than at any point since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began collecting this data in 1994"

https://twitter.com/JStein_WaPo/status/1549859727978516481 (link to Washington Post story)


We're now entering a phase where governments and employers are trying to re-instill labour discipline after two years of that "getting out of control" due to COVID, etc.

There is a target unemployment rate that is considered "healthy"; we're currently below that. Attempts will be made through various levers to get it back up there. Likewise, flexibilities and "perks" around home work, etc. that emerged during COVID will be pushed back: not because they impede productivity but because a disciplined and vulnerable work force is a cheaper work force.

All the talk about "nobody wants to work anymore" is the blunt ideological end of the hammer that will be used to restore workforce discipline. The sharper edge will come in the form of modifications to labour laws, reduction of benefits and welfare programs, and the return of the austerity politics of the 90s. We've been through it before...

A large part of the battle against "inflation" will be done in board rooms of major companies.


What's the need to work so much? Productivity is supposedly off the charts, but isn't making people wealthier


One thing I don't think we appreciate enough is the decline in taking pride in your work. Personally, I think that's the biggest change that happened recently. Part of it is cost, since it's more expensive to pay for craftsmen versus laborers. And then that cascades down from there. But I also don't think our culture rewards pride anymore. It's not cool to take pride in your work. If you do, your coworkers will scoff and tell you you're not paid enough to care. We've cultivated this apathetic society through wages and culture and it's resulted lots of people doing the absolute minimum at all times.


A decade of forgetting to append - 'for me'

Would be a super accurate title :)


Just pay more, you'll find all the workers you want


Am I the only one noticing that his entire timeline very nearly mirrors a list of US recessions? Was that intentional? Implicit? Coincidence?


This is usually a dogwhistle for more immigration, I've seen it happen first hand in my country. Once wages started to reach a liveable standard most employers wouldnt hire anymore, especially in the blue collar sectors. Then they imported cheap temporary labour and exploited those people for pennies and then sent them back broken to their country.


You can only use the word “dogwhistle” when promoting leftist views.


my bad, havent been in silicon valley for long enough to get the jargon yet. Ironically on a H1B visa too heh


My perspective is that "nobody wants to work anymore" is another way of saying "I want workers but I do not want to pay the market wage." Unfortunately for the workers, they tend to get blamed for the issues related to worker shortages, such as baggage delays/mixups at airports and flight delays.


hahaha good one :) reminds me that in french/latin languages the word for work (travail) is thought to comes from the latin tripalium an instrument of torture / or trabaculum ( could mean like a worker yoked to his job)

At the end of the days there are people willing to match their skills with a job and some who are not it s just a market equilibrium thing / demand never match the offer perfectly and innovations tend to displace work towards higher productivity…

source: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-etymology-for-work-in-some-...


Please do not force people to run a modern WebVM just to see a bunch of pictures... Anyway, this is a bit different BUT NOT offtopic: https://i.ibb.co/gdTBXT0/Corp-Whining-Hist.jpg


"I keep trying to hire using <old model of the world> and keep coming up short in <new model of the world".

E.g: I can't hire developers! Nobody wants to work! (Actuality: Nobody wants to spend £7k/pa to commute into your central London office for no good reason)


Happiness is the distance between reality and expectations. In a healthy society, you raise your expectations over time. In the US, blue collar workers are not seeing gains and in many cases are losing ground. That’s why people don’t want to work.


Has anyone wanted to work ever? Isn’t that why they have to pay you to work, generally?


But labor force participation rate has plunged in recent decades, especially among men, and even more so since Covid.

So yeah, people not working has always been a problem or endemic to society, but an argument can be made that it has gotten worse.


> But labor force participation rate has plunged in recent decades, especially among men

Yes, a demographic bulge of a generation during whose prime working years men were even more overrepresented than they are today in heavy physical labor fields that burn out bodies quickly has been reaching the end of their careers, and the denominator for the LFPR is the the population over a certain age with no cap.


I don't think such a sudden decline in 12 years can be explained only by demographics

https://www.statista.com/graphic/1/191725/us-male-civilian-l...

I go to a coffee shop in middle of day on a weekday and tons of men in there of working age.


A decline over twelve years is hardly "sudden" and would map fairly well to a generational change.


Indeed! This year is the midpoint of all Boomers retiring. There will be a labor shortage of around 300k workers this year, slowly increasing until 2034 to 900k workers.

COVID was simply the catalyst of getting a large lump of folks out of the labor force because they could retire (or died of any number of causes during the pandemic).


Erm.. yes it can? What exactly Do you think a “generation” is?


Well, it's not exactly a rigorous scientific analysis, is it?

I'm willing to bet you can find the sentence "People never had it better" in print all the way back to 1894. What would that prove?


Or people’s willingness to work has been in decline for over a century.



Nitter mirror of the same twitter thread that this HN story links to.


Yes, that's posting that is a common practice I think. I always look for nitter mirror and post one myself if there's none. Probably it would be easier for me if I used a browser extension to do an automatic redirect, but maybe this way more people will be able to see the tweet without having to register a Twitter account



Why are there so many twitter threads on HN? Especially this one doesn't provide any context or sources. It reminds me of the time newspapers warned of global cooling with records of coldest days ever measured. Now the hottest days are used for the exact same effect even though its the same statistical lie. Articles about how no one wants to work anymore can also be replaced with any arbitrary metric that's usefull for politicians and newspapers.

Again, I would agree that days are getting hotter and wages are very depressed. But I dont like twitter threads or hearsay



Humanity could be trending towards less work than more work as technology advances.

So every example in that Twitter threat could be true.

On a related note, this kind of content is guaranteed be very popular on Twitter since Twitter is leans pretty far left. It justifies that it's ok to be lazy and that you don't have success because of the system rather than your intellectual ability or hard work. It justifies entitlement.


Twitter changed the algorithm recently such that these type of threads are pushed to more eyeballs.


I think Jordan Peterson helped popularize an argument that a lot of people are excluded from the labor force by virtue of not being smart enough. 15% of the general population has an IQ below 85 and either are unemployed or don't earn enough to make more than they could otherwise earn with welfare. This argument has been well-received among some on the right, as opposed to just attributing unemployment to laziness.


That's just because the right is flirting with concepts like Eugenics under the umbrella of "Race Realism" which fits the narrative of the suppression of free speech and "I'm not racist, I'm just asking questions".

It's not really any better or more well-intentioned than attributing unemployment to laziness.


or you could address the actual argument


There is no argument worth addressing. Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist, he has no credibility, research, or study in this domain.

You or I are equally credible in making up theories to explain these phenomena. He just has a very attractive manner of speaking that sounds very intellectually rigorous to people who have no intellectual rigour of their own. He seems intelligent because he's willing to consider every possibility from it's first principles, whether that possibility is IQ rates in the labour force, or whether women are being sexually promiscuous by wearing makeup to the office.

The specific argument in question is ludicrous. We've always had people excluded from the labour force due to intelligence. While surely IQ 85 individuals aren't able to take advantage of a booming tech market, the specific instances of complaints and criticisms today of "nobody wanting to work anymore" are for menial labour jobs that can easily be done by someone with an IQ of 85.


They are excluded by the fact that we have minimum wages. That provides a lower bar to the required value an employee creates. As we raise this lower bar, we exclude more and more people, generally in this lower intelligence bracket.

I have several family members that would love to be able to maintain employment but can't because they get pushed out by managers who think they can do better for the wage. And they probably can.

If my brother could keep a job for $4/hr it would give him the honor of work (which he wants/needs), and it would do society good to have more of these people around for us to interact with.

> There is no argument worth addressing. Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist, he has no credibility, research, or study in this domain.

Credentials don't make an argument correct. Lack of credentials doesn't make an argument wrong. It's an intellectually dishonest argument to declare something unworthy because you don't like it. If you don't want to participate, then don't, pooping in the thread isn't helpful.


Credibility is earned through a variety of means in our world. There is no true free meritocracy of ideas. A theory about the multi-dimensionality of our universe proposed by a Physics Nobel Prize winner is going to have automatically more credibility and be more worthy of deep consideration and debate, than a Physics Professor, than a new Physics PhD, than a Physics undergrad, than a non-Physics Science students, than a non-Science university student, than a high school drop out, than a homeless person on the street.

Jordan Peterson is treated by his fans as someone with explicit credibility on the domain of human society and its problems and solutions. In my analogy they treat his ideas on string theory as somewhere between a Physics Professor and a Nobel Prize winner.

When in point of fact, his ideas and credentials lie closer to a 1st year English major talking about how the "Universe vibrates" right before they tell you about the healing crystals they bought on eBay. If you squint enough that may sound like String Theory, but it's not the same.

Jordan Peterson builds his entire philosophy on a foundation of Judeo-Christian values. Note, I didn't say he basis his personal ethics on these values - which would be perfectly valid, but rather he believes that this is the only possible way for society to function. That means he is fundamentally, militantly, faithfully against gay marraige, against women in the workplace (he doesn't say he's AGAINST it, but he asks questions that inherently suggest he does not believe in gender equality), and is pro societal hierarchies - within the family, and across it.

All of his other "arguments" - about wages, employment, IQ, etc, are all built on top of this foundation, that I believe is fundamentally broken.

So yes, I will absolutely challenge any idea from Jordan Peterson by default based on his lack of credibility, just as I will challenge any idea about the origins of the universe from a hippie suggesting I rub some quartz crystals on my temples to get in touch with Gaia.


Astute observation, Jordan Peterson did bring this argument back into the limelight.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-Ur71ZnNVk


I certainly don't want to work, but I don't mind playing when someone will pay me to do it. :)


I found Peter Zeihans argument convincing that the largest generation ever, the baby boomers, are starting retiring now. From a purely demographics standpoint this leads to an increasing labor shortage of some 400k per year in 2022 to almost 1m in 2032 or so. Price for labor will go up, and people can be picky not taking every bullshit job they are offered.


Not unless demand goes down because the next generations are much poorer than the precious ones.


Someone has to inherit all of that boomer wealth. I told my father I wanted to earn money the old fashioned way and that I was very disappointed in him retiring at 70


If he retires he is spending his money which generates old fashioned earning opportunities.


That's what I think should happen as well, but the reality might be disappointing.

In the past, the stock market has gone up in huge part due to government intervention. It's entirely possible that real returns in the stock market and real estate market will flatten, but expenses will continue to rise at a faster rate. Notably in healthcare. There also the possibility we'll see changes in taxation.

So yes, we'll get the boomer "wealth", but it won't be what people assume it will be. I hope I'm wrong.


>the largest generation ever, the baby boomers

At present, there are more living Millenials than Boomers.[0]

[0]https://www.statista.com/statistics/296974/us-population-sha...


why should someone be motivated to work 50 hours in a soul crushing job just to pay their rent and bills?

without any hope of social mobility in their lifetime.

this sounds like a you problem (managers,govt), not a me problem.


My grandparents generation was motivated to work, but only because they were actually getting paid enough to buy homes and cars and college educations for multiple children outright.


This is awesome.

And there is also a valid anti work movement. The boomers who mistake that for 'nobody wants to work anymore' just can't see it, but that reveals more about their shitty priorities than the generation(s) they are critizing.

As always, stereotypes of a generation are more telling of the flaws of the previous generations than anything else.


The posting snippets of text as images, which then get zoomed and cropped despite taking up enough screen real estate to be legible in full, is a wonderful advancement of the shiternet.

In 1979 someone apparently wrote:

> nts to work

> - disgusted

Thanks tweet thread!!


In the “capitalism is when no iPhone” catáfora we seem to also have: high employment and labor shortage is when “nobody wants to work” It’s never because compensation is to low, it’s always because these damn workers want to be paid too much!


I would love to work!

I lost 2 jobs in biotech due to vaccine mandates. I'm consulting presently, but may need to completely change careers if the situation stays this way. That or find a startup where the founders care more about talent than optics.

I'm improving my python skills and studying machine learning, but I world rather be doing wet lab experiments.


> I would love to work

Nope. You (we) would love to follow a passion. There’s a ton of under-staffed and under-payed restaurants and factories. Do you still want to work?


Your choice lead to the loss of two jobs, to be clear.


At the end of the day your decision not to vaccinate is potentially putting other workers at risk so that's why its not being tolerated. If you find an employer that is willing to slack off on mandates, they are probably going to be slacking off on a lot of other employee protections that you'd like to have in your favor.


It is disappointing to see that so many (otherwise smart people) think that the first generation covid 'vaccines' (yes, the ones cdc had to change the definition of vaccine for) stop transmission. They don't - hence the argument that one should have to take them to 'protect' ones coworkers falls apart.

Be honest and reflect for a minute on how many people you know who have gotten covid recently. Do you think they all got it from unvaccinated people? Why are the majority of the mutations in spike protein then? Could it be selective pressure applied by a vaccine that was leaky from the start?

I'm sorry but mandating an experimental new drug is unethical, so yes I chose to adhere to my principles and I accept the consequences. My point was some people are out of the work force due to these unethical mandates.

ETA I have taken all other vaccines courses, participated in a different experimental vaccine clinical trial (where I felt comfortable making informed consent) and sat on the safety committees of at least 4 different biotech companies for some perspective.


> I lost 2 jobs in biotech due to vaccine mandates...

Good.

I'm sorry, but biotech is likely one of the last places I would want someone to not be vaccinated.


Totally agree. I want to take it one step further.

Pay me as a contractor to deliver results on a project. I don't need your salary and management structure blocking me.

Give me money in exchange for working software.




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