This kind of post-facto justification for poor working conditions or wages needs a name, so it can be dismissed out of hand. It seems to assume that the market is “fair” and getting poor pay must be justified by some other factor about the job.
In reality, there are plenty of jobs that have garbage pay and suck. As well as jobs that are both lucrative and “easy”. Consider the average CEO: not the exceptional visionaries but the type that loses the shareholders money for years and then exits on a golden parachute. These jobs are hard only in the sense that you have to know the right people, (being born to the right people helps) to even be considered.
On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage (or now, Uber, for below minimum wage).
The free market is not fair, and it is not a meritocracy. It is subject to all the same tribal impulses and inequalities that have persisted in humans throughout history. In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage, no matter how enjoyable it is. That’s just an excuse for exploitation.
> In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage...
Pay is determined chiefly by supply and demand in the labor market. Jobs that are more fun pay less because the supply of workers is higher. Fairness is literally not part of this equation.
> On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage.
Medical licenses are controlled by the government, not the free market.
> [The free market] is subject to all the same tribal impulses and inequalities that have persisted in humans throughout history.
... and also the Civil Rights Act of 1964. All snark aside, why should we pay a high school paperboy a living wage? What does a living wage even mean - the ability to live in a single bedroom apartment? That runs ~3K/month in SF which is roughly commensurate to $50/hour.
The definition of living wage is fairly established. It is the minimum income necessary for a worker to meet their basic needs. Needs are defined to include food, housing, and other essentials such as clothing. This definition is why, in the United States, at least, every few years Minimum Wage (used interchangeably here with Living Wage) would be raised, to keep up with inflation. It allowed the average American to start saving for a down-payment for a house even if all they had was a high school education and nothing else (so, the paperboy you mention). Until, for some reason, we stopped doing that as much.
Instead of looking at one of the most inflated rental markets in the country (SF), let's look at somewhere like Idaho - you'll find that inflation has still affected that place, but minimum wage (living wage) to be able to provide those basic needs has not kept up. This is why, countrywide, 40% of non-elderly adults report difficulty meeting basic needs such as food, housing, health care and utilities [1].
But let's consider that paperboy, for a minute. Do you really believe that the only people who deserve the most basic income to be able to live (living wage) are those that are capable of getting a higher education? What about all the other members of a functional society that we rely on?
Maybe a functional society doesn't necessarily rely on jobs with below-living wages?
Point is, the question of whether you should pay living wages to every worker is basically equivalent to whether you should provide living income to every person, employed or not. When you enforce a living wage, some jobs would disappear and you have to answer question 2 to people who lost their jobs. I don't have an answer for question 2 but I think recognizing the theoretical equivalency here would make the discussion much more straightforward.
I am quite on the left I would say (not from or in the US), so
>why should we pay a high school paperboy a living wage?
My opinion is that it is everyone responsibility to create a society were were abject poverty and marginalization is minimized. There are many tools to our disposal, paying a living wage is one.
The point is do you have a problem of people working as paperboy and not being able to live properly? Then you either pay them more or try to make other jobs possible for them. We should be careful not to do it immorally, we should not just "give" to the poor, but we should make sure that they have always a chance to rise.
I do not think of this as a moral obligation to help other, it is simply my answer to the question: Do you want an entire demographic to be hopeless and disillusioned? I do not and I believe sorta high living wages are a good tool often.
ps: this is not meant to be an argumentation for anything, there are no proof or facts in this comments, just heartfelt personal opinions. I find those pretty useful sometimes and hope mines can help too.
edit: the parent was referring to non-adults paperboy, my answer completely ignores the very important concept of families which are particularly important for non-adults
"Pay is determined chiefly by supply and demand in the labor market. Jobs that are more fun pay less because the supply of workers is higher. Fairness is literally not part of this equation."
I think the implication is that society and technology have advanced to the point where, ostensibly, work that can't be automated away should be work that would demand a living wage. If it's tenable for my job to still exist, it's tenable for it to pay me enough to live. If it doesn't... well, that would be less a function of higher level characterizations of the economy or any individual job and more a function of the basic availability of food and housing, anyway. If there isn't enough food and housing, people start dying, but since there does seem to be enough of those, what is happening?
I work retail full-time. It's definitely not "fun," and I definitely can't afford to carry my own weight; I have to rely on family to make ends meet, and I know people who rely on welfare. In regards to the time and opportunity cost of working that job in relation to compensation, it is unfair (imbalanced), but the situation emerges from a context defined by labor's complete lack of leverage, juxtaposed with the, perhaps, overcompensation of the people who support us, encompassed by our mutual desire for society to not collapse.
I think it's funny that you mention $50/hr for delivering papers as if we should be aghast at the mere thought. If it's a job that needs to be done to secure the solvency of the overall business, and that's what it costs to live in the area where whoever holds that job must live, then... that's the going rate. If someone can live on less, they get the job and are paid less. If the business can't afford to pay a full time wage for a full-time paperboy (or a commensurate wage for a part-time one), maybe we don't need or can't afford paperboys. But as a society, at some point it would be prudent to look around and see whether the way people are living is sustainable, or if, say, the inopportune removal of a welfare or familial wealth Jenga brick would cause the entire tower to collapse into, like, tent cities or whatever.
> I think it's funny that you mention $50/hr for delivering papers as if we should be aghast at the mere thought.
$50/hr for delivering papers would most likely cause the prompt and total collapse of the local economy. If you think otherwise, why stop at merely $50/hour? I'm only aghast that the proposed cure is actually much worse than the disease!
> But as a society, at some point it would be prudent to look around and see whether the way people are living is sustainable, or if, say, the inopportune removal of a welfare or familial wealth Jenga brick would cause the entire tower to collapse into, like, tent cities or whatever.
I agree wholeheartedly, but I'd guess we probably disagree on the remedy. I'd defer to the market which would of course require a free market to exist in the first place for things like housing.
>$50/hr for delivering papers would most likely cause the prompt and total collapse of the local economy.
I imagine it would merely cause the prompt and total collapse of the paperboy position, until efficiencies were created to support it (e.x., there's only one paperboy for n square miles, they oversee a swarm of paper-delivering drones, and the number of papers they deliver justifies a $50/hr salary); people simply decided that physical paper delivery wasn't worth the cost; or they decided that it was worth it, and had their pay and expenses adjusted commensurately.
>I'm only aghast that the proposed cure is actually much worse than the disease!
I'm not sure you've proven that.
>I agree wholeheartedly, but I'd guess we probably disagree on the remedy. I'd defer to the market which would of course require a free market to exist in the first place for things like housing.
The laissez-faire approach to market management is what "innovated" tent cities into existence in the first place, man.
What's the "logical basis" for concluding that they think it's good for anyone to collapse economies?
I don't think this weak "gotcha" rhetoric is conducive to good discussion. You're trying to disarm their point by putting words in their mouth. And you're taking it off topic.
For example, since you only mention banks and large corporations, can we assume you're okay with every other possible way economies can be collapsed? No, that would have no "logical basis."
All snark aside, why should we pay a high school paperboy a living wage?
Because we, as a society, are paying that paperboy* a living wage one way or another. The alternative is to let him starve to freeze to death. So, we build robust safety nets to catch these people - food stamps, housing assistance, etc.
Wouldn't it be more efficient to simply pay the person a living wage vs pumping the money through government programs?
* I'm assuming we're talking about an adult employee here, and not a literal paperboy as in the video game. I haven't seen one of those in decades.
> This seems to capture the current intellectual zeitgeist very well. Once we name something, we can dismiss it without engaging it.
In the internet age, this is a necessity because the other pattern is the same claims repeated over and over again with the expectation that a comprehensive rebuttal must be provided each time. At some point you have to name the thing so it can be added as an entry to Wikipedia and move on. See also: how global warming denialists have an evergreen grab bag of false claims to pull from and expect a thesis-length answer to each one.
Also, this is nothing new. Commonly referenced fallacies like tu quoque are a way of saying that the other person is arguing from shaky ground, and their argument does not need a complete rebuttal until they refine it a bit. In fact, the comment I was replying to can be considered a derivative of the just-world fallacy[1], substituting the hand of the free market for the kind of ephemeral karma that the original just-world fallacy implies.
I mean, I see what you're doing here, haha, but AlexanderB brings up a good point about asymmetrical debate, where one side says something sloppy, vague and poorly sourced and then expects you to "write a thesis" to rebut. Personally, I think this phenomena really does need a name, less to dismiss it, more to get lazy arguers to stop demanding high quality rebuttals (and at the very least to make the debate easier to walk away from). Fundamentally it's a kind of hypocrisy, but it needs a lyrical name. I like the pattern of naming a fallacy and then opting out that you're demonstrating, but a name could actually be useful. Indeed you could even term it a fallacy, the "vice demanding virtue" fallacy, or something like that.
> ...and at the very least to make the debate easier to walk away from...
I find simply reminding myself that duty doesn't actually call[0] to be a very easy way to walk away from any debate that isn't going anywhere productive
If you are going this way, someone could very well "adjectivize" your comment with the label "fallacy of fallacies" it fits very well: The fact that the comment you criticize uses a fallacy, doesn't make that comment wrong! Duckduckgo that!
edit: ok, i saw now Haberman has already provided a even better explanation about your superficial use of the word "fallacy" in your argument. Check his link, and learn something.
I regret that my point may not have come across. I don't actually believe in pejoratively labeling any good-faith argument, and I would not actually use a label like "Jacobin whinging" in earnest. My point is: labeling something is not the same as refuting it.
Apologies, my irony meter is malfunctioning today. I read it twice but I'm so used to reading this serious comments similar to your sarcastic critique online these days, it didn't read as sarcasm.
When discussing deals, jobs etc, an old boss of mine used to ask "is the juice worth the squeeze?". A job that you are morally against requires more squeeze, so you expect more juice.
>The free market is not fair, and it is not a meritocracy.
It's fair, but not based on effort like people mistakenly think it should be. It's silly to think "I should be paid X because it was really hard work" or to try to interfere with the market to force that price.
A big part of the issue is ignorance of economics among most of the population. People don't realize they are always participating in markets, even when it's a regulated market.
>Consider the average CEO: not the exceptional visionaries but the type that loses the shareholders money for years and then exits on a golden parachute.
I don't think you know what the word "average" means, because that's very far from the truth. There are hundreds of thousands of people with the title "CEO". Only a tiny fraction are of companies with publicly traded shares and only a fraction of those get large golden parachute deals (<1000).
There are more professional football players becoming millionaires for playing a game than there are CEOs who lose companies tons of money and get a golden parachute.
>On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage (or now, Uber, for below minimum wage).
So what? Their medical degree obvious isn't qualifying them to be a doctor in the new country.
>So what? Their medical degree obvious isn't qualifying them to be a doctor in the new country.
I never understood this, even while in the medical industry myself. Perhaps this might be a little true for an immigrant from Venezuela with a medical degree. But for an immigrant from England, Why not?
That's analogous to switching from being a data-base administrator to a systems ops engineer. Sure, fundamental knowledge of logic is transferable (compare: knowledge of human anatomy on a general scale, courtesy of medical school), but the intricacies and applications of that knowledge are different. Some re-schooling from one extremely specialized medical post to another makes sense.
I'm talking about, for instance: being an orthopedic surgeon in England (or even France, or Russia). I operate on human bodies. Those human bodies work the same way in the United States, do they not?
Maybe there are some discrepancies in established best practices, country to country. But there is no necessity to go through the entirety of relearning fundamental medical knowledge just to demonstrate you didn't go to a "worse" medical school. Even if you did - what should be looked at is your medical practice, not school, and your patient track record.
For many jobs, the pay and working conditions really are a product of market forces. For other jobs, not so much.
For software jobs, and for jobs with garbage pay and which also suck, it's mostly true. People who can competently write software aren't that common, and there's tons of jobs and demand for them, so the pay goes up, and companies compete with each other for them by offering better pay, better perks, etc. Jobs which both suck and have horrible pay are that way because there's desperate people willing to do them, and because those jobs generally have a very low barrier to entry.
CEO jobs aren't very common, and are largely a factor of "who you know". Going to the right fraternity in college is more important than how competently you can run a company, so obviously it's not a merit-based job.
As for immigrants with medical degrees, here again there's a barrier to entry: you can't just immigrate here and get a medical license by taking a test; the industry actively limits how many licenses they allow.
>In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage, no matter how enjoyable it is.
Software jobs that pay poorly DO pay "living wages"; they surely pay far better than any random horrible minimum-wage job. You're not going to get any sympathy from me about not getting paid "enough" for some software job that doesn't pay median pay, but is more "fun". If you want more money, go find a big-corporate job that's boring as hell but pays well. Nothing is stopping you.
For actual shitty jobs, this sounds good, but how do we enforce it, besides simply raising the minimum wage? And there is an argument to be made that raising the minimum wage will simply cause many of these jobs to go away (increasing unemployment), and also cause the prices of products and services to raise, increasing inflation so that poor peoples' purchasing power isn't any better than it was before.
IMO, what we really need is more automation, plus a Basic Income so that people forced out of work by the automation can still enjoy the fruits of society's success without having to toil in some pointless bullshit job, and perhaps use their free time and efforts to do something more productive (like start an innovative new business, write a best-selling book like Harry Potter's author, etc.). Automation is going to put more and more people out of work by rendering so many jobs obsolete, as machines can do them faster and more efficiently, and as a society we need to prepare for that. Remember, a century ago people thought that in the 2000s, we'd all be working 10 hours a week.
> IMO, what we really need is more automation, plus a Basic Income so that people forced out of work by the automation can still enjoy the fruits of society's success without having to toil in some pointless bullshit job, and perhaps use their free time and efforts to do something more productive (like start an innovative new business, write a best-selling book like Harry Potter's author, etc.).
How do you decide what is a pointless bullshit job? How do you decide what it means to be productive? How much of the success of a business relies on its innovation, or the success of a book on how well written it is? How many people have the drive and self-discipline for self employment?
On the face of it, what it sounds like you're contrasting isn't "pointless bullshit" and innovative productivity, but "what bores me" and "what excites me" or "what fulfills me."
It's easy to confuse the good-in-itself of work with the goods-in-themselves that work facilitates (paying the bills, feeding a family, giving to the less fortunate, et c). If we prioritize the former over the latter, we're going to have a crummy society in whatever regime we use to try to solve the thorny issues of automation and living wages.
>How do you decide what is a pointless bullshit job?
Market forces: if you have a universal basic income in place (so people don't have to work to avoid starvation), coupled with ever-increasing automation, then there's going to be fewer and fewer pointless bullshit jobs. Businesses aren't going to be able to afford to employ people to do bullshit when they have to pay enough to make them want to come to work, and when they can get a computer/robot to do it instead for next to nothing.
Non-"pointless bullshit" jobs aren't necessarily exciting or fulfilling either. They're jobs that provide real value to the employer, and which they can't just automate away.
> Market forces: if you have a universal basic income in place (so people don't have to work to avoid starvation), coupled with ever-increasing automation, then there's going to be fewer and fewer pointless bullshit jobs.
"Pointless" and "bullshit" seem like value judgments, not economic judgments. Why not simply say they are "cheaper to automate than to pay a human for"?
Suppose, though, that they are economic judgments. If the market were persuaded that working was a good whose value outweighed the cost savings of automation, then wouldn't said jobs be perforce, uh, "pointful" and smell better?
> They're jobs that provide real value to the employer, and which they can't just automate away.
In that vein, why should it be that employers should determine the value of a job? I'm genuinely curious in your opinion here, not trying to beg the question.
The free market is not fair. It's just fairer than anything else we know of. It's not a meritocracy, just more meritorious than anything else we know of. If you think things are bad when greedy people are pitted against each other, wait until greedy people are pitted against the average man, as they are in nearly every other economic system.
I wouldn't say it's the fairest thing we know, but it scales the best. A centralized market system could be extremely fair, if there's only 7 participants. With 7 billion, there's just no way. At a national or global level, we need decentralization.
At smaller scales, we do use other systems. Within a company, essentially nobody uses a free market system.
There is something to note here, the "free market" is a pretty wide term, goes from corporate anarchy to heavy regulations with everything in between.
I agree that it is the right pattern to organize into as in "freedom for private enterprise to provide goods and services" but it not necessarily the right way to handle retirements funds.
Overall I am quite far on the side of regulations, claiming that free market needs to be constantly beaten into shape to keep it a meritocracy.
you could say that this is the free market greatest strength: private enterprise and public government can have a dynamic dialogue trough regulations often with an almost symmetric power structure (when things run smoothly).
> The free market is not fair, and it is not a meritocracy. It is subject to all the same tribal impulses and inequalities that have persisted in humans throughout history.
Based on context, I suspect you mean merit as in moral merit. Economic merit is defined as the economic value add in a free market, so free markets are tautologically a meritocracy, because success in a free market is basically a definition of economic merit.
It certainly isn't fair, but nearly nothing is. Life is profoundly unfair.
> In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage, no matter how enjoyable it is. That’s just an excuse for exploitation.
A debatable point - it is easy to justify making it as easy as possible for a worker to leave a job that isn't paying a living wage and find something else. However there are a lot of people out there and not all of them are working to live. Eg, maybe someone has a stead source of income (spouse, parents or investment money) and wants to get involved in something worthwhile but low value add. It isn't at all obvious why we should prevent that as a society because nobody thinks it is worth a living wage worth of money per hour.
A minimum wage is basically a declaration that work with less value add than some number is not worth doing. From an incentives point of view, it is really weird and there are probably better ways of helping people with nothing to offer their community.
>This kind of post-facto justification for poor working conditions or wages needs a name, so it can be dismissed out of hand. It seems to assume that the market is “fair” and getting poor pay must be justified by some other factor about the job.
Maybe this is true when you consider not just the job itself, but acquiring the job. How many minimum wage jobs offer minimum entry requirements? How many offer secondary benefits that are worth a lot, but only to a very small percent of the population (such as internships offering access to important people).
Of courses, none of this means fair. Some people are unfairly born with advantages or disadvantages, many of which have no solution that I've ever seen.
In reality, there are plenty of jobs that have garbage pay and suck. As well as jobs that are both lucrative and “easy”. Consider the average CEO: not the exceptional visionaries but the type that loses the shareholders money for years and then exits on a golden parachute. These jobs are hard only in the sense that you have to know the right people, (being born to the right people helps) to even be considered.
On the other side of the ledger, you have immigrants with medical degrees, who are driving cabs for minimum wage (or now, Uber, for below minimum wage).
The free market is not fair, and it is not a meritocracy. It is subject to all the same tribal impulses and inequalities that have persisted in humans throughout history. In western societies, no job should pay less than a living wage, no matter how enjoyable it is. That’s just an excuse for exploitation.