>if Uber disappeared tomorrow, society would be moderately inconvenienced, but little else

If you inconvenience 100 million people by costing them 15 minutes more a day, or a few dollars more for lack of competition, then the cost per person may be low, but the cost altogether will be high.

This is the essential problem I see with the articles, they say so many jobs are useless, but often they're useful but only a small part of what is visible.

Totally, but now play the same scenario in your head if all the social workers or teachers disappeared tomorrow. Uber would be a societal inconvenience, but losing all of our teachers would be a catastrophe.

Wages vary according to marginal utility rather than total utility. The question is not "what if all teachers disappeared", but "what if one particular teacher disappeared".

Wages for public sector workers are legally defined and, at least, in this case, have very little to do with any measure of utility. Our society is horrendous at measuring utility in almost all long term cases.

I'm not complaining that teacher salaries are too high or too low. I'm complaining that: A) you're reinventing the Paradox of Value; and B) you're challenging the norm without proposing an alternative economic model.

"Just pay teachers according to the intrinsic value of their profession." But it's not immediately obvious what this means in practice. Suppose wages were set not by congress and not by the market. According to your moral calculus, what is the correct wage and how is it determined?

Indeed. Oxygen is very valuable too, but it should not be expensive for this reason alone. It's abundant, and therefore cheap, and that's a good thing.

Similarly, hypothetically speaking, perhaps teachers are the most valuable profession to society, but if there's plenty of people willing to become a teacher, and plenty capable, there's no reason to reward these people with vast extra sums of money for the sake of their value.

Such a system would lead to extreme inefficient allocations of resources, an oversupply of teachers.

Yes, if teachers are valuable and you can't find people willing or capable to do the job, then by all means, raise their pay. That's the reason I think many teachers deserve more pay. Not because they're intrinsically valuable.

>Wages for public sector workers are legally defined and, at least, in this case, have very little to do with any measure of utility.

Public sector workers can leave for private wages, and for most comparable jobs, are paid similar wages, perhaps more so when adding benefits of most public sector jobs compared to volatility in private equivalents.

So maybe the wage is not the result of public artificial restriction, but of the value placed on the jobs themselves in the open job market.

Also not US teachers are among the highest paid in the world, certainly the OECD, likely because of Baumol's Cost Disease (which would imply US teachers are intrinsically overpaid, but receive the wages they do because schools must compete with outside even higher paying jobs to attract teachers). So perhaps it's not simply the US or public systems, but this is around the value on such skills worldwide.

So either the entire planet places similar utility on teaching as measured by pay, or the entire planet, public and private, has reached the same wrong conclusion.

In fact, many public sector jobs exist because they are too valuable (or difficult) for the market to pay. In the time before lighthouses were automated, try to calculate the value of the lighthouse keeper who prevented deaths and lost cargo.

I agree. And to be clear I think I think it would be an immediate catastrophe as parents would not be able to work as they would have to take care of their children. Teaching is obviously vastly more important than childcare but teachers on their undervalued salaries provide both of these salaries.

If parents did not have to work or could take their children to work, they could be both caregivers and teachers.

No, it wouldn't really be any sort of calamity. Online-Courses/tuitions/bootcamps/home-schooling will take the place of traditional teachers in no time assuming some overlord disappeared them.

You’re assuming they we

a. Are accurately pricing teacher pay (if the upper bounds of private schools are any indication, we are not)

b. The downstream effects wouldn’t be catastrophic.

Certainly most American parents could not afford to properly educate themselves enough to do this job, let alone educate their children.

Finally, a miseducated generation of children would probably end up costing us trillions of dollars in incarceration, health care, etc.

You must think about the nth order effects of these things. Hence our completely inaccurate valuation of them.

> [are we] accurately pricing teacher pay (if the upper bounds of private schools are any indication, we are not)

Why would you look at the upper bounds?

> Private school teachers make way less than public school teachers. Average salaries are nearly $50,000 for public, and barely $36,000 for private.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-ar...

I think a problem with this line of reasoning is that people forget what we used to do before we had certain conveniences. If Uber disappears, people would just read a book for 15mins or plan everything to take the extra time into account.

Another problem with this line of reasoning is that people assume that they can always utilise 15m in a productive way or that not doing anything is not productive. How many times do you need a break everyday? How many times would a 15m break to relax and refocus or meditate actually benefit you rather than trying to force some work?

> I think a problem with this line of reasoning is that people forget what we used to do before we had certain conveniences. If indoor plumbing disappears, people would just read a book for 15mins or plan everything to take the extra time into account.

Of course people would get by, but their lives would be worse and advocating for making people's lives worse is kind of a shitty thing to do.

False equivalence. Indoor plumbing is nothing like an app to call a taxi.

Also see both my points. You don’t know if their lives would get worse. You’ve just assumed that the main goal of everyone is to hyper optimise their lives.

Yes I do know their lives would get worse[1] and yes it is an equivalent. You think when indoor plumbing came around people weren't arguing how it was an unnecessary luxury and making people soft and how that wasted time walking to the outhouse builds character and refocuses the self and how we'd all be better off without it?

[1] Because they have said they do, repeatedly, with their wallets.

I think work is pretty important to being human, but working 40-60 hours a week is absurd. 30 seems like a sweet spot to me. If we could remote, do only 30, and reduce pointless meetings than I bet we'd have a lot more time for the things that make us happy like family, side projects, exercise, and Netflix.

Why do you think work in and of itself is important? Being useful to your community is absolutely important, but our definition of that utility is absurdly narrow in this market economy. In fact, sometimes what we value and what is useful are totally orthogonal (again teachers are probably undervalued way too much, because we are poor long term thinkers).

Because nearly everyone wants to feel they're contributing to society in some way. I think we agree here. I'm not saying you need a horrendous office job.

I think people care less about contributing to society and more about having something meaningful to do.

Many jobs are quite meaningless, and the only reason people work them is because they have bills to pay.

On the other hand, creative people will find something meaningful to do that may or may not ever be a contribution to society.

Work is important but labor is not, so to speak.

Work is important because we value a high quality of life. Things like comfort and shelter and medicine and protection from violence and all of the other trappings of civilization never mind luxuries like cars, Internet, cell phones, etc. These things have never existed apart from work. I keep hearing about how awful capitalism is and how absurd and morally wrong it is for humans to need to work, but no one has offered a better solution (certainly nothing that bears up to a layman’s understanding of economics). Substantiate your claims about how “absurd” things are—articulate a system that can appropriately channel resources “where they really should go” (e.g., caregivers) better than capitalism (specifically what imbues your system with more moral authority than a market? If your system depends on a majority of voters feeling the same way as you, what happens when you can’t guarantee that invariant? What happens when you realize that voters and their representatives are even less efficient at allocating resources efficiently than a market? And how does your system guard against corruption better than capitalism?).

change netflix to gaming and you might be onto something

What exactly is overpriced about Uber? The drivers aren't making that much and despite Uber's cut they still aren't profitable

Because that core business isn't where all the money is going. The basic concept of software connecting buyers to sellers (riders to available drivers) is a simple software problem, easily solvable by a few guys and servers given time. Uber spends money on expansion, marketing and a constant game of legal stratego against any town/city/country that seems to get in its way. We are overpricing, over-rewarding, those companies who live to rise their stock price. We should be rewarding those companies whose continued existence is of the greatest benefit to society. That probably isn't Uber.

> Studied hunter-gatherer societies are as multi-faceted as agrarian and technologically driven ones, but they all seem to share a 20 hour work week and a strong affinity for story telling and art.

Yes, and in pretty much every conflict against hard working agricultural societies, they got wiped out.

> we’ve actually under priced some of the most important labor in our society (caregivers, teachers, social workers, etc),

Who is we? Who sets the price?

People obviously don’t see more value in teachers or caregivers, price should not be mandated by law

Prisons are arguably less important to society than education (since it represents the failing of citizens being productive members of society). However, prison expenditures were increasing three times faster than education from 1990 to 2016 [1]. Much of it going to corporately run prisons.

And given the marijuana legalization trend as of late, I really don't believe that people see the value of locking people up we are angry at. People we're afraid of, sure, that's a different story. But a non-violent marijuana offense shouldn't get a 15 year sentence.

Let's be clear, government should control the market, not the other way around.

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/07/the-s...

I’d say it is important to lock up those that hurt society

But I agree that in most countries prisons are true hellholes

In the US laws mandate certain level of care, and government prefer to pay someone else than handle the costs: unions, pensions for those prison staff

> I’d say it is important to lock up those that hurt society.

That's part of how we got here. Prison is just one option. Fines and orders to curtail freedom is another. E.g. Court ordered monetary restitution and loss of one driver's license are examples.

Here's a short version of how we got here:

1. Make more crimes to felonies subject to incarceration.

2. Imprison more people.

3. Remove felon's right to vote to make change to the current system.

4. Build more prisons

5. Privatize the prisons because government needs so much more of them now.

6. The prison lobby now argues for more harsher sentences.

7. GOTO 1.

> Let's be clear, government should control the market, not the other way around.

Missed this one in my earlier comment

Wow

What about farmers, miners, bakers,..., surely they are more important than caregivers and teachers or social workers? This is a silly argument to assign value to a certain profession based on how one feels. And what do hunger-gatherer societies do when they run out of food for whatever reason. Do they just say, no our 20 hour quota was already fulfilled this week, we'll starve now. The a amount of work neccesery to enable our modern lifestyles today is sometimes unimaginable to a person who has everything brought to them.

Evolutionary biology can only tell us the bare minimum about what we need to survive as a species. If you want anything more than that (say for example, a cushy third-world quality of life), evolutionary biology is the wrong field (or rather, not the complete set of fields) to look at.

Why do you think caregivers, teachers, and social workers are undervalued? Last time I checked, care facilities, classrooms, and social centers were fully staffed. On what basis can you claim that their pay is too low? Who gets to decide the right salary? You? Why?

A particular job being important in aggregate does not entitle each individual who does that job to a salary higher than people who do some other job that might be less important in aggregate.

Oxygen is very important and it's free. Certain comic books are expensive despite being of very little importance to our survival. The value of a thing is the price of one additional unit of that thing, not some statement about the moral significance of all of that thing in aggregate.

Why do you get to say that working a "full time" job should not have to cover your full time living expenses?

Why are people entitled to a particular set of benefits in exchange for a particular time spent doing some activity? Who gets to decide what benefits should result from that amount of time? You? Why?

> Who gets to decide what benefits should result from that amount of time? You? Why?

Practically speaking, voters do because we live in a democracy.

It is perfectly fine for a society to decide "a full time job should have to pay enough to cover a person's full-time living expenses", to define all those terms reasonably, and presto enforce it as law.

It is also perfectly fine for the free market to decide this. This is society too and captures relative value far more effectively and adaptably than a fixed one-time vote.

The free market considers the monetary tradeoffs in this.

Comparing it to a holistic societal value (quality of life, family time, other non-monetary factors) is a disservice, that I believe negates the (subjective) "effective and adaptable" value measurement of the free market.

Otherwise you're just distilling people's lives and communities down to a dollar value, which in many people's eyes is the dark/down side of capitalism and how we ended up here to begin with.

(PS: I did not downvote you). People have the same rights. However, relative economic value is definitely different from person to person. Denying this is denying basic reality.

Taking an example from a parent post - caregivers do NOT have high relative economic value. Anyone over 18 can become a caregiver without even passing high school and become a certified home care aide. Enforcing a higher pay through law will is only likely to increase un-employment. The market on the other hand is self-correcting.

The federal government being the lender for loans has only lead to higher cost of loans and un-employed arts graduates who cannot get a job and cannot payback those loans. Without the federal government backing, those loans were un-likely to have been offered in the first place, unless there was current/future demand for arts graduates.

I strongly believe that most aspects of living (for people and communities as you put it) indeed need a dollar value otherwise un-realistic and un-workable economic expectations come into play.

We have seen this play out in the past with failed governments and we will continue to see this in the future.

> just distilling people's lives and communities down to a dollar value

What's wrong with that? Our resources are finite. Our attention is short. We have to prioritize society's investment. How can anyone decide on the relative priority of two things without casting them to some common unit? It's only when we describe people's lives in terms of dollars that we can make intelligent decisions about where to apply society's scarce resources.

This. All professions have relative economic value. The free market - a market without permanent subsidies, monopolies and correct application of import tax (to balance non-free foreign subsidies) is the best and most fair judge of this.

Not some social welfare activist or even some elected representative of the party in power.