My favorite is the owner of a liquor store in my area. I indirectly know the guy — they are printing money from the pandemic, expanded the business across storefronts to keep up with demand, operate 4 delivery trucks, etc.

The guy gets on TV complaining that he has to pay $17 to hire drivers.

I think USA is still in a very good position compared to other countries as it is still seen as one of the best places to emigrate to. Other countries have it much worse and declining demographics will kill them faster.

The USA still has a lot of private capital to attract talents. But eventually it's going to run out of it or the dollar will lose value. This will be accelerated by the growth of the Chinese renminbi, especially once countries start to use it as a base currency instead of the dollar.

The USA has high salaries and relatively cheap house but it also has high taxes, high cost of healthcare and education, a good amount of social craziness (political polarisation, crime, revolts, gun shootings in school, badly handled homelessness) - I personally think you may be better off living in Europe for the time being.

Still, Europe is a time bomb waiting to explode. The demographics decline and high paid jobs moving away to countries with lower taxation will trigger a pension crisis, eventually. When Italy needs a bailout, Europe will stop being what it is.

I think in x0 years South America could be the next Europe and China could be the next USA.

It boils down to the following in the US. If you are upper middle class or above you have a very high quality of the life in the US. Healthcare is excellent, taxes are very low for the wealthy and unlike some parts of central and South America, you're free to openly enjoy your wealth here without fear of retribution. My parents live in the US and would love to retire in Spain. The tax burden alone makes that untenable.

China may end up being the dominant economic power but it's unlikely to ever reproduce what the US has in the last century. While the US has societal issues, it's not (currently) committing genocide and it's not facing a demographic time bomb with no ability to incorporate immigrants into society. For all the problems in the US, within a generation or two immigrants become Americans and participate at the highest echelons of American society. Please call me when that's the case in China.

What has made the US great is that it's been able to convince the brightest people in the world to make their homes here. From Albert Einstein to the Google founders and Elon Musk. I really don't see any of that that happening in China.

The U.S. has plenty of problems but I think moral contest with China in this area is not one of them.

[edit] - I incorrectly identified China as the bad guy in a historical event where they were the victim. My bad. Point still stands.

They're actually recruiting foreign talent, they're building futuristic and liveable mega cities, they're collecting the capital needed for venture and they're growing their global VC investments.

I really don't like this development and I wished a free country would have achieved what China is doing (I think of them like the Galactic Empire in Star Wars), but I think they'll get there.

People are quick to forget the past and the majority of young people favour socialism. I'm sure they will be quick to move and work for the CCP.

I really don't have much hope left for Europe and the USA, things just keep getting worse. I hope South America will grow its economy and become the free society that can oppose China.

Could you expand on that? Does Spain heavily tax retirees?

I know the US taxes his citizens on global income though, so they would be taxed like US retirees.

If we can do that without the EU so be it, it's not like we culturally merged just yet.

But not saying the situation is great in each country, but I suppose if Italy dies, we can still kick it out or stop the EU as long as France and Germany find a way to ensure no more world war. This is the only goal for most of us. Every other advantage is a bonus, every flaw a necessary sacrifice.

I still think that if the EUR currency were to fail all those countries will face tremendous adversities for quite some time. That could be a chance for countries like Italy and Greece to rebuild a less corrupted version of themselves, but I reckon it would take a long time.

This is a very good observation. And smaller business owners often really don't get the increases in efficiency because they skimp on tools and aren't great managers. So it's a double whammy of increasing costs and not getting the increase of efficiency that larger companies enjoy.

Basically, they're on the receiving end of Baumol's cost disease.

And because more expensive labor forces increases in efficiency (more tech, better organization), cheap labor is by far the worst drug for the economy, covering up for stagnation and exploitation.

I agree, but is it the best place for pernament emigration?

I always think of US like a 1-3 year journey and then go back to PL

The "coasts rich and good, middle America poor and backwards" narrative that we get plenty of here, on Reddit, etc. is an over-simplification at best.

Is it no wonder, then, we might feel like there are "different" Americas in the broad expanse of the US? And "different" Americans?

While I agree with you in part, another argument might ascribe many aspects of a perceived "polarization" to mere geography.

San Francisco and LA are infamous for large homeless populations. The inland South and West are flourishing.

Have a listen to "We Can't Make It Here Anymore", by James McMurtry

I mean, from a business standpoint, let's face it, employees are a pain and more of a necessary evil when needed. I dream of running a lifestyle business where I don't need any full-time employees. Not many people start a business wanting to employ lots of people and be a "model employer" (even though those who do are loud about it)

Less employees means less consumers which means less income for your lifestyle business. Economics 101 bud. But yeah, keep dreaming!

I fail to understand why any business should pay more than market rate for anything. I get that you want the market rate to be higher, but I have yet to ever have encountered a business that completely disregards market rate and just blows their wad on the first employee they hire.

It seems like the market rate for labor is going up, but the businesses are failing to deal with that reality.

How do you figure this? If businesses were not paying more the market rate would not be going up.

I believe we're currently at 5.8% unemployment for May 2021, down from around 15% during the pandemic.

Yes. Those are the options. The .001% is really cleaning house while smaller businesses are dying. And no way Amazon is going to absorb the cost, so all of this will just end wiping out the earnings and savings of most people while nobody's purchasing power increases.

If you are willing to pay $2/gallon for gasoline in June 2021, you are likely to have difficulty operating a car. Note that does not mean there is a gasoline shortage.

Firms can’t get workers because they don’t actually have a sustainable job to offer. In a functioning capitalist system encouraging those firms to die would be seen as positive.

Firms should have to compete for labour. Not getting labour and the existential risk that poses to firms drives automation and innovation. They are capitalists supposedly. Deploy some capital, or close and get out the way so somebody else will.

Venerating individual businesses stops capitalism working. It’s time to give up believing firms have a right to exist and that they are doing anybody a favour by existing. Let competition do its job of getting rid of the bad and encouraging the good.

Source: I'm an economist.

Even members of the Nobel family have come out and said the prize is bullshit.

The more people are willing and able to do a job, the less is the perceived marked value, especially if they are not organized in unions to assert their interests.

Now from what I know unions are generally frowned upon in the US for some reason or another (perhaps because of their obsession with capitalist ideology), and reports say that large corporations are actively oppressing the formation of unions.

So what is left is simply trying to avoid work and perhaps hoping that some companies will come around and provide reasonable working conditions and pay or to start businesses themselves, while trying to survive the bullying tactics of said companies.

It is interesting, that in free-market economics, you get many of the same effects as in nature and evolution. There will always be parasites.

The problem today, are all the people so convinced of the perfection of free-market economics, that they will insist that even the parasites somehow serves a purpose.

The more power you have over others, the more money you make. That's the real "free market" definition of value.

There's a reason climate damage and other critically important side-effects of market dysfunction are dismissed as ignorable "externalities". They have little or no immediate political effect and no independent political agency. Therefore in market terms their value is either zero or negative.

The physical reality is that the game board is on fire and unless something changes the entire game will be over soon.

What we have is some form of (heavily financialized) crony statism, where a bunch of well connected monopolies milk consumers shamelessly (health "care", higher education, etc).

There is no getting around the fact supply and demand = price. If society wants to change the price, society needs to work on moving the supply and demand curves. So what is left is providing people with the information on the market, such as publicizing pay rates (Colorado has made a good start here), and then providing people with the means to get an education so they can provide the type of labor that the market is willing to pay more for.

Another option is unions, although that is more difficult when the global supply of labor is so high and people around the world are willing to work for 10x less. In this case, tariffs are an option, but then you get into politics and there are other consequences to consider.

Economics does have a fair amount of fortune telling. I believe the entire field of technical analysis is bunk and really is "fortune telling" but I think that economists have a lot of value to add outside of fortune telling BS.

No one is in a capitalist system. Democracies ensure that - politicians will act to ensure the interest of their supporters.

As a result there will always be tariffs, subsidies or tax breaks to support different types of commercial work.

Is it just a rhetorical tool? Some times it reads as if people are actually arguing based on a pure capitalist model and it’s confusing.

Will they? I think they are more like adults promising sweets for breakfast to children if they behave (vote). Not really in their interest if you think about it.

The supporters are the PACs and special interest lobbying groups exchanging funding for political achievements.

Voters are just the marginalized workers whose favor needs to be curried every so often to keep critical analysis of our sociopolitical economic reality in check.

It is an ideology that is used to solidify and concentrate power.

"Free trade agreements" that actually lower trade interaction and increase the foothold of multinational corporations in foreign countries to outsource work and avoid taxation.

"Competition" for the workers, while large corporations get massive tax cuts, bailouts and lobby for regulations that benefit them and are a burden for SMBs.

"Market innovation" that is largely superficial and stands of the shoulders of giants, researchers who are paid by the taxpayer.

(I'm being hostile and uncharitable here to get a point across and give some counterweight to the status quo.)

We are all in a capitalist system. Capitalism doesn't mean free markets, it has a much wider definition than that, and doesn't require free markets.

I read it as, "why talk about pure capitalism when we're not even in capitalism?" I've seen far more conflation of the two by commenters on HN than not, so maybe that's clouding my reading.

Of course pure capitalism is not realistic nor desirable in practice.

Unfortunately - similar as with housing - most people currently don't have a meaningful choice between having a job or not or paying through their nose for rent or not, which is something that way too many employers and landlords exploit as a natural consequence of a captive market.

The obvious solution would be a livable minimum wage and government provided housing or at the very least severe rent control and building out of infrastructure in rural areas, but all of that is often simply decried as communist.

We don't need a minimum wage. We need a minimum job - the ability to sell your labour hours for a given price.

Alternatively, we could look at what our ancestors dreamed of: utilizing automation to reduce the individual workload for everyone and spread it over more people. A future that is not 5x9-5 is possible. 4 workdays of 6h each with a 30min break at halftime would be a starter.

We would however first need to re-define our culture that derives much of our sense of "self worth" from our employment status, and we would need to think about which jobs we actually want as society... IMO we could cut out a large part of the plague that is advertising, most of the insurance industry (very easy: forcibly fuse all kinds of insurance provider into a single non-profit government entity - added benefit, rates could get massively lower due to less overhead) and likely all of far-distance truck transportation by expanding rail coverage and capacity.

Which is a fallacy of composition - unless you believe you can turn a dumpster diver into a brain surgeon just by applying some amount of training.

It's known as the appeal to fungibility and it doesn't stack up.

Jobs are becoming more skilled, not less, which means that we all have to deploy our hours in solidarity with the skilled who we want to work a full week.

Otherwise they will just stop on Tuesday, once they have made enough for themselves, and have the rest of the week off.

So... take the workload of one brain surgeon, and hire two brain surgeons with 20 hours a week each?

Of course society would need to (drastically) expand training capacity, but it would be better off in the end.

That was always the failure of the 'socially necessary labour time' idea. It assumes complete fungibility amongst people, and that isn't the case.

> Alternatively, we could look at what our ancestors dreamed of: utilizing automation to reduce the individual workload for everyone and spread it over more people. A future that is not 5x9-5 is possible. 4 workdays of 6h each with a 30min break at halftime would be a starter.

This won't solve the initial problem. The amount of work which gets done defines the amount of activity in the economy, but unemployment is compatible with a range of amounts of activity.

If the goal is to keep about 3% of those who want jobs and could work unemployed, then you will achieve that whether people are working 20 hour weeks or 40 hour weeks. (Actually, the target unemployment is a lot higher than that, because there's plenty of people who want jobs and could work, but who the labor market prefers to redefine as "can't work" or "doesn't want to work". If two people can do the same job, but one person can only do it at half the pace, then we often exclude them from the market.)

Right now we have a lot of people that are not working at all even if they wanted... in many households, women stay home for childcare, there are people who don't even register for unemployment because of all sorts of (sometimes willful!) bureaucratic impediments.

By reducing the expected per-person workload to 20 hours a week, society would enable all these people to contribute.

I personally have moved out of the 1st world to avoid the work plague, I help my kids grow up and dig a beautiful garden...my conscience cringes at the "work ethic" which I perceive as government propaganda to help milk peoples time and keep them politically silent... the easiest solution to global warming is to work less, we saw it with covid (at least a whispering) but maybe politicians are avoiding doing anything realistic because...power corrupts...

The market won't solve this.

On one side there is inflation which ruins the economic recovery (too generous benefits) and on the other side you have mass suffering (too stingy benefits). As the primary driver of the shortage (the fear of COVID) goes down, we also need to scale back benefits while maintaining that delicate balance between too generous and too stingy. And we can't stop decreasing benefits until people begin to accept those less desirable jobs again. Failure to do this would push us over into inflation.

Instead, because the power relationship between companies and employees is imbalanced towards companies, who can afford to not hire a few employees while individual employees can't afford to starve, these employees have to accept suffering for a pittance because hey, there's a slight risk of inflation (while companies have been bailed out to the tune of a few trillion).

This is why low wage workers should unionise.

Italy and Greece both had low or shrinking inflation since 2016 and their economies are down the gutter.

The rest of the EU that has reasonable inflation is doing very well with 2%+ growth well above inflation.

Can you explain why you think this would happen?

The article didn't have anything to say about those who work multiple part time jobs, which I suspect is important. Getting paid 50% more to work half as much will leave many low income workers in a precarious position. Worse yet, the threat of job loss (either due to mandated closures or a business failing) introduces the risk of being denied benefits should they be needed again.

It follows, therefore, that economists are stupid and couldn't possibly think of everything they did.

I have seen them being dismissive of mathematicians as well. I think only physicists are spared their scorn.

Even within software engineers they consider themselves the smartest. They are also simultaneously dismissive of Google's interview process, if they fail it; while respecting Googles engineering prowess.

No wonder this is the most upvoted response.

There are times when perspectives from the outside should be considered and be given the dignity of a credible response. Even though that appears to be happening more often now that a microscopic virus has thrust a grand social experiment upon us, it has been all too rare in the past. It is also worth noting that software engineers are far from the only ones going unheard when speaking up. Many outside the discipline have done so when the reality of economics didn't reflect their reality.

The only exception is the commenter who implied you were an out of touch ivory-tower academic because you called the pandemic benefits overgenerous. It’s the only reply whose author seems to have actually read your comment and it doesn’t even make an argument, only calls you names.

To answer your question as to why the top comment was someone just bullying economists based on a misinterpretation of the headline, the reason is because the left was never inherently more pro-science than the right. For a long time, the right denied climate change and the left embraced it because the right was representing coal miners who felt like their jobs were at risk and the left was representing environmentalists who appreciated having a rock-solid justification for why we needed to switch to forms of energy production that emit less carbon (which usually means they pollute less). This got converted in the cultural conciseness to the left “following the science” and the right distrusting it and thinking they’re smarter or more knowledgeable than people whose job it is to study the topic at hand. But that want why, it was just because the obvious prescription coming from science was bad for the population the right represented and good for the population the left represented. (If you still feel the reason the left supported climate change is because they believe what scientists tell them, why does the left broadly oppose nuclear?)

Now, the cultural battleground is moving from climate change and social issues like gay marriage where the science is either neutral or on the side of the left, to economic issues where it’s not so clear cut. For example, there’s wide agreement among economists that the corporate tax is one of the most distortionary and least efficient taxes, and should ideally be reduced to very low rates if not zero. Yet this is broadly ignored on the left, who want to instead make “corporations pay their fair share”, as of whatever you intuitively feel is a corporation’s fair share is the economically optimal corporate tax rate.

Economists are also not united in supporting a federal $15 minimum wage. (Actually if I remember correctly the majority opposite it.) If the left was truly pro-science, they’d ask economists what they thought the minimum wage should be, possibly fund studies to help determine the socially optimal amount, then implement whatever number they say. But that’s not how the number was chosen and now since there’s disagreement among economists about whether it’s a good idea, the left needs to justify why they suddenly know better than the people whose job it is to study this stuff, and that manifests as calling all economists stupid or in the pocket of big business whenever the topic comes up.

Obviously this post wasn’t about minimum wage, but what I’m trying to communicate is that economists are now seen by the left (mostly the young online left) as agents of the enemy, and many see it as their prerogative to make sure nobody has a good impression of them. In their circles everyone knows that, while you should follow the science, these economists either don’t really know what they’re talking about or are being actively deceptive and so their opinions can be safely disregarded. How else can you explain why the GP comment felt the need to call economists stupid before even reading the article to figure out what they had to say?

First, there was no need for the political rant… the answer to the above question is simple: people just read the headline, not the article.

Second, economics isn’t “science” any more than any other “social science”, so the left being “pro-science” or “anti-science” doesn’t really apply.

Economists are not seen as “agents of the enemy” by the left. That’s absurd. There are many economist across the left spectrum: from Stieglitz to Picketty and Kelton.

Stop it. You can’t try to make a point about “sides” having an agenda and then write… this. It looks foolish.

It didn't start with climate change, that was just a sequel to asbestos and smoking denialism.

- from the ivory tower

It's not about feeding and clothing everyone who needs it. It's about seeing if there are any jobs out there that people feel are beneath them and if you find any, lower the floor a bit until the jobs don't look so bad.

lower the floor a bit until the jobs don't look so bad

Surely you can see how this reply reads as “let them eat cake”? (And thats the most polite way to put it I could think of).

I don't think that was the parents intent. I read it as descriptive of how the system currently functions, not as justification for it being that way.

I've been thinking about this, how a society can get necessary work done without forcing some people to choose between doing it or starving. Perhaps if everyone was guaranteed to be fed, to be housed, and to have medical care, then the market would find a fair price for collecting garbage or cleaning floors.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210531112440/https://www.econo...

Profit > People