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.
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.