I think the conclusion of this sort of economic thinking is basically: Give your employees just enough money that they can keep they keep their head above the water but not enough to flourish, and just enough pressure/responsibility that they don't have energy to do anything else, but not too much that they have a complete mental breakdown that leaves them with the conclusion that they should leave your industry at any cost.
When you spent a lot of time and money into a specialized and demanding career, I imagine it practically very difficult to actually change your career, even if it's killing you. It's probably even worse if you have familial obligations. You likely do not have time or energy to better your situation after hours, and if you quit, you potentially resign yourself (perhaps) to many years of destitution while you accumulate the necessary knowledge to do something else. I would not be surprised if many people just bear bad conditions because the cost to do anything else worth one's time is simply too high.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-01-24/wisconsin-...
Yes, you hire them back at travel nurse rates, while you lobby for your state legislators to ban your employees from doing any work if they quit.
https://medium.com/geekculture/the-dead-sea-effect-d71df1372...
I recall hearing about one desert conflict "gratuitous" allocation of several times the prior typical water per day resulted in outsized military performance. I think it may have been the Six Day War. But Silicon Valley is basically the exemplar of that business model as they specifically go with a very high COL area in the world's richest country instead of mass outsourcing. Even assuming that the actor is a heartless and selfish bastard what truly matters first is net profit.
It is the same fallacious false economy seen both among slaveowners and the Soviet Union. That the labor is free or already paid for so don't worry about its efficiency.
They are not like computer programmers who can make an industrial process be 10,000x faster. They cannot magically care 10,000x more, no matter how relaxed and comfortable they are.
Furthermore, as they are pushed closer and closer to failure, the collapse in patient care standards does not result in a collapse in profit. People aren't going to not seek medical treatment, it's a basic human need, sometimes a life or death need.
So we're back to the question: does that mean they should be exploited and milked of all their caring, at the same time the standard of care collapses, because the economic incentives reward that?
And that is fundamentally a moral/humanitarian question in which you have to make an adult moral judgement.
There are a lot of jobs openings available to someone with an RN certificate and some experience. Unemployment in that group is close to zero. They don't all work in direct patient care roles.
But I'll go ahead and explain the joke. There is a long history of the private sector using the spectre of communism (or socialism, or "big government" or "nanny state") as a canard to prevent sensible policies eg. anything that would improve patient care, even if it were at minuscule costs and will use that canard to justify lobbying aggressively to prevent it. And if they cannot obstruct legislative action then they switch to defunding the state bodies which enforce the regulations as an exercise in "cost cutting" because "the state is wasting your hard earned taxes!!" etc.
Hope you have a better rest of your day.
Edit: I mean, once you have set a regulation, and established a body to police it, you have already interfered with the market, so even what you are suggesting could be described as having "done a communism"
Exactly, remove regulations from health care. I'm dead serious. Regulatory burden on nurses and health care workers are insane. It's completely plausible the net effect would be far more people saved than lost, due to greater access to healthcare and lower burdens to achieving outcomes.
For example, hospitals spend a lot of money complying with CMS reporting rules on iatrogenic harm such as bed sores and secondary infections. Should they stop doing that?
You're right, apologies for not being specific.
>Which specific regulations would you propose to remove?
Specifically, all of them.
>Should they stop doing that?
Object to framing of the question. Hints at a false dichotomy. Desirable outcomes can be achieved without precisely following a regulation.
The second point is entirely accurate. It's one of the major factors that makes communism, socialism, untenable in many ways.
What's hilarious / frustrating is how these same people think that humans in a libertarian utopia won't be corrupt, won't want for money and power, and as a result, "Sure, remove all regulation - the market will get more efficient! It certainly won't end up like the railroads in the 19th century, or something out of an Upton Sinclair novel!"
Never the supplier using ill gotten capital from predatory business practices to lobby or perpetrate regulatory capture.
Nope, it's always those pesky regulators sticking their hands out. Never those Captains of Industry! Paragons of Humanity and Unquestionable Beings of Moral Fiber and Impeccably Ethical Manner!
What part of that didn't you understand? Where did I say the captains of industry aren't corrupt. I said "everyone."
The consumer has the power to voluntarily spend or not spend with a particular health care provider for the vast majority of health care decisions. Their providers are beholden to the customer.
The regulator, on the other hand, is not beholden to the customer this way. The regulator, are typically integrated as part of government and thus not only are they unbeholden to the customer but they also are part of the same entity as men with guns who can use violence to achieve their ends. They are nearly always unelected and only in the loosest sense does the customer have any control -- no one seriously votes for their senators / representative based on who they approve of in say the FDA (can 99% of voters even name a single regulator in say the FDA?) -- that vote is dominated by other even more important issues you need your representative for. These regulators are effectively an ultimate source of corruption, backed by guns and only in the most tangential sense accountable to consumers but with wide latitude to control industry in ways that harm the consumer.
Yes everyone is corrupt, including the 'captains of industry' and even the 'consumer' but regulators make things massively worse. Regulators create an amplification effect of corruption.
Many people don't have even a little optionality.
I definitely feel for those paying child support, because 'imputed income' means you must pay at whatever rate the judge thinks you can make the best money at. You can never take a more relaxing lower paying job, because it will result in your imprisonment. Those people really have no future in the US -- their only option to throttle back their income is suicide, leave the country, or wait to go to jail. I blame society for the existence of these debtor's prisons, not nursing employers.
This is basically how it works when you're married, though, at least in my family. Whether I'm unemployed or my work life is booming, the child cost the same for me as when I'm not. During bad times I liquidate my engineering tools / spend from savings / go into debt / sell my vehicle to take care of my kid if needed. On the flip side during the good times the extra money goes into investments and retirement. The amount I need to take care of the kid is fixed, with the amount I spend having virtually nothing to do with the amount I make. My level of personal real spending has changed very little since I got my first near minimum wage job after leaving home at 18; and definitely not linearly with my salary (at best I eat out more now, but that's because I'm busier making money). When the kid came they've always been a relatively fixed cost -- or at least unaffected by our salaries.
My kid would not be effected the slightest, better or worse, for my wage unless I was stuck below ~$12/hr for an extended time, so maybe it would make more sense to take a variable amount up to say $12/hr and then just a fixed price after that.
>doesn't mean that what you can afford is enough to raise the child well
Really depends. Some children grow up in situations where money is scarce but nonetheless have fulfilling childhoods that lead them towards success. It's also worth noting parents who can provide other things in lieu of money -- such as a homestead where they grow their own food and build their own house is perfectly acceptable in a marriage but somehow not acceptable as part of child support enforcement. It doesn't make sense.
>This has the benefit of allowing low earning parents to pay less
Again this is an odd choice. When I am making nothing, I still contribute half to the family costs. When I'm making 6 figures, my half stays the same. Both my wife and I have a deal where we pay half the costs. That way there is no resentment that someone is paying more just because they make more. It happens to be my wife makes significantly more money than me, but we still pay 50/50 costs of child and other bills with the remainder going into our own unshared accounts. It would be extraordinarily selfish and greedy of me for me to demand my wife to pay more simply because she makes more money, yet if we divorced this is precisely what the judge would order in many states. No matter how nasty the divorce I would simply return her share of her savings along with anything over half for spending of the child -- to not do so would make me a vile and greedy person who cowardly uses the violence of the state to unjustly take from others.
In our case the cost of the child is about 6-8% of our current salaries; so as you can see from child support calculators, about half of the money calculated by child support worksheets would be entirely for the lolz of the judge.
>So the compromise is to base the amount paid on the amount the parent makes
Unfortunately this isn't how it works, as above alluded. Once you make a certain amount it becomes your 'imputed income'. Once you set the precedent you can earn a maximum, the judge expects that to be your income you're capable of. You pay based on that higher amount whether you relax back to a lower paying job or not. In this way you're set up into a trap where if you try to get a higher paying job to save up to pay off years of child support, you're stuck in an even more fucked position and meanwhile if your kid is like mine and has a relatively fixed cost then the rest is bled off as backdoor alimony as a reward to your ex-spouse for divorcing you.
Another interpretation is that the economy is a tool for exploiting people. For example, human beings are inherently of the opinion that human decency is good, they want to be functioning members of society, they care about the wellbeing of others, and if they are paid crap and treated like garbage, they will endure that, even to the point of great personal cost, emotional distress, mental illness, alcoholism, and even death. But as long as they don't quit, then everything is fine.
If you want to see an indocator of terrible compensation - check why pretty much noone (at least here) wants to be a nurse.
Profession is rapidly aging because new ppl are not joining. And they are not joining because work is hard and pay is terrible.
The whole Healthcare system if we dont get robots in place fast is going to crumble soon like a house of cards.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/10/25/1047290...
The work is hard, but the pay is well above many other jobs and there are jobs everywhere.
+ emigration of nurses to Germany
People don't 'switch careers' when they've spent years getting good at it. What they do instead is sit around posting on HackerNews and fucking the dog in all sorts of other ways.
Do you realize the irony of it all? This place gets like 1/10th the traffic on weekends. That's not a coincidence.
There are, of course, onlookers who are unable to even perceive the moral dimensions that normal human beings take for granted. Perhaps they were beamed down from the mothership just yesterday? The prevalence of psychopathy among human beings cannot be as high as it would appear from the average internet message-board, can it?
In healthcare I get the feeling that a lot of workers feel stuck in that there are many patients and people depending on them, and to leave would sort of be like abandoning them while increasing the burden on ex-cowoerkers.
Not necessarily. The "transaction costs" of switching careers are huge. If you want to make comparable money to nursing, you probably need training in something else, which likely requires a period of low or no income, possibly years of schooling or other training, etc.
It's hard to switch careers after 30 -- not always impossible, but certainly hard to revert back to the lifestyle of a 20-something for some time. People may stick it out despite unhappiness.
Doesn't mean compensation is adequate.
At what point in time did America have better jobs? A lot of people may reference the glory days of 70s and 80s manufacturing, but those jobs went from bad to good with the power of unionization. There was no free lunch.
Staying when you want to leave indicates there's enough compensation to 'make it worth it' at least versus whatever shitty alternatives you have. Leaving when you want to stay, to me, would be a much bigger indicator that nurses who want to stay in the profession can't because of wage/benefits/conditions issues.