Yeah, I think the work ethic of a lot of “professional class” careers is very revealing about the culture. There’s a ton of people in this environment who aren’t just thinking “well this career has the potential to make me more than enough money, so I have to figure out how to work hard enough to advance in my career but be able to get leisure by retiring early or finding a better balance once I’m settled.”
Overworking is glorified in all sorts of weird ways by people who don’t need to do that to make rent for the month. It often becomes a badge of honor and even professionals who paid their dues will expect it from their junior coworkers even beyond what is necessary.
I’m glad people who have the ability to are questioning those attitudes these days.
I think there’s been some synergism between the two the last year and half, or so. The great resignation is people saying, “Why should I put up with this bullshit if I can retire?”, antiwork is people saying, “Why should I put up with this bullshit if there are better jobs out there that aren’t being filled?”, followed up by, “Hey, if everyone else quit and I’m stuck doing their jobs too, why am I still only making minimum wage?”, all mixed together with a general pandemic-inspired fatalism. And then add in all the employer bullshit nonsense (see posts above!) that is still going around despite all of the above.
It all feeds into the same thing, which is a whole lot of people suddenly deciding that the status quo we used to accept just doesn’t work any more.
Sure you can. The quits rate has been elevated since early 2021 while the economy and demand for jobs grew. Far more people than usual quit their jobs in the last 1.5 years while the labor force grew (recovered) by 11M.
This is partially correct. The labor force level is back to just about where we left it. But the participation rate is down for all 20+ groups, not just the 55+ group. It’s not a simple matter of people replacing boomers. Nor is it young people not wanting to work.
The quits rate remains elevated. Job openings are double what’s normal.
So the issue now is not so much that the labor force shrank but that in normal times it would have grown by a few million in excess of where it is today.
Coming back to this as my frustration over how what I have said has been twisted around in rather disingenuous ways is cooling down enough.
This has been a trend, sure, but past performance doesn’t equal future results. Things are changing faster and faster, and constantly retraining for the next job means that less is getting done now.
And what is someone supposed to do while training for a new job? How do they support themselves? How do they pay to relocate to where that new job is?
As one example out of a long, long list, do you think that the coal miners in West Virginia should be given assistance in finding new jobs, or should that just be something they do on their own?
And if they are being trained into new jobs, are we going to tell them what jobs they are going to get, or do they have some choice? If they want to try out art, is that something that they would be allowed?
The economy grows as more consumers enter the market. The population doesn’t increase the economy if the additions to the population are not able to participate in it.
Sure, but that would be a misrepresentation of what I said. There are people who are not going to be able to find work that they are qualified for, physically or mentally, and there are also people who are not going to be able to find work where they are geographically. If you dispute this, then fine make your case that the labor market will always provide gainful employment at a living wage to everyone. It hasn’t in the past, so I don’t think that even you are claiming that it will in the future.
So, the question is, what do we do with people who are unemployed through no fault of their own? Do we just let them go homeless and starve on the streets? And then there’s the question of how much resources we want to allocate to determining if someone is unemployed through no fault of their own, or if it is in fact, their fault, and therefore deserves to be hungry and homeless.
Do you feel the same way about someone who inherits stock and lives off the growth and dividends?
Well, I’ve already put it on the table in this thread, but to repeat, it is enough to survive on. A secure place to sleep and keep your belongings, bland but nutritious food, healthcare, and access to educational materials.
The same way we pay for blowing up other people’s houses and schools.
I think that you thought you had some sort of deep and meaningful lesson in there, but it really is just inanity.
See, this is where you twist my words and challenge me to defend the words you have chosen to use, rather than the words that I chose to use. That’s why it took me a while to decide to come back to this thread, in the slight chance that you will continue this discussion in good faith, we’ll see how that does.
Now, what I said was “put food on the table or widget on the shelf.” Have you ever heard of an actor, or a musician? Have you ever heard of an actor that makes more money than a McDonald’s employee or factory worker?
If not, then I can’t help you here. If so, then you have answered your own question.
Now, since you asked about value, people do place value on things that don’t put food on the table or widgets on the shelf, sure. But we also put value on human life and dignity. Some of us put more value on that, and some of you put less.
Right, which is why we shouldn’t be measuring human worth by their productive activity.
If a busker is making enough to live, then someone is providing that person a living as well, right?
Either way, no widget gets put on a shelf or morsel of food put on a table.
See,that’s the problem. There is enough to go around. And when there is not only enough to go around, but a whole lot more than is needed to go around, why do some people take so much to feed their unlimited wants that others cannot get enough to fulfill their much more limited needs?
That’s when capitalism breaks down, when the wants of one are considered more important than the needs of another.
It’s a positive sum game here, and you are playing by negative sum game rules. As long as you do that, you will always make everyone lose, including yourself.
See, that’s where we differ. I think that luck is a huge component. If nothing else being born into an environment that instills a good work ethic is something that you have no control over. Intelligence, health, and abilities are things you luck into in the genetic lottery machine.
And then even beyond that, luck is still a huge factor. Lotta people out there work damn hard every day of their life, barely make it by.
Why not? Aren’t they just unlucky to not be physically or mentally able to work?
And that’s where you keep running into the nonsense notion that we don’t have a growing economy.
I feel that’s a pretty stupid question.
Yes, because manufactures saw all these out of work agricultural workers, and decided that was a good place for cheap land and cheaper labor, and put a factory in. Now that those factories have laid people off due to automation and offshoring, those people are not finding work.
And some became homeless and died on the streets.
Not if they couldn’t stay on the farm with the amount of UBI coming in. They would have moved to where they can have their little 8x8 box to lay their head, given away or lost any possessions that didn’t fit there, and started a diet of bland, but nutritious food.
And desperation forced many of them to the streets, and there are not many that would agree with you that we are better off with a homeless problem.
Automation doesn’t make a job no longer need any people at all, just fewer. How many people did it take to make a road when they had pitchforks and shovels vs the massive, intricate and custom machines that we use now? I see robot bricklayers, as well as 3d printed houses, roombas and all sorts of machinery and robots that do exactly what you say there’s no chance of being automated.
Do you understand what worker productivity is? Do you understand that factories and the like strive to increase worker productivity? Do you understand that if worker productivity goes up, that means fewer workers are needed to produce the same number of goods?
Currently, sure, because we are in the backend of an unprecedented societal disruption. But as a trend, factor jobs have been paying less and less, provide fewer and fewer benefits, and are harder to get.
Yes, and when the opportunity cost is greater than the benefit, what solution do you propose?
What is “work” should be what you do at work.
Yes, and the savings involved in not paying a bunch of people to tell if you are deserving will more than make up for it.
Says who?
Personally, not really. But the companies that they run certainly do.
Fiscal policy should be easy. You print money to pay for the things that you need to pay for, and then you tax the places where the money pools up and collects.
Instead, the places where it pools up donate small portions of that amassed wealth to politicians who tell everyone else to pay up. Then there are people who inexplicably defend this practice, as if they have some fantasy of one day joining those elites.
Your “true confusion” stems from simple ignorance, which, if you chose, could be mitigated. Or if you choose otherwise, you can continue to side with the wealthy over the rest of the population.
And when you can name your own price, and be guaranteed a buyer, whether through monopoly or govt contract, then the value that your product has in the first place is actually hard to pin down, much less the value of the mid level manager who runs weekly meetings for his engineers to learn about synergism.
Sorry, I was referring to the “rest and vest” term, not the “retired in place” term (although as I reread my post that wasn’t obvious).
I imagine that “rest and vest” is much more recent term, unless Bell System was handing out stock options on a vesting schedule as a major part of their comp.
I haven’t researched the demographics thoroughly, but from what I can tell it isn’t just old people retiring early. It’s also two income families deciding they can get by just fine on one income, young people staying with their parents longer, Certain industries like hospitality unable to fill demand because their employees moved on to other jobs. A lot of the demand is being driven by increased desire
And here I’d hoped it was a pause to dig up those data that prompted the notion that we are getting to the point where there isn’t enough work for people to do. The sort of thing one general checks prior to making questionable declarations, but late is better than never.
I wrote nothing about the population verbing anything. Long-term growth in payrolls, the economy, and the population, all rise together. But, on average, the additions to the population are participating in it, as reflected in BLS’s Current Employment Survey and USCB’s Current Population Survey.
What you said was that we getting to the point where there isn’t enough work for people to do, which isn’t true. So any point built on that is neither here nor there, but I apologize that my attempt to translate what seemed like a well-intentioned point was off-mark.
You then go on to describe an approximate of what we’ve been calling (for a ~century) structural unemployment, which was hardy a new phenomenon when the term was coined. Perhaps your thesis is that it’s increasing? That would take some work to back up but at least you’d have some friendly minds in the economics literature to fall back on.
But I don’t think it matters if structural unemployment is increasing or decreasing, because if it’s not zero, there’s a problem that may warrant a policy solution. Basing that policy need or solution on the notion that “we are getting to the point where there isn’t enough work for people to do” falls deep into “not helping” territory. That structural unemployment exists is utterly noncontroversial. Whether we should do more to address it and, if yes, how, are then ripe for debate. My knee-jerk responses to that are “yes” and “I don’t know” because I haven’t done enough homework to back up a proposal, but I’m not opposed to paying more taxes to address the issue.
No. “Work ethic” is a collection of concepts that mostly revolve around doing whatever work you choose to do as honestly and competently as you are able. Whether you are a dishwasher, a high-powered attorney, or an airline pilot, you should do that job as well as you can because 1) someone is paying you to do it and 2) other people are counting on it to get done.
Often having a “professional class” career (like an attorney or architect) requires a lot of hard work and extra hours because 1) they are highly competitive, 2) there’s a lot to learn, both academically and on the job, 3) economic and business that impose deadlines that must be met, 4) many have cultures of excessive work and “paying your dues” (which is often really a way of ensuring you learn what you need to learn and are competitive enough to make a career of it).
The overwork you speak of sounds more like what I’ve heard referred to as “hustle culture”. It’s this mentality that you need to be CONSTANTLY working or performing activities related to your career - networking, writing code, writing proposals, developing your personal brand, building your side hustle, all that shit. Complementing hustle culture is “hustle porn”, which are mostly self-aggrandizing social media posts by millennials about how much work they are doing or stories about people who went from living at home with their parent to running their own multi-million dollar company in a few years.
It’s good that people are questioning the later because it is largely a fiction espoused by corporations trying the emulate the success of Silicon Valley tech companies in order to please the Wall Street bankers who own controlling interest in their companies. Companies want you to work as hard as you can for as long as you can so long as you are useful, then they will quickly discard you. And I think people are waking up to that, if they haven’t already.
But that should not be confused with having a poor work ethic. Work still needs to get done and people willing to put in the hard work to get it done should not have to pick up the slack for people who don’t feel like working.
And regardless, I think most people want to be treated with respect or at least honestly and fairly and not have the rules of their employment changed on a whim.
Companies are training people to have a poor work ethic. If someone gets hired and does nothing, that’s one thing, but think of the people who have worked hard for years, only to find at a certain point the company considers 70% of them as mediocre and no raises or tiny raises, even in a hot economy. Some will leave, but others will give themselves an hourly raise by cutting back on hours or production.
In the Soviet Union this was called “you pretend to pay me, I pretend to work.”
It’s that and the fact that even to this day there’s this culture in a lot of professional careers where they insane overwork is a rite of passage or a badge of honor and I’m glad people are pushing back more and more against that stuff.
There’s an attitude of “I had to do it, so you should to!” Studies have shown that productivty sharply declines after about 50 hours of work as fatigue sets in with work slowing down and more errors being made. A medical resident in some specialties might put in 140 hours of work in a single week which actually endangers patients as the doctor is more prone to making errors. I suspect this attitude stems from a misplaced sense of unfairness.
When I was working 12 hours a day in revenge I wrote a column around a paper called “The $200 hour” which showed that people working 80 hours a week accomplished the same as those working 40 hours due to the issues you mentioned. And got paid overtime. The paper got republished in an IEEE management review, but wasn’t available online the last time I checked.
This is absolutely completely freaking true. When I was a young inexperienced coder, I’d sometimes work most of the night trying to debug a problem. I learned that that was counter-productive pretty quickly. More efficient to just go home if your first tries are not working.
Waaaaay easier to solve a problem that you haven’t turned into a massive hairball by working when you were tired and stressed. Fresh eyes. New day. Often figuring out a solution in a relatively short time.
I have a friend who joined the army and went through officer school at Sandhurst (equivalent of West Point). We were discussing our other friend who had become a city lawyer working 12/14 hour shifts with occasional all-nighters. He said that:
They did an all day/all night exercise at Sandhurst
It did not go brilliantly
In the debrief, the instructors stressed that the point of the exercise was to demonstrate that when you are tired (and physically exhausted) you tend to make bad dumb decisions.
It was striking that the army (whose members will be in situations where they really, really don’t get a choice about what hours they keep) thought this was an important lesson to teach, but the City law firm did not, and indeed, tended to valorise a long-hours culture.
Army officers also don’t bill out at $300 an hour.
One thing that people seem to neglect is that people work long hours as corporate lawyers, investment bankers, tech startups/unicorns, doctors, Big-4 accountants, management consultants, and other professions because they make a lot of money. The command six figure salaries, often right out of school or shortly thereafter. They might have huge bonuses or stock options. There is frequently a path to massive executive salaries or big IPO money.