cellio | low-end jobs

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behavior,
money

low-end jobs

Automated alternatives to humans in the service industry have been around for a while. ATMs were probably the first widespread case of this. The real value of ATMs was the ability to interact with your bank at times when the bank wouldn't otherwise be available. I think ATMs are a real win for that reason, and the only time I visit humans in my bank is when I want to make a deposit.

More recently, I've interacted with automation that is designed to specifically replace humans rather than broadening service. The automated check-out at grocery stores is the big example here. Instead of one cashier per line, stores now need one employee per 4 or so lines. This isn't making things more convenient for customers; unlike ATMs, the scanners are only available when the store is open anyway.

There are practical reasons I tend to avoid the automated checkouts, mostly related to speed. The line for the human has to be about three times as long as the line for the machine before the machine looks like a time-saver. People may get more proficient at scanning and packing over time, of course.

But I find that even absent that consideration, I'm reluctant to use the machine. Doing so helps to eliminate a low-end job that might be the only job the job-holder is capable of doing. Most of the cashiers I see at the grocery store aren't college-age kids looking for spending money; they're middle-aged and sometimes visibly handicapped.

This is not wholly a compassion-based argument; it's also one of expedience. I think we as a society are better off if almost everyone has a productive job. And some people are only capable of the lower-end jobs that are most in danger of being automated away. (Aside: for this reason, requirements for high minimum wages are also a bad idea -- don't make it cost-ineffective to hire people at prices they're willing to work for!)

We cannot avoid automation, of course, and in many cases it's a good thing. I'm no Luddite (she says, typing on her computer :-) ). But I kind of wish that we could focus it a little differently sometimes.

And yes, sometimes the humans are annoying to deal with. Last night I lost close to ten minutes to an inept cashier, and there is one (mentally challenged) bagger who I will never again allow to touch my groceries because he seems utterly bewildered by ideas like "the bread goes on top" (multiple failures). People who aren't capable of doing the job shouldn't hold the job anyway just out of pity. (Giant Eagle was right to fire the guy who was partially eating food and then putting the package back on the shelf, and I don't care that he didn't understand that this was wrong.) But y'know, the machines aren't painless either -- just try to get a scanning error fixed. And for the most part, the people holding these jobs are quite capable and willing to work, and I find I'm rooting for the people over the machines.

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I think you've seen a lower percentage of inept/apathetic cashiers than I have. ;-) I dread going into one particular grocery store after the self-checkouts have closed because the women who are on at night are always distracted, chatting amongst themselves, wandering around the front end far from the registers, or just otherwise dippy. They seem surprised when someone actually comes up the register and wants to buy something and doesn't want to wait for them to finish their conversation. I find similar cashier problems in places that don't have self-checkout. It's very rare that I get someone who's quick and competent and not bitchy.

There's also almost never a line for self-checkouts here, and always a line for cashiers during the day. I think the stores are unwilling or unable to hire enough people to staff the regular checkouts. Having dealt with stupid retail payroll policies (you can only pay X amount a week, so you can't actually put enough workers on to serve the customers you're having at certain times, even if you are making enough money to justify paying those workers), I'm not surprised.

It's too bad that people who are disabled/handicapped, who'd like to work and have something to do, risk losing their benefits and thus not having enough money to live by taking these jobs, though. There should be a better way to do it, I just don't know what. :-/

I dread going into one particular grocery store after the self-checkouts have closed because the women who are on at night are always distracted, chatting amongst themselves, wandering around the front end far from the registers, or just otherwise dippy.

I've certainly been known to take my business elsewhere in the face of crap like that, and to tell the manager why. Of course, that's easier in a sizable city; I don't know if you have that option.

I almost always see lines for both humans and self-checkout. The lines for humans tend to be longer but faster. It only takes one person ahead of you in the self-check line who can't figure out the code for some produce or who can't find the bar code on a package or who thinks there's a price error to ruin your "quick trip to the store", after all.

It's too bad that people who are disabled/handicapped, who'd like to work and have something to do, risk losing their benefits and thus not having enough money to live by taking these jobs, though. There should be a better way to do it, I just don't know what. :-/

Indeed. And I don't see why this is hard: if the state has said you should get $X/month, and your job pays $X-Y/month, you should get Y instead of X if you have that job. Ok, it's not really that tidy because you have to account for the deductions from the paycheck (income taxes, social security, etc), but these are known quantities.

It only takes one person ahead of you in the
self-check line who can't figure out the code for some produce or who can't find the bar code on a package or who thinks there's a price error to ruin your "quick trip to the store", after all.

Actually, as implemented locally, that's not true: the self-serv machines are arranged in groups, and a single line forms behind each group of machines. This means all four machines have to be down or have problems for the line to be brought to a halt.

This can be done for the self-servs but not the full-servs: the full-serves take up too much physical space, while the self-servs can be packed tighter without compromising access.

Note that in my local store, the only self-servs are express lines. It demonstrates something interesting: the human cashiers are faster at scanning than their non-specialist customers, but the machines faster at handling the payment transaction. So it is more efficient to use a full-serv line only when you have enough items that faster scanning will save more time than faster transaction.

Since my grocery does a brisk business in take-out meals (salad bar, soup bar, stirfry bar, etc.) this makes a lot of sense.

Also, in my grocery store, they don't seem to hire baggers, or at least not in the hours I go. Usually the person at the register, after having scanned the groceries, has to turn around and bag. This is not efficient.

Actually, as implemented locally, that's not true: the self-serv machines are arranged in groups, and a single line forms behind each group of machines.

Ah. That would be nice. And this isn't the only application that could benefit from the "form single line" approach. It doesn't seem to be very common here -- banks and the post office but not otherwise, most of the time. Very frustrating.

In the hours when I shop there seems to be about a 50% chance of a bagger. It looks like they have fewer baggers than cashiers with dynamic reallocation based on need. So if I have a lot of things a bagger will probably show up, but not if I just have a few things. Pity, in a way -- if I have a lot of things then once I fill up the conveyor belt I could start bagging, but most of the time someone is already doing it.

They can be dishonest, (woot wel) but I want to have them have jobs. I have to navigate systems that don't actually answer my questions, or want me to get to ask humans a question that isn't included on a voice menu. Because they'de have to hire and train.

Maybe, Egad, provide something like decent pay and health care. If we can't nationalize, bullying is the alternative. Let me know if it gets better. (Charles!? My smelling salts!

Do you think nationalized health care is working well in Canada?

The problem with the idea of mandated "decent pay" (which we all callibrate differently) is that some jobs aren't worth much. But I'd rather people take those jobs at the market rate and, if necessary, collect the difference from welfare, than have no job at all and collect all of it. (I realize that our welfare system is broken and interferes with this; I'm talking ideals here.) Because not only do I want to lower the cost of welfare to the workers who fund it, but I also want people to have the meme of working being good. It's better for all of us.

But if you tell the guy who runs the Mom&Pop grocery store that he now has to pay all his people twice the market rate, the result is that he'll be forced to fire half his workers or close up shop. Either way, the service to his customers diminishes, and more people end up out of work. I want Mom&Pop shops to be out there, not just mega-chains, so I can support my local community. Anti-business laws don't just target Giant Eagle and WallMart, after all.

Sadly, the mom & pop grocery store is not much in evidence any more. Because people want the store to have what they want, not what happens to be in one day. (We faced the dilemma of this all the time in Baltimore.) Mom & pop are better but not economically viable most places. That's why we're talking about these machines at Giant Eagle.

But let's say we were talking to the mom & pop store -- there are certainly ways to exempt businesses with a certain type of labor pool from wage and benefit requirements. Indeed it would provide a competitive boost to smaller stores to do so.

For supermarkets, an increase in the cost of doing business (in higher gas prices, or labor costs, or whatever), as long as it's uniform, is primarily passed on to the consumer rather than creating fewer jobs, since (as mentioned before) we're already talking about a bare-bones number and pay of employees. Sure, it's bad that consumers bear that cost. But if all consumers did what you did -- patronized less efficient mom & pop stores, or stores with no self-serve checkout -- that inefficiency would *still* be borne by the consumer, only voluntarily rather than by mandate. So either moral values -- and the costs associated with them -- are part of the equation, or they aren't. If people have jobs OR wages a free market would deny them, it makes no difference if it's the government or it's consumer morals that do the dictating. Economically OR morally. At least to me.

Do you think nationalized health care is working well in Canada?

It suddenly occurred to me last night, that it's reasonably likely that, nationalized health care is working just as well in Canada as private health care is working in the US -- only in Canada, that "well" is spread more evenly.

To oversimplify for clarity: In the US, some people get wonderful care, and some people get no care at all. In Canada, everybody gets middling health care.

In the US, people who get that wonderful care are going to look at Canada and say "Yeeesh! No way! I don't want my standard of care to go down!" From their perspective (that of the US "haves") nationalized health care looks like a disaster.

But, boy, it looks like a big step up to someone who has no health care at all. That's a hell of a lot of people who have no health care.

Is it morally/ethically fair that the wonderful health care I have available to me is only at the expense of my fellow man?

(This is all if we take as granted that the Canadian system necessarily results in lower maximal quality health care. Maybe it doesn't. But I'm certainly open to the argument that it does. So, if it does, but raises the minimal quality of health care, we have the moral issue I explain above.)

Morally/ethically, I think it is right and proper that there be a minimum level of care that is available to all. There is a minimum now, actually, in that an ER isn't allowed to turn you away, but we can do a lot better than that. But I can't come up with an implementation that is fair in terms of personal liberty.

Canada does not permit the "haves" to buy additional care. This means they come across the border to get care because they don't want to accept the standard level (or standard waiting-list time). I know that this happens at least somewhat because I know people who do it. Note, by the way, that if the US goes this route then we won't have the option of easily crossing the border for care; flights to Europe are a lot more expensive than drives to New York.

So if you have a minimum level and the ability to buy more then you're on firmer ground, except that then you might see the quality of that minimum drop because the policy-makers are "haves" who do not themselves use the system. (Sort of the way Congresscritters are exempt from the Social-Security Ponzi scheme.)

So on the one hand, you're tempted to force everyone into the same level of care as a prod for making it a reasonable level, but on the other hand, it's not fair to penalize people who have the resources to do better. Isn't this the fundamental problem of communism?

Canada does not permit the "haves" to buy additional care. This means they come across the border to get care because they don't want to accept the standard level (or standard waiting-list time). I know that this happens at least somewhat because I know people who do it. Note, by the way, that if the US goes this route then we won't have the option of easily crossing the border for care; flights to Europe are a lot more expensive than drives to New York.

Yeah. Let me be real, real clear on this. I really am proposing that maybe you and I -- clearly both "haves" -- should, for moral reasons, accept less good health care for ourselves, for the sake of other people having better health care. I hate, hate, hate this. It scares the bejesus out of me. This is life-and-death stuff, and the consequences of this sort of decision could be personally catastrophic and tragic to me and the people I care about.

But there are also people I care about who can't afford the medication they need to maintain a chronic illness so it doesn't spiral out of control. There are people I care about who only ever see a doctor when the problem has gotten to be such a crisis that the emergency room is the only option. This is not news, I'm sure.

This all scares me intensely.

But I also have to live with myself.

So please -- I would LOVE to be wrong on this one. Check my logic:

1) Given: The nationalization of medicine in Canada is why it is worse than the medicine in the US, which is private.

2) Id est: The private medicine of the US is better than the nationalized medicine in Canada, because it is private.

3) Private medicine -- medical care sold on the open market as a commodity -- is subject to the law of supply and demand in pricing.

4) The law of supply and demand in pricing stipulates that the price of a commodity will stabilize at that point on F(supply, demand) which maximizes F.

5) The law of supply and demand stipulates that as the price rises demand falls off. This is for the economic definition of "demand" which does not mean "wants", but means "has cash on the barrel head to pay for".

6) For any prize above zero, there are, definitionally, buyers for whom that price exceeds their demand. The further above zero it is, the more buyers that is.

7) Since F(supply, demand) never stabilizes with a price of zero (since it maximizes price X purchases), there will always be buyers for whom the price exceeds their demand, again, where "demand" include "capacity to pay".

8) Therefore medicine which requires being sold as a commodity (as our 1 and 2 above) to attain superior quality, as a concomitant requires for that quality that some known number of buyers be unable to acquire it.

Did I screw up anywhere? I'll be the first the say that economics is not one of my pursuits. (I'll tell you where and when economics and I parted company in a different thread.)

As far as I can see (and I welcome correction) the quality healthcare I enjoy can only exist if some people can't have any healthcare at all. That is, it seems, the logical outcome of arguing that our superior medicine is a result of it being a commodity.

(If, however, we can argue that our superior healthcare is due to something else, we can have our cake and eat it, too. A nice thought, but I'm dubious. Willing to entertain arguments though, if anybody has 'em.)

Yeah. Let me be real, real clear on this. I really am proposing that maybe you and I -- clearly both "haves" -- should, for moral reasons, accept less good health care for ourselves, for the sake of other people having better health care.

But all this does is to redefine the "haves". Do you really think that, say, the family of a doctor is going to get the same quality care in this system that everyone else does? There will always be "haves" -- if not "have cash to pay for it", then "have connection to a provider who'll see me privately".

6) For any prize above zero, there are, definitionally, buyers for whom that price exceeds their demand. The further above zero it is, the more buyers that is.

This is true of health care, or food, or housing. The logical extension of your argument would be that no one should be able to buy any of those (above the median quality) because doing so means someone else would go without. If this argument is correct, then it's about much more than health care.

But what actually seems to happen today is that there is a government-subsidized minimum, in the form of welfare, and most people pay their own way. Why does it work for housing but not for health care?

But what actually seems to happen today is that there is a government-subsidized minimum, in the form of welfare, and most people pay their own way. Why does it work for housing but not for health care?

Housing: there is public housing for (some of) the very poor, those better off can afford to pay their own way, and those in the middle get screwed.

Health Care: there is a publicly funded system that (theoretically) cares for the very poor, those better off can afford to buy into the system, and those in the middle get screwed.

The group in the middle getting screwed is a lot bigger, but the difference isn't as big as you think.

The national health care system in Canada is not the only model available. In fact, it's not even the same model in all Canadian provinces... and there is a big push to privatize parts of the system.

Most of Europe has what is called "two-tier health care" - a public universal system, and (presumably better) private care available for those who want to pay for it.

And one feature that you might want to think about: in Britain, Public Health doctors are public employees, and select from positions where the public health authorities have decided that doctors are needed. In Canada, doctors are all in private practice, with the bills paid by the various provincial health systems. One effect of this is a chronic shortage of doctors in smaller cities and towns, and in rural areas.

Which system would you prefer?

So, if my logic is right, then the situation isn't:

to force everyone into the same level of care as a prod for making it a reasonable level

It's a matter theft.

it's not fair to penalize people who have the resources to do better

It dawns on me there's this interesting edge case I don't know the Libertarian position on. So, how do Libertarians feel about laws prohibiting the sale of stolen goods?

In any event, if I am managing to undersell my local Walmart by means of hijacking its widget delivery trucks, seizing its inventory of widgets and then selling them for less than Walmart does -- cause, hey, I didn't pay for those widgets, so they're pure profit to me -- I don't think that makes you entitled to buy widgets at my price instead of Walmart's price. If the police busted me, and you were to complain to them that they were interfering with your "personal liberty" to buy things by taking away your supplier, everyone would look at you like you were crazy, right? Would they be wrong to do so?

The fact that someone has the "resources to do better" does not mean that they're entitled to be provided with a market of stolen goods (or otherwise criminal goods, e.g. assassinations are also illegal to buy) in which to spend those resources.

I do not see it as either unfair not to let people buy things they could only have by depriving others of them, nor as a "penalty" and certainly not as a violation of "personal liberty".

Isn't this the fundamental problem of communism?

That depends on whose "problem" you're talking about. If you're talking about "why people who don't like communism don't like it", I think you're right, but that's quite a different thing from the implementary issues which people who like communism see as its problem. I've spoken with at least one communist Russian who approved and believed in that system (whose answer, BTW, to "So then why did you leave?" was "Anti-semitism") who felt that the "failure to reward" thing was a complete non-issue in reality. I'm modestly inclined to agree, due to my understanding of psychology.

Personally, I think the fundamental problem with Communism is the same as the fundamental problem with Libertarianism: pie-in-the-sky ideal systems which intersect with human reality really poorly. They assume spherical chickens.

So, how do Libertarians feel about laws prohibiting the sale of stolen goods?

The same way you do. The libertarian philosophy is fundamentally about the individual's right to be left alone. Theft is a crime against the individual, and its consequences are invalid. (That is, third-party buyers don't get to say "not my problem"; they get to seek damages from the thief who sold them the stolen goods.)

I hadn't considered the health-care situation as theft. If one agrees that buying better health care takes any care at all from the poor, then that's something that has to be dealt with. I'm not sure about that premise, though (see my reply above).

Personally, I think the fundamental problem with Communism is the same as the fundamental problem with Libertarianism: pie-in-the-sky ideal systems which intersect with human reality really poorly. They assume spherical chickens.

Well, that's true of any system, including Capitalism. There has never been a perfect implementation of any of them.

As for communism, the specific point I was wondering about was the slacker factor -- why should I do more than I need to when it makes no difference to my level of comfort? Is the Russian you spoke with saying that that's not how it plays out? I understand that it doesn't play out that way on kibbutzim (at least sometimes), but those are smaller self-selected communities where everyone knows everyone else. It's much easier to slack off on the guy a few blocks over who you don't like much anyway and who'll never notice you doing it.

Well, that's true of any system, including Capitalism. There has never been a perfect implementation of any of them.

There is the "no perfect implementation" problem, and then there's the "if you had a 'perfect implementation' and populated it with real people" problem.

Anarcho-libertarianism probably works beautifully populated by Heinleinian rationalists. Heck, the early internet was basically anarcho-libertarian, and it was great. It got colonized and its culture eradicated by capitalists non-rationalists because it had absolutely no defense, but next time we'll build walls.

And then there's the "if you have a 'perfect implementation' populated with real people and it working perfectly.... but sucking mightily."

Totalitarian authoritarianism can "work" "splendidly" (I'm told). It accomodates real people really well. I doubt I would be happy in such a society, no matter how "perfectly" realized the vision was.

As for communism, the specific point I was wondering about was the slacker factor -- why should I do more than I need to when it makes no difference to my level of comfort? Is the Russian you spoke with saying that that's not how it plays out?

The Russian I spoke to is on LJ, should I invite her over?

As to myself, it seems to me there are two kinds of work: the work people would do anyway, and the work you have to pay people to do. Work in the first class is not necessarily any less valuable to society: it includes doctors, scientists, engineers, programmers, artists, librarians, etc. Those people aren't going to slack off simply because they're not necessarily working for money.

People who do work they don't like -- I don't expect many factory workers would do it without pay -- may slack off if compensation isn't contingent.

Then again, it's possible to have a system whereby if you fail to meet the grade, you're not docked pay, you're moved to a less desirable job; and contrariwise, mastery is rewarded with promotion. There are obvious problems with this, clearly.

Perhaps the solution is that "would-anyway" workers should be communistically organized, and everyone else capitalistically.... or is that just what socialism is?

The Russian I spoke to is on LJ, should I invite her over?

Sure!

Work in the first class is not necessarily any less valuable to society: it includes doctors, scientists, engineers, programmers, artists, librarians, etc. Those people aren't going to slack off simply because they're not necessarily working for money.

On the other hand, they might cherry-pick the work. Programmers would rather develop grand new programs than maintain old cruft. Doctors would rather not deal with problem patients. Scientists would rather work on the shiny new research problems, not do grunt chores usually given to grad student. Within any field, it's worth looking at which sub-fields seem to have either shortages or higher compensation; that might signal work that won't get done without personal motivation even by people who have a stronger inclination to work. The answer to "will you work?" is rarely "yes" or "no"; it's usually "it depends on what the work is".

People who do work they don't like [...] may slack off if compensation isn't contingent.

I would certainly expect people who don't like their work to do the minimum acceptable job, yes. We've all dealt with such people, and not just in the crappy service jobs. Surely you've been stuck working with disgruntled programmers?

You're right that there are considerations other than money, such as what your next assignment will be. As you say, there are problems with that approach too.

Perhaps the solution is that "would-anyway" workers should be communistically organized, and everyone else capitalistically....

Except that if the "would-anyway" workers would be able to live better under capitalism (probably true for most doctors and programmers; probably not true for most artists and librarians), wouldn't they just lie about their intentions in order to get into the capitalist pool?

The other significant difference between US health care and the health care of every other wealthy nation (not just Canada) is the amount sucked up by administrative costs, since each doctor or hospital has to follow the varying reimbursement and coverage rules of every insurance company that their patients belong to. According to one study, health care bureaucracy costs Americans about $1,000 per capita per year, while Canadians only spend $300.

A while back, Max Sawicky linked to some paper by a liberal think tank, proposing that the US save money on Medicaid by subcontracting out to countries that have a higher life expectancy than the US but spend less per capita on health care. He said he couldn't tell whether or not the paper was meant as a satire.

My friend who lives in Canada hasn't complained any. I've heard tales both ways, though. I won't know for sure unless we try it. Since I've found a dr. I respect here, and have lots of furniture and toys, moving could be tough

Helped run the Mom, Son, & Daughter deal. We paid everyone what we could afford,(no executive bonuses) or what they were worth and hoped they'd leave if they weren't worth minimum. Our health care plan involved fish medicine and shiatsu. One does what one can. None of us were rich. My job was to make myself unnecessary.8-)

It think the health care is great here compared to the US and I have experienced the US system as a have as I had coverage from the company I worked for.

1. I don't have to worry which doctor I go see.
2. I can choose my doctor without being penalized financially for using the PPO option
3. When I am sick, I go to the doctor without worrying about the headache of paying and being reimbursed. Since I am back in Canada, I am much more able to get the care I need instead of coming up to limits and unapproved treatment options. All the doctors know the system out here!
4. Cobra - yeah I had to pay 300$/month for about a year. Enough said
5. So you hear about Canadian waiting times and surgery. Well yes non-urgent stuff takes months but if you need to be seen ahead of the queue you are critical. My aunt had cancer related surgery - she waited days. My grandmother had excellent care before she died. It's not as bleak as the media puts it.
6. There was a cancer study a couple of years ago comparing Detroit and Windsor, ON. Upper and middle class had the same death rates. Lower class fared much worse in the US.
7. I walk out of the doctor without paying anything at all.*

*Ok in some provinces there is a monthly fee that is usually paid by your employer. There are subsidies readily available. When I moved back to Canada, I had to pay 50$ CDN/month for full coverage until my spouse's insurance started to cover me.

Thanks. It's good to hear this from someone who has experienced both.

Do you think nationalized health care is working well in Canada?

Actually, pretty much every balanced study I've seen indicates that Canada's system works a lot better than the one here.

The problem that the US has is an absolutely classic example of market failure. The issue is that the usage of the healthcare is massively decoupled from its pricing, due to the insurance system.

Most people who have real healthcare get it from private insurance carriers, and are paying a more or less flat rate for it. (Yes, there are co-pays, but they're too small to really impact the problem.) This means that the users have a strong motivation to maximize their usage, to get the most for their money. The insurance companies make a lot of noise about trying to drive this down, but in fact have a lot of motivation themselves to allow it, because it lets them raise their prices continuously. So we wind up in an upward spiral, with no real way to arrest it.

Most studies have shown that this system is horrifically inefficient. It is good for precisely one thing: people who have health insurance get remarkably instant gratification for their complaints. But this doesn't seem to lead to better health overall -- in fact, the US falls behind most of the rest of the first world on most longevity and quality-of-life metrics, despite spending something like thrice as much on healthcare as anyone else.

Really, it's just about the worst system one could come up with: having the insurance carriers as intermediaries manages to combine the worst features of the socialist and capitalist approaches. So while I'm a bit leery of simple nationalization, the fact is that almost anything (if decently run) would probably work better than what we've got now.

But I'd rather people take those jobs at the market rate and, if necessary, collect the difference from welfare, than have no job at all and collect all of it.

Careful: a well-designed welfare system is a bit subtler than that. You want them to collect more than just the difference from welfare, or the incentives wind up perverse. Remember, working has costs, in things like travel and childcare, and you want to make sure that someone who is working is making more in net than if they were not working. So you really want a formula that uses a sliding scale, reducing the welfare payments fairly gradually as the income goes up...

It seems that an insurance company could potentially make a killing (so to speak) by offering coverage against catastrophic loss only, with a significant deductible. You pay for your own checkups and minor ailments, but if you get cancer you're not financially screwed. Rates would be a lot lower than for conventional insurance. It would, of course, appeal primarily to healthy people, drawing people away from the actuarial pools for conventional insurance, thus screwing over everyone else rather more. But that's not the concern of the insurance company making the offer. So I wonder if this has been tried and, if so, what the results were.

Note: I am not saying this would be good; it's just an experiment I'm wondering about.

Careful: a well-designed welfare system is a bit subtler than that. You want them to collect more than just the difference from welfare, or the incentives wind up perverse.

Hmm. Good point.

It seems that an insurance company could potentially make a killing (so to speak) by offering coverage against catastrophic loss only, with a significant deductible.

Nope -- this misses the third part of the problem, which I really should have pointed out explicitly. Insurance-mediated healthcare is a problem. *Employer-funded* insurance-mediated healthcare is a much bigger one.

Remember, by now most of us with serious jobs demand high-end health insurance as a perk of that job. This disconnects us even more dramatically from the actual payment of the healthcare, because we're not even paying the full load. I'm paying, what, probably about a third of the actual cost of my health insurance; the rest is picked up by my employer, which is pretty normal. And it's rare for a company to offer multiple health plans -- the hassle of managing multiple plans just isn't worth it to them.

The result is that there's no good way to introduce competition into this marketplace. Sure, an insurance company can introduce competitive rates, but an employer who uses that plan is going to have much more trouble attracting the best employees. There isn't anyone properly motivated to buy this plan: the high-end companies are forced to buy high-end insurance, the low-end companies don't need to buy *any* insurance, and it's still too expensive for individuals, because the whole system is skewed towards the pricey and inefficient high-end plans.

It's really astonishingly messed-up: you would be hard-pressed to come up with a system of more perverse incentives if you tried. It illustrates nicely that governments aren't the only actors capable of introducing massive friction into a marketplace...

I see your point, though I had been thinking of this as a viable option for, for example, laid-off workers who don't want to pay $600/month for COBRA coverage, and self-employed contractors, and other middle-class-ish folks who don't otherwise have employer-supplied coverage.

And yeah, the insurance business is really messed up now. But the phrase "let the government fix it" rarely inspires confidence, either. :-)

True, but at this point not really a compelling argument. The government would actually be hard-pressed to screw it up worse than it is now.

Mind, I'm not convinced that a purely government-run model is necessarily the best -- I suspect that a well-designed hybrid model would likely be better from my POV. But I *am* pretty sure that what we have right now is the worst. The entire point of capitalism -- really the one truly solid argument for it -- is that it's supposed to be efficient. But in this case, due to perverse incentives, it manages to be *remarkably* inefficient...

Catastrophic health insurance plans *are* available. However, the ones I've seen are tailored for people who don't qualify for conventional insurance, and are thus priced astronomically.

I absolutely categorically refuse to use the automated checkouts for this very reason. I also insist on someone to bag my grocerys and push the cart to my car. Usually it's a mildly retarded man doing this.

When I do get a rude cashier, like the first reply mentioned, I have occasionally been ugly to her and said "You know, the store is looking to automate jobs, that's why they put in those scanner things. It would be sad if they had to automate yours, too."
Usually that results in the cashier jumping up and doing what she's supposed to do, even if she does it with an attitude.

Wow. Don't know why that never came to me. Good reply. I'll have to file that one in the back of my mind.

Good for you!

I don't like the "self-checkouts" anyway... if you buy alcohol or tobacco products, or if you're writing a check, you need to deal with a human anyway... and I almost always buy alcohol and tobacco products, and usually want to write a check for them.

I like the automated checker thing in theory, but that's probably because I have a distinctly non-sociable streak. (And bagging my own groceries is not bad either.) However, I think these arrangements leave much to be desired. My main complaint is that the stores in my neighborhood both require that you get clearance from an employee if you are paying by credit card before you can leave. In one, you also have to sign on a computerized signature pad and then wait to get clearance. Apparently, this was done as an anti-theft measure, which I understand. Nevertheless, the signature pads don't always work, and it's not always easy to catch the eye of an employee when you are trying to get out of the store.

The self-checkouts are new here, and always unbelievably faster, because people don't use them. And I'm hella fast on them. They are a huge time-saver for me.

Anyway, it's an interesting issue. Maybe I'm rationalizing, but the way I look at it, the onus is on the store. The trend is for supermarkets to get bigger and bigger. With larger stores come more and more customers. The store has to decide how to process the number of customers. If the store is concerned about your experience as a shopper, they will add checkers and baggers to prevent the long lines. If they don't care, they won't. (The store closest to us (no machine) usually just doesn't have baggers, making the checker both ring up and bag the stuff, which infuriates me.)

As a consumer, I don't see how reinforcing the inconvenience already mandated by the store will make the store change its ways. The only way to do that would be to not shop there but to shop instead at a store where they have enough checkers and baggers (usually your high-end gourmet shops). But since everyone goes to the store with the most stuff that's convenient, we consumers don't really exercise that leverage.

That said, I think there's a "service ceiling" on these devices, since there are limits on how many bags they can handle at once, which is why they have limits of 20 items on them or whatnot. Their efficiency is thus really only aimed at the most efficient segment of the process (the express lines), so their overall impact on labor will probably be small.

I'm also going to remark that this is an interesting train of thought for the libertarian-inclined. Service jobs are indeed the last jobs left for a lot of people because other untrained work (manufacturing) is gone -- the reason being that they are jobs machines can't replace that well (i.e. that 20-item bagging limit). Service jobs are increasingly interchangable, yet still necessary to attract a customer. So this is one place where a higher minimum wage would actually pose less of a threat to the worker, since the job is less likely to be eliminated (there will always be a lot of shoppers with more than 20 items; indeed the number will go up as the store gets larger and larger). BUT it's also a place where the free market is likely to drive down wages to the minimum, because any *individual* worker is interchangeable. So it's actually a situation where government-mandated wage and benefit standards are least damaging to competition and innovation, while most beneficial to workers. At least that's how it seems to me.

Yours have 20-item limits? That's not the case here. Either an item limit or a "no produce" rule would speed up the process, now that I think about it.

This is an interesting political/economic challenge, yes.

Yeah, everywhere I've been, there's a limit. Even when we lived in Baltimore. I can't imagine the system otherwise. The bags are on scales so they know you haven't shoplifted -- and there is a maximum number of bags (usually 3-4) that can be part of each unit. (The need to prevent theft is another aspect of "service" that I think puts a limit on how much these things can be used.)

Produce is not such a problem -- there are touch screens to go through to get what you want.

Ah. Ours are configured differently. Beyond the scanning area is a conveyor belt that leads to a bagging area. There is, apparently, a scale built into that belt (or the lead part of it). If the bagging area fills up you have to pause and bag some of your stuff to get it out of the way, but people can and do go through them with full carts.

Produce is slow because if you don't have the PLC on a sticker (or if you do but the damn print is too small to read, not that I'm bitter) you have to page through several screens to find what you're looking for, because (say) "N-P" is 4 screens and you can't jump straight to "O" for your onions, and sometimes you don't know how something will be listed anyway. (Green onions? Onions, green? Scallions?)

Sounds unpleasant. Well, then people won't use them anyway. (Moral) Problem solved!

There's a nice guy at the grocery I most frequently. He's not retarded, but not bright. I bring two carts back to the store when I go in, and two carts back when I'm done. He likes me, I like him, and once in awhile he insists on taking my groceries out and loading them despite my protestations.

He also doesn't mind when I bring in gobs of recyclable bags once a month. I'm unsure about tipping when he does this, and I don't always have the cash. I have to rethink our non-relationship.

I once asked an ex-employee whether I'd ever made her feel like a barnyard animal. Produce or hit the knackers. Since that's what I got at LizArd. And the really dumb pet store She said no. So I was a good boss. She's also my adopted little sister and one semester shy of a Ph.D. in genetics. I'm so proud of her. Not that she didn't do it on her own.

We walk the earth caringly, but not always knowingly.

. (The store closest to us (no machine) usually just doesn't have baggers, making the checker both ring up and bag the stuff, which infuriates me.)

The store I use most often usually makes customers bag their own groceries. Each cashier has two slides to send groceries down, so that even if it takes twice as long to bag groceries as to ring them up, the line keeps moving.

Monica, do you use self-serve or full-serve gas? When I'm in a state like New Jersey with no self-serve, it always annoys me to sit in my car waiting for the attendant to get around to pumping my gas and swiping my credit card for me...

Here, the odds of getting a bagger at Giant Eagle are about 50-50 for me at the times I shop. Otherwise, the cashier bags and I help. At Kosher Mart the cashier bags during the time it takes for the credit card to be processed. (I don't know why their machine is so much slower to approve.)

Monica, do you use self-serve or full-serve gas?

Self-serve. I never really thought about the effect of that on the folks who pump gas. Not all gas stations around here even offer full-serve.

I blame Walmart.

Grocery chains have had to cut costs to compete with Walmart, and one way to lower costs is to have less employees... hence, self scanners.

(note: this is my theory. I have not done research to back this up.)

- Cranky/inept cashiers. Much like other people have stated, I dislike dealing with inept or cranky staff. I worked at a grocery in MA after I lost my first job; even though it was a brainless job I was still able to do it and be pleasant despite how little I was being paid. In general, I don't like dealing with people, though.

- I can bag my own groceries. This is a big deal to me; even though I try to send the groceries in the order I want them bagged (cold things together, meat separate, etc) they rarely get bagged right. and if I get one more heavy sigh when I ask for paper...

- it's faster, for me. I generally know the codes I need, and I can scan pretty quickly. combined with the bagging skillz of

el_gecko, this makes the trip faster for us.

I never really though about the social consequences. thanks for giving me something to think about :)

Many people, even in the face of very convenient examples of automation, would rather deal with actual humans rather than machines. I don't assume that someone having such a preference for interpersonal interaction is a Luddite, nor do I assume that someone preferring the efficiency of automation is a misanthrope.

As long as the government doesn't intervene one way or the other, I don't have a problem with whatever choices anyone makes in this regard.

I also want there to be a human available to intervene if necessary. The last time I took my car to be washed I got ripped off; the vending machine took my $6 but didn't dispense a wash, there was no attendant on site, and the posted phone number led to voice-mail oblivion (no return call). Needless to say, I won't be patronizing that particular provider again.

I am not a fan of the self-checkout grocery stands. It's mostly fine in cases where all the items have barcodes, but with produce I found that the human cashier who had memorized most of the codes was always faster than me having to look them up. I really didn't like the self-checkout at Home Depot. IIRC it has some way of sensing what has been put on the to-be-bagged area versus what you've scanned, and it got confused. No amount of moving stuff around, cancelling and rescanning, etc etc would unconfuse it. It was a huge nuisance and if I'd gone to the human cashier I would have been out of there faster.

There's a problem with your economic premise, and it's a weird-ass, frustrating psychological problem.

I'm speaking with both my anthropologist/psychologist hat on, and my Unlike Most People I Really Did Sell My Labor On The Open Labor Market Like Some S ort Of Libertarian Dream For Eleven Years.

In our culture (and for all I know other cultures as well) there's a deep, pre-conscious mapping of social status "worth" to the monetary "worth" of someone's time.

This flies in the face of High School Economi cs 101, which tells us that the price of something (such as labor) is a function of supply and demand. If the demand goes up, the price is supposed to go up.

Unfortunately, enormous number of people -- including employers -- have emotional resistance to the idea that a low status job earn over $x amount, where $x is personally determined. By "emotional resistance" I mean "would rather see their business go under".

There was a great example of this in an exchange in the Anne Landers column years ago. Someone had penned a rant about how little teachers are paid, pointing out "even" garbagemen are paid more. The wife of a garbageman wrote back a letter explaining, what a brutal, hard job it was, and how he earned his money. Yeah: more people want to be teachers than garbagemen, because it sucks even worse as a job; if there are fewer garbageman-labor-hours on the market they should cost more. Supply and demand. Labor is a commodity, too.

But people don't think that. They think the higher status a job is, the "nobler", the "more important to our society", the "better" it is, the higher it should be paid. The want the abstract value judgment of the worth of a position to society (or in society) to dictate how much that position sho u ld pay.

I cannot tell you how many times I've had the conversation with employers/clients, where they rant about the high costs of labor -- "She's only a secretary! How can we pay her more than a vice president!" -- and I've have to explain "welcome t o supply and demand". Especially during the tech boom. It was during that time that I became particularly enamored of the saying "Nothing offends an American businessman more than the sight of someone actually daring to practice capitalism."

Up the str eet from where I live, over the border into Arlington, there was a restaurant with a fantastic Sunday brunch, served buffet style. It was %50 more expensive than the average Sunday brunch in the area, but was full up both times I went. The second ti me I went, I inquired about their hours, and was told, "This is the last time we'll be open for brunch, we're giving up on it." I was agast (hate to lose a quality brunching spot) and asked why. "Can't afford waitstaff."

Hello, what? If your restauran t is full of customers and you need to pay your waitstaff more, raise your prices. But, no, apparently the thought of paying the waitstaff more caused the owner to feel "I can't afford that" instead of doing the obvious.

And (need I say it?) a couple of months after they stopped holding brunch, the business closed its doors for good.

Since these attitudes are widespread (and they are, apparently, widespread) it effects price collusion -- without any actual conspiracy. If everyone is emotionally unwilling to pay their low-status workers the market rate, to the point of being willing to go under instead, then you have de facto price fixing.

This is one of the two reasons I have come to appreciate unions. There's so much bellyaching about how unions force their industries to pay higher wages, but look what they're up against: an irrational prejudice against paying some sorts of workers in some sorts of jobs what would really be the market rate, which deforms the so-called "free market".
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There is a theory that employers of low-wage workers have monopsony power, i.e., there are far more people looking for work than employers looking for workers, so the few employers can hire workers for less than what they'd have to pay under perfect competition. If this theory is true, and if employers under perfect competition would be paying low-wage workers at least the minimum wage, then the minimum wage is just compensating for employers' monopsony power, and it is not responsible for unemployment.

The book Myth and Measurement argues for this theory with some empirical evidence: looking at what happened to employment statistics when one state raised its minimum wage and a neighboring state did not. Of course, not everybody is convinced.

I report, you decide.

there are far more people looking for work than employers looking for workers

Not trying to be snarky here, but..... isn't that sort of the textbook "supply and demand"?

"Textbook supply and demand" simply states that suppliers will be willing to produce more of something as its price goes up, and that consumers will be willing to purchase more of something as its price goes down. The issue of supply and demand is orthogonal to the issue of monopoly power.

This is also one of the points of evidence in my observation that "the problem with expecting 'enlightened self-interest' is not merely expecting enlightenment, but that most people have trouble figuring out what their own self-interest is." Wh en it is a widespread phenomenon that businesses would rather commit hari kari than engage in a free market of labor, capitalism cannot work.

As usual, the problem with a beautiful abstract system (in this case capitalism) is humans.

I like the spirit of your idea of guaranteed income (mandate X, govm't pays the diff between X and Y) instead of a minimum wage. I would expect Libertarians to scream bloody murder about that sort of social program (it has a cash handout and everything), but you're the second one to come up with it in my hearing.

But doesn't guaranteeing an income mean that employers will start to rely on it to make up the difference, and become even more unwilling to pay a living wage? If you think (and I don't know you do; many Liberta rians do) that people are lazy and will suck on the public teat instead of working, given half a chance, just wait till you see how businesses behave. At least people have shame about taking charity, and out of pride will try to get themselves off it. Businesses have absolutely no such compunction.

s

Hmm. I wonder how common this meme of "go out of business rather than pay market labor price" is. It comes as a surprise to me (because it's really pretty stupid and self-destructive when you examine it), but I haven't been part of that dynamic (on either side of the paycheck) so I could well be out of touch.

Did the buffet owner who wasn't willing to pay more than $X/hour for waitstaff consider hiring more waitstaff (rather than paying the existing ones more)? Or was there also some meme about the "correct" number to have, in addition to the "correct" price?

But people don't think that. They think the higher status a job is, the "nobler", the "more important to our society", the "better" it is, the higher it should be paid.

And yet, if you ask them which professions are "noblest" or "best for society", they'll rank teachers and nurses much higher than, say, IT professionals. While there's some correlation between salary and perceived worth, I think it may be more complicated than what you're describing.

You have a good point about non-conspiratorial price-fixing. If this "worth ceiling" is widespread, it would produce that effect.

There's so much bellyaching about how unions force their industries to pay higher wages, but look what they're up against: an irrational prejudice against paying some sorts of workers in some sorts of jobs what would really be the market rate, which deforms the so-called "free market".

This is complicated by unions' job-protection-in-excess-of-demand tactic, though, which is a perversion of the free market in its own right. Locally, the unions are getting very cranky because the city, which is shrinking in population, wants to eliminate some public-service positions. This has nothing to do with wages and everything to do with keeping now-superfluous police officers (etc) on the payroll.

Unions do have a real problem to contend with -- low wages in the face of "disposable people" (there's always a pool of cheap labor somewhere if you don't care about churn). Overall, though, in the last couple decades I'm not sure they've been a net gain for workers.

Sorry; that was a tangent.

[continued]

I wonder how common this meme of "go out of business rather than pay market labor price" is. It comes as a surprise to me (because it's really pretty stupid and self-destructive when you examine it), but I haven't been part of that dynamic (on either side of the paycheck) so I could well be out of touch.

Me rationalist. You rationalist. Rest of world.... not so rationalist.

Yeah, really insanely, mind-bogglingly stupid and self-destructive.

I decided the field of economics had little utility to me, when I was about 20 and several local stores responded to dwindling patronage (lower demand) by raising prices. To make up for lower sales, you know.

*beat* *head* *on* *desk* *beat* *head* *on* *desk* *beat* *head* *on* *desk*

At which point I threw up my hands and acknowledged that the the laws of supply and demand only worked to describe markets on a macro level of earthlings, or on a micro level that was populated by people from some more intelligent planet.

(Yes, the shops went out of business.)

Have you ever actually tried to have the "if you have fewer customers maybe you should drop your prices" conversation with a vendor? I've had people look at me like I was absolutely out of my mind for suggesting that.

Heck, I expect there's SCA branches out there which responded to dwindling event attendence with trying to share around the cost of the same hall among fewer people. "Oh, no, we have fewer people, so now our event prices have to go up."

I could go on, and on, and on (and probably have :) with the unbelieveably counterproductive, cockamamie, "do you just not grasp capitalism?!", "how have you managed to stay in business?!" things I've witnessed in the business world.

Did the buffet owner who wasn't willing to pay more than $X/hour for waitstaff consider hiring more waitstaff (rather than paying the existing ones more)? Or was there also some meme about the "correct" number to have, in addition to the "correct" price?

Three answers to your question:

1) Not memetically, but there are other issues which force the number of heads, e.g. no matter how economical you think it would be to have 40 people all work one hour a week, you are unlikely to find workers willing to play along. The costs of overhead can mean it's cheaper to have fewer workers and pay them more -- or it can mean it's cheaper to have many workers and pay them less. Depends on circumstance, cost per employee, and market conditions.

2) Here, I don't think that would have solved the basic problem. If you need three waiters to work three hours each, but are unwilling to pay enough so that there are three people would take the jobs, being willing to hire four people at less money than anyone will accept doesn't solve the problem. It's not like we're talking about overtime here.

[cont]

Well, I can give another data point for employer stupidity. A few years ago, my wife was hired as a science writer for a center at MIT. When folks at the center wanted more features from their Web site that the standard MIT servers would let them have (e.g., they wanted to make some sections only accessible to their external partners), she installed a Linux box in her office and learned something about system administration. The dynamic part of the Web site grew into this big database-backed PHP system, written by an outside contractor to Jen's specifications.

Then, Jen decided she wanted to quit her job to become a full-time mother (the cost of two kids in day care would just about equal her take-home pay, so she figured she might as well eliminate the middleman). She went about looking for her own replacement. I asked around, and was told by various people in the know that someone with the skills to fill her job could command about 150% of her salary. Unfortunately, her boss wanted to pay Jen's replacement less than they were paying Jen. The person they eventually hired had "Unix system administration" on her resume, but it turned out that she didn't even know the difference between "cd afs" and "cd /afs".

The center hasn't gone out of business, but...

Also note that according to various studies, the best computer programmers can be an order of magnitude more productive than the worst, but they certainly aren't paid an order of magnitude more. I suspect this underpaying is due to a combination of (a) corporations not willing to pay technical workers more than the managers above them in the hierarchy; (b) the bureaucratic imperative of "the more people report to you, the more powerful you are" leads managers to hire several mediocre programmers when they could hire one star; (c) the difficulty of measuring the quality of a programmer's output.

At which point I threw up my hands and acknowledged that the the laws of supply and demand only worked to describe markets on a macro level of earthlings, or on a micro level that was populated by people from some more intelligent planet.

This is the sort of thing that makes me regret that I didn't major in economics. (Youth is wasted on the young, and all that...) "The laws of supply and demand" are for the freshmen. All the juicy research and theorizing about the exceptions to the laws of supply and demand are saved for the grad students.

(And actually, Keynesian macroeconomics is based on the observation that labor markets don't follow the laws of supply and demand in the same way that, say, the market for pork bellies does. Read his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money.)

3) I didn't get to discuss it further with the people involved (I confess, I was too stunned and lost the initiative -- there are a lot of details I wish I'd been more on the ball to seek out), but I will observe that there was (and is) the surrounding economic condition: This city has massively sky-rocketting rents. Things were bad all over, but much worse in the region where this restaurant was. (I don't know how to estimate tip-worker's income, so I use non-tip guidelines. Right now the Federal minimum wage for non-tip workers is $5.15/hr. That's $206/wk before taxes. I pay below market for my one-room apartment: $825/mo. Do the math.) People in waitering jobs in that region were being priced out of their apartments. They had a decision:

(1) Move to where they could afford the rent and commute in.
(2) Move to where they could afford the rent and get a new waitering job there.
(3) Don't move, and try to get more wages to afford to remain in neighborhood.

Overwhelmingly, it seems #2 won. Apparently when people in low-paying service positions moved out because they couldn't afford to live here any more, they didn't stick around, commuting to their old jobs; they got new low-paying service positions out where they live. The people taking their old apartments were "young professionals" -- white-color workers who certainly don't wait on tables.

A lot of restaurants folded. A lot of restaurants are trying to get by on a few vastly over-worked waiters.

And a lot of restaurants raised their prices, and are doing fine.

Survival of the fittest, I'm sure, but that's cold comfort to the food vendors who lost market, commercial landlords who lost restaurant tenants, cooks who lost jobs, etc. A business' success is good for many more people than the business itself.

Overall, though, in the last couple decades I'm not sure they've been a net gain for workers.

Very true. I think of unions as "supply-side corporations" -- they are corporate vendors on the labor market. What we call corporations are "demand-side corporations" because they're the ones with demand for labor, they're labor-buyers. (Really, an incorporated company is a union of employers, engaged in collective bargaining over the price of all the jobs at a facility.)

As such, unions are just as heir to the sorts of counterproductive stupidity I've discussed above, as their demand-side brethren are. They are just as likely to become corrupt, or taking over by stupid people.

This is sort of the fundamental problem of corporatism.

I misunderstood the buffet problem. I wasn't suggesting that he hire more people to work fewer hours; that's the same net cost. I thought the problem was that his waitstaff were over-stressed from the number of customers, causing them to get better jobs elsewhere. If he's not willing to pay higher wages, the other alternative would have been to add more people to the busy shifts.

Apparently when people in low-paying service positions moved out because they couldn't afford to live here any more, they didn't stick around, commuting to their old jobs; they got new low-paying service positions out where they live.

That's what I would have expected. Employers treat the people in those jobs as interchangable, but the people in those jobs also (largely) treat employers as interchangable. Why commute in to the old job if you can get the same type of job more conveniently?

[continued from previous]

I like the spirit of your idea of guaranteed income (mandate X, govm't pays the diff between X and Y) instead of a minimum wage. I would expect Libertarians to scream bloody murder about that sort of social program (it has a cash handout and everything), but you're the second one to come up with it in my hearing.

Well, just to be clear, I don't actually like it -- I don't like government handouts. But if we are going to have such a system -- and I don't think it will go away in the US in my lifetime -- then at least we shouldn't cripple it so that people are motivated to not work. Right now, as I understand it, people who try to generate income are penalized (beyond a dollar-for-dollar trade, I mean). That's not right.

But doesn't guaranteeing an income mean that employers will start to rely on it to make up the difference, and become even more unwilling to pay a living wage?

This is why I'd rather not have a government program. Some people are lazy (would-be employees) or cheap (would-be employers), and will abuse the system. Government intervention in the market can cause problems like this.

Consider the following (still not-very-libertarian) scenario: each jurisdiction (I'm thinking city-size here) has some government-funded cheap housing and subsistence food available. Essentially, you won't die frozen under a bridge or of starvation. However, there's no financial handout, and the housing isn't all that comfortable, so you're motivated to actually go out and get a job so you can provide for yourself.

Would some lazy slugs move in and never try to get out? Sure, but (absent any data whatsoever, mind), I'm guessing the cost would be lower than what we currently have.

Meanwhile, if by doing this you lower the costs to taxpayers (first by getting rid of a federal bureaucracy and second by encouraging people to strive for better), then more dollars are available for private aid. Sure, some people, given a tax cut, will say "woot! 60-inch HDTV here I come!", but others will channel more into charitable efforts because they have more. I don't know how much and it sounds like wishful thinking, but I also know a non-trivial number of people who tithe, so who knows?

At least people have shame about taking charity, and out of pride will try to get themselves off it. Businesses have absolutely no such compunction.

On the other hand, there is probably a wage threshold below which people are not willing to fall, particularly in a "get the money anyway" scenario. Some jobs are only worth $2/hour, but others are worth $5/hour and people will punt before taking the latter for $2 if they can still get food and shelter.

Consider the following (still not-very-libertarian) scenario: each jurisdiction (I'm thinking city-size here) has some government-funded cheap housing and subsistence food available. Essentially, you won't die frozen under a bridge or of starvation. However, there's no financial handout, and the housing isn't all that comfortable, so you're motivated to actually go out and get a job so you can provide for yourself.

You know, that's exactly what the other Libertarian I mentioned above said. You could have knocked me over with a feather. A socialist libertarian! His rationale (which I approve of) is that a truly free market in labor is so desireable it is worth it to adopt a public policy of guaranteeing subsistence to all human beings, so that they can engage in the labor market without the threat of starvation, exposure, or lack of medical care making them exploitable.

I could get behind that.

more dollars are available for private aid. Sure, some people, given a tax cut, will say "woot! 60-inch HDTV here I come!", but others will channel more into charitable efforts because they have more. I don't know how much and it sounds like wishful thinking, but I also know a non-trivial number of people who tithe, so who knows?

Well, I'm a Reform Objectivist on alternate Tuesdays, and as such think of private aid as a consumer commodity: the consumer pays money to get a warm fuzzy feeling. Sort of like cable TV. Donating is essentially a selfish act of ego-gratification and, if one is so theologically inclined, self-soul-saving.

So I don't really see private charitable giving as really intersecting with the problem of social justice and welfare. People give where it feels good to them to give, not where it is most needed nor where it is most useful to society. As environmentalist activists are happy to point out at length, the money will pour in to protect an endangered mammal with cute offspring, but an ugly bug which happens to eat other ugly bugs which predate on human crops, and keep those crop-eaters in check? It can go pan-handling in Harvard Sq.

In a society with as much bigotry and prejudice as we have, relying on people's good will tends to mean that the haves donate money to haves-with-problems, not to have-nots. White people are more likely to donate money to causes which benefit poor whites, not to poor blacks. Christians donate to christians. It's how it is. I'm not even sure that that's wrong, on some level. I think people should be able to support their own, if they want.

But if we want that freedom, then, but are also trying to make our society just in the rudimentary ways, and not have people starving in the streets (which, I, wholly selfishly, would like) we need to have a social system which doesn't rely on personal predilection for where the money goes, that systematically attempts to address big-picture problems.

You know, that's exactly what the other Libertarian I mentioned above said.

Who is this other person, out of curiosity?

A socialist libertarian!

An expedient libertarian. The ideal solution doesn't involve the government-provided baseline, but we do not live in an ideal world.

So I don't really see private charitable giving as really intersecting with the problem of social justice and welfare.

For most people it doesn't, which is why I wondered about the degree to which this would actually work. But for some, this is a religious obligation; the word tzedakah, usually translated as charity, actually means justice. We support the poor not because we pity them but because they are human beings who deserve it, and there but for the grace of God go I. I accept a personal obligation to aid those less fortunate, but I don't think it's generally the place of government to mandate it.

But yes, there will be the problem of distribution. It takes time to introduce better memes for directing support dollars. Most people give to the charities that personally speak to them because a lot of the basics are already covered by government handouts. If there were no welfare, I'll bet a lot more dollars would go to aiding the poor than to preserving cute mammals, because those poor would be in your community, in your face. Maybe this too is wishful thinking; we'll never find out, most likely.

Who is this other person, out of curiosity?

Ooh, I knew you'd ask a difficult question like that. It was in a conversation on a very high-volume mailing list which I read in digest form (so the "from" lines don't reflect authors), some time in the last 2 years, plus or minus 1.5, by one of several resident Libertarians. Or maybe it was in a private off-list discussion. I've been grepping my archives, but haven't found it so far and am having trouble thinking of clever strings to grep on.

I may give up grepping at some point, and just post asking if someone wanted to own that position. How interested are you to know?

Also, do you get enough email? If not, I could help with that....

For most people it doesn't, which is why I wondered about the degree to which this would actually work. But for some, this is a religious obligation; the word tzedakah, usually translated as charity, actually means justice.

I've heard it translated as "righteousness", too.

We support the poor not because we pity them but because they are human beings who deserve it, and there but for the grace of God go I.

This reminds me! There was a quote that crossed my desk which I thought you might like, from one Matt Gordon, on an email list I am on:

My favorite comment on the "Random Acts of Kindness" fad was made by a rabbi, who said, "Judaism rejects random acts of kindness. It demands _systematic_ acts of kindness."

I accept a personal obligation to aid those less fortunate, but I don't think it's generally the place of government to mandate it.

I have much to say on this. I'm going to be non-linear here and jump ahead, otherwise I'll never to get home.

One of the Waytes (Laenus, the mad fiddler) made a fascinating point to me over dinner one night. He pointed out that through period, the Roman Catholic Church did all of the things we now think of as "Health, Education and Human Welfare": they founded and ran the universities, the hospitals, the almshouses, the monestaries (which housed many people who could not otherwise make their way in the world), and they patronized the arts.

They did this in part by imposing a simple flat tax upon their worshippers -- "tithe" means "tenth", and that's what it was. They also did it by pay-per-use services (college students paying to attend lectures, by the lecture, in a very clean capitalist system) and self-sufficiency and industry (monestaries strove to be self-sustaining).

With the eviction of religion from civil life, these functions were no longer systemically performed. For quite a while -- a bunch of human generations -- people got on OK without them. But it turned out they hadn't been fungible after all. The problems the Church had been solving didn't go away. And they compounded.

Eventually some situations got so dire, that the government wound up being brought in by the citizenry. So now we have government run schools and government funded universities and government subsidized hospitals and governmental arts grants. We don't have much in the way of poor houses, but we have some grant money going to battered women's shelters and homeless shelters and soup kitchens.

When FDR started the New Deal, it was, in a way, secular government throwing up its hands and saying, "Alright, alright! I guess someone does need to deal with this!"

It seems to me, in light of history, that a society cannot neglect these problems. Leaving individuals to sort it out on a non-systematic, ad hoc basis winds up imposing massive costs -- from the direct monetary through the costs of lost labor and human potential -- on society. There must be a systemic, institutional approach to dealing with them.

Maybe it doesn't have to be the "government", but I for one would be very unhappy to see it be the Church. Or churches.

[cont]

(As long as LJ has already decided to make the interface to this page less friendly, there's no reason to conserve comments now. So random bits first, then church/state in a separate comment.)

Ooh, I knew you'd ask a difficult question like that.

Oops, sorry. Please don't go to any more effort on my account; it's not that important. I incorrectly assumed that it was a recent conversation or perhaps something you'd read on LJ. If it was a conversation still in progress that'd be interesting to look in on, but sending someone email two years after the fact just doesn't have the same attraction.

Also, do you get enough email? If not, I could help with that....

I probably get enough email, but I'm always interested in hearing about other things I should be reading. procmail can at least let me sort it for batch reading.

I've heard it translated as "righteousness", too.

That too. I think of it as "when we do justice we behave righteously". Do you know the phrase "tzedek, tzedek, tirdof", usually translated as "justice, justice you shall pursue"? It comes amidst a bunch of commandments and/or advice about behaving righteously.

Quote: thank you! I like that.

It seems to me, that there's a hole in our society. There's a place where no thing is. We have this concept "government" which orders how things are. But we have this echo of an idea of this other thing, the function of which was fulfilled by religious organizations, but for which we have no generic term, which tended the common weal and husbanded society itself.

In a religiously homogeneous environment, having the Church in that position solved the "people only donate to what they like" problem. You tithed, period. You didn't get to say that you didn't want your money going to those nasty lepers. You were welcome to give more and more specifically.

Right now government is in that place, and fitting badly.

What would you say to an institution (we need a name for it), existing in parallel to and independent of the "government" (yet which might be said to be a "government" of its own), to which all such social programs were relinquished and which got not one dime of tax money; and once a year you got a bill for one twentieth of your income which was completely, utterly, 100% voluntary to pay or not as you like?

The government would remain the people with the guns, responsible to make and enforce the laws which protect us from force and fraud, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, etc.

If there were no welfare, I'll bet a lot more dollars would go to aiding the poor than to preserving cute mammals, because those poor would be in your community, in your face. Maybe this too is wishful thinking; we'll never find out, most likely.

Why look forward when we can look back? The first national anti-animal-cruelty society was the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in England, founded in 1822. (America followed in in 1866.) Eventually the fact that it was illegal to beat a horse but not beat a child -- quite seriously, that was one of the arguments of the day in support -- lead to the founding of the The New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the first child protection agency in the world, in 1875. England followed with the
London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty in 1884 which became the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children five years later.

No, it turns out the cute mammal thing goes back quite a ways.

That's an excellent observation, that the RC church used to provide the human services now (badly) (somewhat) provided by government.

I assume this worked because the church was near-universal. There are certainly people who were left out of those benefits -- Jews, for example -- but they reached a high percentage of the population. No single body does that today, though many (mostly-religious) organizations still do similar things within their own ranks. For example, the Jewish community tends to have aid grants for the needy, (kosher) food banks, free-loan societies, and so on. I assume the RC church still does some of this within their ranks. I assume that other religions/denominations do as well. But no one is doing it all, even within their own communities, and not all communities are doing any particular thing.

But even if they were, this leaves out a lot more people than the church left out in the middle ages. Some of that gap is plugged by other voluntary associations -- for example, look at the outpourings of support when SCA members face crises like fires. This is not the same as the day-to-day support needs of poor people, of course, but -- here's that word again :-) -- community comes in many forms today, perhaps more than at any pre-industrial time. Sometimes people are able to draw on that community. I've known people who were pretty much always the beneficiaries of event leftovers, for instance. But again, it's very spotty.

What would you say to an institution (we need a name for it), existing in parallel to and independent of the "government" (yet which might be said to be a "government" of its own), to which all such social programs were relinquished and which got not one dime of tax money; and once a year you got a bill for one twentieth of your income which was completely, utterly, 100% voluntary to pay or not as you like?

Assuming that this replaces the government programs, I'd be completely up for that. Let it act as a federation as much as possible rather than trying to centralize, and it's even better.

I'm not sure if this would be a net positive or negative, but consider a stipulation: if you ever benefit from the service, you're required to contribute some when you find yourself in better circumstances. (This is that "free loan" idea.)

The "negative income tax" was proposed by libertarian guru Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom.

I personally don't think there's anything wrong with such a plan, and I don't think most liberals would, either, but I suspect that a negative income tax would be a hard sell to conservatives and moderates. There seems to be a widespread belief that government welfare should only be given to people who "deserve" it, which entails an intrusive and expensive bureaucracy to separate the deserving from the non-deserving.

And the cost of the bureaucracy to determine worthiness likely exceeds the potential fraud. Conservatives are supposed to be about fiscal responsibility, aren't they?

Mind, I used to think that way too about worthiness (fueled by bad uses of food stamps observed in grocery stores), and I still have some tendencies in that direction. But if, instead of having an arcane process for applying for and keeping welfare, with fraud opportunities galore, you instead did a tax-like filing with a body that's already set up to sniff out egregious fraud, you can let it all boil down to the contents of the tax return and not even deal with all the other factors like proof that you've been dilligently job-hunting. If you're willing to live below the poverty line, I shouldn't be not that concerned with whether you're lazy or truly deserving. (You do, of course, have to keep the line fairly low; the point is to provide for the most basic needs only, not to provide a comfortable living. This is "don't let them starve" money, not "support the beer/pizza/cable habit" and "dynasties of welfare families" money.)

requirements for high minimum wages are also a bad idea

must ... resist ... urge ... to ... argue ...

:-)

You might find the discussion

siderea and I are having (above) interesting, then. :-)

No, sorry, minimum wages are the wrong solution to the problem.

The problem is that people need to eat, have clothing and shelter, and meet other basic needs... everywhere.

Let's suppose we set a minimum wage of $5/hour. What happens to the person who was making $4/hour?
- They get paid more for the same amount of work -- this is inflation, and means that pretty soon $5 is worth what $4 used to be worth...
- or, 20% of them are laid off, and can't find jobs, and need payments from the government of at least $5/hour equivalent...
- or, they are asked to do more work in the same time, which may not be possible -- a McDonald's burger-flipper needs to be there all the time, regardless of whether there are customers or not.

What's a good solution? Well, it may be that the government (i.e. us, the taxpayers) need to subsidise these jobs by some degree. People showing that they make $4/hour might get an electronic account that can be used for rent or food purchases at a rate of $1/hour worked. Or we can subsidize them in some other way. That continues the basic problem, but stabilizes it for a while. The long term solution is, oddly enough, to automate all the $4/hour jobs out of existence, while providing education to the displaced workers that allows them to land more remunerative jobs.

The crying shame is that we spend billions on war instead of on sensible assistance for our own people.

The crying shame is that we spend billions on war instead of on sensible assistance for our own people.

Amen!

The long term solution is, oddly enough, to automate all the $4/hour jobs out of existence, while providing education to the displaced workers that allows them to land more remunerative jobs.

Maybe. A society with no jobs for which little-to-no education is necessary? Wouldn't that make education-vendors have a monopoly of sorts? Looked at through another lens, that's a society in which you need a permit to work -- a thought which makes my skin crawl.

I am reminded of a line from an old humor article:

"Real Programmers insist on scanning their own items at the grocery store checkout, because you just can't trust keypunch operators to get it right the first time."

I admit that I like the self-scan express lanes at those few stores near me that have them. I know how to use them, so it can be a major time-saver for me. But if there are lines all round, I'll go stand in line for a real cashier.

And I *would* be willing to pay higher prices for places that hired enough people to keep the lines moving smoothly. The supermarket industry is one of the most cutthroat in the country, though. Sigh.

And I *would* be willing to pay higher prices for places that hired enough people to keep the lines moving smoothly. The supermarket industry is one of the most cutthroat in the country, though. Sigh.

Me too. My requirements of a grocery store are, in order:
- be open at the times I want to shop
- have almost all of the stuff I want under one roof
- have human staff
- be cheap

I probably use the self checkout and an actually cashier equally. If I just have a few items and I'm in a hurry, I usually go for the self checkout- I can use my check/ATM/credit card without having to sign anything and can thus be through the line in about 2 minutes. When I do my actual weekly shopping, I use the cashier because I think there's an item limit at the self checkout and I don't wish to hold other people up.

I'm not sure that the self checkouts have cut down on actual humans in my store- where there would normally be two staffed checkout lanes with two cashiers (there are rarely baggers, except for peak times on the weekend), there are now 4 express self checkouts staffed by one person, thus, in my opinion, actually freeing up another cashier to be at a regular lane.

I don't think that automation in this respect is a bad thing. I think it keeps tempers down and allows people to move through stores much quicker. I find that I'll use a store more often if I know they've got a self checkout.

That's just me, though. I realize I'm from a generation where things have always been more automated than previously- I personally have never had to deal without ATMs and the like.

"How can you think about installing flush toilets - do you know how many chambermaids you will put out of work???"

I hope you will grant that the value-add from flush toilets over chamber pots is rather more significant than that from automated grocery scanners. :-)

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theft

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health care

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(continuing to resist the urge not to argue)

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part 1

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"go out of business rather than pay market labor price"

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church and state

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self checkout AND real people

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