low-end jobs
Nov. 9th, 2004 12:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioMore 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.
Re: Humans
Date: 2004-11-10 03:00 pm (UTC)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.
"go out of business rather than pay market labor price"
Date: 2004-11-10 03:32 pm (UTC)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.)
Re: part 2
Date: 2004-11-10 03:40 pm (UTC)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.
errata
Date: 2004-11-10 06:03 pm (UTC)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.
church and state
Date: 2004-11-10 06:17 pm (UTC)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.)
Re: part 2
Date: 2004-11-10 06:31 pm (UTC)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.)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-10 11:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 12:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 12:44 am (UTC)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...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-11-11 02:57 am (UTC)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.
Re: (continuing to resist the urge not to argue)
Date: 2004-11-11 03:42 am (UTC)Not trying to be snarky here, but..... isn't that sort of the textbook "supply and demand"?
Re: (continuing to resist the urge not to argue)
Date: 2004-11-11 03:40 pm (UTC)Re: Humans
Date: 2004-11-11 10:39 pm (UTC)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...
Re: theft
Date: 2004-11-12 09:59 am (UTC)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?
Re: theft
Date: 2004-11-12 03:20 pm (UTC)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?
health care
Date: 2004-11-12 03:27 pm (UTC)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.
Re: health care
Date: 2004-11-12 06:08 pm (UTC)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...
Re: health care
Date: 2004-11-12 08:28 pm (UTC)And yeah, the insurance business is really messed up now. But the phrase "let the government fix it" rarely inspires confidence, either. :-)
Re: health care
Date: 2004-11-12 09:33 pm (UTC)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...
Re: Humans
Date: 2004-11-13 10:09 pm (UTC)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?
Re: health care
Date: 2004-11-13 10:18 pm (UTC)Re: Humans
Date: 2004-11-13 11:24 pm (UTC)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.