The Puritan work ethic really needs to get the Ol Yeller treatment.
why
Because its gooseshit?
If I want to work 80 hours/week, who are you to tell me otherwise?
Would you say the same thing about alchoholism?
Seriously? 80 hours a week? That's assinine. The standard work week was instituted for a reason. Granted, you've got 40hrs of overtime pay; good for you. You've got all that money to spend on... doing fucknothin, because you're at work or maybe sleeping, mayyyybe eating. So, yeah, enjoy that vacation time, I guess?
I mean, money is great; but only because we need it to obtain things.
80 hours a week is not that much. More than I want to work, sure. But I've done that many hours before and it wasn't the end of the world. If someone is really, really motivated by cash or the job, I understand why they would do it.
More importantly, I wouldn't want to live in country that tells me I'm not allowed to work as much as I want to. Obvious exceptions being the underage and the mentally disabled.
80 hours a week is not that much. More than I want to work, sure. But I've done that many hours before and it wasn't the end of the world. If someone is really, really motivated by cash or the job, I understand why they would do it.
More importantly, I wouldn't want to live in country that tells me I'm not allowed to work as much as I want to. Obvious exceptions being the underage and the mentally disabled.
there are health reasons why you can't work as much as you want to, if the amount you want to work is absurd.
you probably do live in a country where your employer will tell you to go home at a certain point, because they are liable for you overworking to the detriment of your health.
80 hours a week is not that much. More than I want to work, sure. But I've done that many hours before and it wasn't the end of the world. If someone is really, really motivated by cash or the job, I understand why they would do it.
More importantly, I wouldn't want to live in country that tells me I'm not allowed to work as much as I want to. Obvious exceptions being the underage and the mentally disabled.
there are health reasons why you can't work as much as you want to, if the amount you want to work is absurd.
you probably do live in a country where your employer will tell you to go home at a certain point, because they are liable for you overworking to the detriment of your health.
this is a good thing.
I guess I just put a lot of value on free time. Like... what's the point of having money "for the future" if your now is nothing but work. I guess I'm the grasshopper in the Grasshopper and Ant parable.
The Puritan work ethic really needs to get the Ol Yeller treatment.
why
Because its gooseshit?
this is not a reason. i'm not asking why it's unnecessary to abuse yourself with an 80hr work week. i'm not even asking about "puritan work ethic" literally (the idea that hard work and success is a sign of divine favor).
what exactly are you talking about when you say it needs to disappear?
Okay, it's not difficult to get another job. We need to clarify that point. It may be difficult to find a job that fits your standard of living, but it's not difficult to find a job.
O_o
Are you familiar with the unemployment rate?
Yes. Are you saying everyone unemployed is trying 100% to get a job? Hell, I could easily find a job. Would it meet my standard of living? Probably not. But I could get it. There are jobs out there... it's not like there are places that aren't hiring. Until I see every place in the world saying "we're not hiring", then it means jobs are available. People just choose not to get those jobs.
This is a page late, but I couldn't let this one go. The unemployment rate is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics only using the number of people who have actively looked for work in the past four weeks. Beyond that, I think they're considered "marginally attached" to the workforce or "discouraged workers" and aren't featured in the calculation of the headline rate. Thus, "everyone unemployed" pretty much is trying 100% to get a job.
You know what is incredibly ironic? The Nixon administration considered a guaranteed basic income (which was tuned to make its so there was never a point where you made more money not working than working, so there was always a benefit to getting a job) in order to basically annihilate the welfare state.
Didn't get implemented. It's just funny how things turn out.
Anyway, as automation increases, and humans become increasingly obsolete at a lot of jobs, eventually modern industrialized states are going to have to accept that perhaps a majority of their citizens is going to just flat out need a basic income provided gratis because otherwise there would be nothing for them at all.
You know what is incredibly ironic? The Nixon administration considered a guaranteed basic income (which was tuned to make its so there was never a point where you made more money not working than working, so there was always a benefit to getting a job) in order to basically annihilate the welfare state.
Didn't get implemented. It's just funny how things turn out.
Anyway, as automation increases, and humans become increasingly obsolete at a lot of jobs, eventually modern industrialized states are going to have to accept that perhaps a majority of their citizens is going to just flat out need a basic income provided gratis because otherwise there would be nothing for them at all.
I'm not buying this. People still need to create/maintain the machines. When jobs become obsolete people gravitate to other careers. Manufacturing bases become service oriented societies over time. This is not new. Yes there is pain in transition, but that's less painful than completely destroying an economy to prevent it.
No. I wouldn't say the same thing about huffing paint either.
Well all of these things are harmful to the individual and society so why is regulating the latter okay, but not the former?
The example was 80 hours of week worth of week, which isn't uncommon for a small business just starting out. At sub minimum wage no less. Are you suggesting this shouldn't be allowed?
You know what is incredibly ironic? The Nixon administration considered a guaranteed basic income (which was tuned to make its so there was never a point where you made more money not working than working, so there was always a benefit to getting a job) in order to basically annihilate the welfare state.
Didn't get implemented. It's just funny how things turn out.
Anyway, as automation increases, and humans become increasingly obsolete at a lot of jobs, eventually modern industrialized states are going to have to accept that perhaps a majority of their citizens is going to just flat out need a basic income provided gratis because otherwise there would be nothing for them at all.
I'm not buying this. People still need to create/maintain the machines. When jobs become obsolete people gravitate to other careers. Manufacturing bases become service oriented societies over time. This is not new. Yes there is pain in transition, but that's less painful than completely destroying an economy to prevent it.
Huh? What does that have to do anything I said?
I didn't say all jobs were going away. But at a certain point, you are going to have a large population of people who won't be needed to produce a wealthy, vibrant society because of the productivity force multiplier of technology. And since the only things left will be intellectual tasks like creative endeavor and specialized training...everyone not really capable of doing those things is gonna have nothing to do.
And you can't just let those people starve. Ergo, welfare-leisure state. It's a natural and inevitable consequence of technological growth. Better medicine and food production means more people, better automation leads to more production with less people...you end up with more people than you need to produce goods who are effectively nothing more than consumers and perhaps occasional publishers of fan fiction on a micropayment website.
Anyway, as automation increases, and humans become increasingly obsolete at a lot of jobs, eventually modern industrialized states are going to have to accept that perhaps a majority of their citizens is going to just flat out need a basic income provided gratis because otherwise there would be nothing for them at all.
I'm not buying this. People still need to create/maintain the machines. When jobs become obsolete people gravitate to other careers. Manufacturing bases become service oriented societies over time. This is not new. Yes there is pain in transition, but that's less painful than completely destroying an economy to prevent it.
But there is a maintenance cost to labor, too; even in the total absence of legal distortions like minimum wages, employee safety legislation, etc., there is permanently the cost of relying on a 'machine' who pursues goals which are, fundamentally, not the same as the organization employing it. There is risk and the risk is costly, and the higher the ratio of capital to labor, the more damage can be done, and thus the more costly this risk is.
There's a little passage from Clark's A Farewell to Alms that illustrates the problem:
... there was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boats on the canals, toiled in the pits, and carried armies into battle. But the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.
Automation will eventually reach this point. I don't think we are there yet. Unlike horses, people do adapt and change careers; however, the material costs of resorting to labor at all places a de facto tax on employment and thus unemployment is an inevitable outcome. Such high productivity would imply an income far higher than today's, if one is employed, and even if all one does is sweep the streets. But high structural unemployment may be the market outcome.
I'm a design engineer for a defense contractor, I'm good at what I do and I get payed well, I enjoy playing the latest video games on my new, huge HD screen in my lesiuer time.
I will honestly trade that to be playing WoW:Cataclysem on a three years old PC in a modest room while eating good, in neutrtion no taste, food. Seriously, I only get a new PC every year because I can, not because I really want to, just 'slightly want' is enough.
So a garunteed income will stop society from making use of my ablity, I'm really that much in love with my free time.
80 hours a week is not that much. More than I want to work, sure. But I've done that many hours before and it wasn't the end of the world. If someone is really, really motivated by cash or the job, I understand why they would do it.
More importantly, I wouldn't want to live in country that tells me I'm not allowed to work as much as I want to. Obvious exceptions being the underage and the mentally disabled.
there are health reasons why you can't work as much as you want to, if the amount you want to work is absurd.
you probably do live in a country where your employer will tell you to go home at a certain point, because they are liable for you overworking to the detriment of your health.
this is a good thing.
in the long-run, the liability is already accounted for in a lower wage. Much of the incidence of the liability tax falls instead on the employee, who will not like it but will pay it anyway.
The moral here is that it's very hard to stop people from pursuing as much earned income as much as they want to; you can make it more inconvenient for them to do so but people who willing to do all that, um, work tend to work through those inconveniences, too.
liberals here should be more worried about instances where employers exercise a disproportionate amount of power and therefore the approximate idea of employment as a mutual agreement between employer and employee is no longer true; this is happily not generally true of employment but occasionally it does happen.
e: to enc0re. Don't efficiency-wages imply that labor is generally overpaid, with resulting unemployment + overwork of the employed? There is an argument for market failure here, even if intervention solutions are hard to concoct.
ronya on
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kaliyamaLeft to find less-moderated foraRegistered Userregular
I'm a design engineer for a defense contractor, I'm good at what I do and I get payed well, I enjoy playing the latest video games on my new, huge HD screen in my lesiuer time.
I will honestly trade that to be playing WoW:Cataclysem on a three years old PC in a modest room while eating good, in neutrtion no taste, food. Seriously, I only get a new PC every year because I can, not because I really want to, just 'slightly want' is enough.
So a garunteed income will stop society from making use of my ablity, I'm really that much in love with my free time.
I hope you don't do any of the technical writing... You may say/think this, but currently you could, in exchange for a pay cut, become a STEM teacher in a secondary school and get way more vacation time, exchanging a reduction in pay for increased leisure time. Yet you haven't made that decision. You also could seek part time employment as an engineer, yet you haven't done that either.
Anyway, as automation increases, and humans become increasingly obsolete at a lot of jobs, eventually modern industrialized states are going to have to accept that perhaps a majority of their citizens is going to just flat out need a basic income provided gratis because otherwise there would be nothing for them at all.
I'm not buying this. People still need to create/maintain the machines. When jobs become obsolete people gravitate to other careers. Manufacturing bases become service oriented societies over time. This is not new. Yes there is pain in transition, but that's less painful than completely destroying an economy to prevent it.
But there is a maintenance cost to labor, too; even in the total absence of legal distortions like minimum wages, employee safety legislation, etc., there is permanently the cost of relying on a 'machine' who pursues goals which are, fundamentally, not the same as the organization employing it. There is risk and the risk is costly, and the higher the ratio of capital to labor, the more damage can be done, and thus the more costly this risk is.
There's a little passage from Clark's A Farewell to Alms that illustrates the problem:
... there was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boats on the canals, toiled in the pits, and carried armies into battle. But the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.
Automation will eventually reach this point. I don't think we are there yet. Unlike horses, people do adapt and change careers; however, the material costs of resorting to labor at all places a de facto tax on employment and thus unemployment is an inevitable outcome. Such high productivity would imply an income far higher than today's, if one is employed, and even if all one does is sweep the streets. But high structural unemployment may be the market outcome.
The problem is, we don't have structural unemployment right now. With very few exceptions, there aren't any career fields or cities where workers are highly in demand, but no one qualified is there to do the jobs. In almost every case, the number of qualified workers greatly exceeds the number of jobs. So what are those workers supposed to do? Go to work for a much lower wage?
I'm a design engineer for a defense contractor, I'm good at what I do and I get payed well, I enjoy playing the latest video games on my new, huge HD screen in my lesiuer time.
I will honestly trade that to be playing WoW:Cataclysem on a three years old PC in a modest room while eating good, in neutrtion no taste, food. Seriously, I only get a new PC every year because I can, not because I really want to, just 'slightly want' is enough.
So a garunteed income will stop society from making use of my ablity, I'm really that much in love with my free time.
I hope you don't do any of the technical writing... You may say/think this, but currently you could, in exchange for a pay cut, become a STEM teacher in a secondary school and get way more vacation time, exchanging a reduction in pay for increased leisure time. Yet you haven't made that decision. You also could seek part time employment as an engineer, yet you haven't done that either.
Nah, don't worry about the writing, there are tools that can hide my gross illiteracy which I don't use to post.
As for your suggestions, you do raise a valid point, there are pleanty of places between where I am and living on goverment income, and the fact I haven't explored them yet makes a huge dent in my theory. But there is some strange allure to the absolute low end of this spectrem, to sleep knowing that I will only wake up to play? I don't know, its like, I really should try to rethink this on a weekend, my position might change.
Well the big problem I see is that all of the real, literal, needs have already been filled. What do you need, exactly? You need food, shelter, medicine, and some clothes to stay warm. That's it. You don't need anything else. All of those things are produced by huge, multi-national organisations, which an independant startup can't possibly compete with. And the same problem exists with the indirect needs- stuff like cars, and computers, stuff which isn't strictly necessary but helps a lot with everything in modern society- you can't do that yourself. There's a small number of people who produce enough to go around, for everyone. We don't need anyone else producing those things.
When people go in to business for themselves, what they do is produce luxuries. Stuff like handmade crafts, or paintings, or computer games, or a coffee shop, or a restaurant- all that stuff is fun, and I enjoy it, but we don't really need it. And they're all competing with each other- people only have a small amount of excess income to spend on luxuries like that. In order for a new startup like that to succeed, another small business has to lose money. Those small businesses would be more pleasant if they weren't trying to cut each others' throat to stay alive.
edit- there is another way to run the economy. There's a small group of people with effectively infinite income to spend on luxuries- the super rich. We can all start small businesses that service their every desire. That's pretty much the way the US economy is headed right now - a small group of oligarchs, and their servants. I just really don't want to go down that road.
is amazingly straight out of 1920s Progressivism, right down to the proclamations of the ascendancy of the faceless assembly line, the desire to rationalize competition, and the confidence that all material wants had been satisfied by the technology of the day. Unfortunately, there is a good reason 1940s Progressivism replaced 1920s Progressivism, and that is because the latter was a terrible idea, and mostly wrong about its empirical predictions.
Do you have any sources that address this? Because this is still the argument most convincing to me personally, and I don't think anyone has directly addressed this yet.
That your view is similar to early progressivism, or that it was hopelessly wrong on how things turned out?
Because huge multinationals rise and fall fairly regularly, and compete directly with startups. Because competition would certainly be more pleasant if all those niggling competitors went away, at least for the incumbent businesses, because now they get to charge monopoly prices. Because it is clear that people want more than food, shelter, medicine, and warm clothes; people in the slums of El Salvador might not have enough food or safe shelter but you can see the satellite dishes sprouting on the aluminum roofs anyway. In the actual third world, the poor have cell phones more than they have shoes.
Characterizing some business output as necessities produced solely by huge businesses immune to competition and all other output as unnecessary luxuries produced by small businesses is incredibly bizarre; it made a degree of sense a century ago when a majority of GDP was manufacturing and agriculture, both of which were undergoing a process of consolidation into the oligopolies of the 60s. But it is obviously not true today. Healthcare and education are not services dedicated solely to the super rich, but they occupy increasingly large shares of GDP.
Anyway, as automation increases, and humans become increasingly obsolete at a lot of jobs, eventually modern industrialized states are going to have to accept that perhaps a majority of their citizens is going to just flat out need a basic income provided gratis because otherwise there would be nothing for them at all.
I'm not buying this. People still need to create/maintain the machines. When jobs become obsolete people gravitate to other careers. Manufacturing bases become service oriented societies over time. This is not new. Yes there is pain in transition, but that's less painful than completely destroying an economy to prevent it.
But there is a maintenance cost to labor, too; even in the total absence of legal distortions like minimum wages, employee safety legislation, etc., there is permanently the cost of relying on a 'machine' who pursues goals which are, fundamentally, not the same as the organization employing it. There is risk and the risk is costly, and the higher the ratio of capital to labor, the more damage can be done, and thus the more costly this risk is.
There's a little passage from Clark's A Farewell to Alms that illustrates the problem:
... there was a type of employee at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution whose job and livelihood largely vanished in the early twentieth century. This was the horse. The population of working horses actually peaked in England long after the Industrial Revolution, in 1901, when 3.25 million were at work. Though they had been replaced by rail for long-distance haulage and by steam engines for driving machinery, they still plowed fields, hauled wagons and carriages short distances, pulled boats on the canals, toiled in the pits, and carried armies into battle. But the arrival of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century rapidly displaced these workers, so that by 1924 there were fewer than two million. There was always a wage at which all these horses could have remained employed. But that wage was so low that it did not pay for their feed.
Automation will eventually reach this point. I don't think we are there yet. Unlike horses, people do adapt and change careers; however, the material costs of resorting to labor at all places a de facto tax on employment and thus unemployment is an inevitable outcome. Such high productivity would imply an income far higher than today's, if one is employed, and even if all one does is sweep the streets. But high structural unemployment may be the market outcome.
The problem is, we don't have structural unemployment right now. With very few exceptions, there aren't any career fields or cities where workers are highly in demand, but no one qualified is there to do the jobs. In almost every case, the number of qualified workers greatly exceeds the number of jobs. So what are those workers supposed to do? Go to work for a much lower wage?
Like I said, I don't think we are there yet.
As for what is going on right now: we have sticky prices and sticky wages and growth below trend, and therefore excess capacity and excess unemployment. Workers could go to work for a much lower wage, which would reduce unemployment, and prices could adjust, which would raise the real wage back up. The most relevant actor here is the Federal Reserve. There isn't a need to postulate anything more complicated than this.
Well the big problem I see is that all of the real, literal, needs have already been filled. What do you need, exactly? You need food, shelter, medicine, and some clothes to stay warm. That's it. You don't need anything else. All of those things are produced by huge, multi-national organisations, which an independant startup can't possibly compete with. And the same problem exists with the indirect needs- stuff like cars, and computers, stuff which isn't strictly necessary but helps a lot with everything in modern society- you can't do that yourself. There's a small number of people who produce enough to go around, for everyone. We don't need anyone else producing those things.
When people go in to business for themselves, what they do is produce luxuries. Stuff like handmade crafts, or paintings, or computer games, or a coffee shop, or a restaurant- all that stuff is fun, and I enjoy it, but we don't really need it. And they're all competing with each other- people only have a small amount of excess income to spend on luxuries like that. In order for a new startup like that to succeed, another small business has to lose money. Those small businesses would be more pleasant if they weren't trying to cut each others' throat to stay alive.
edit- there is another way to run the economy. There's a small group of people with effectively infinite income to spend on luxuries- the super rich. We can all start small businesses that service their every desire. That's pretty much the way the US economy is headed right now - a small group of oligarchs, and their servants. I just really don't want to go down that road.
is amazingly straight out of 1920s Progressivism, right down to the proclamations of the ascendancy of the faceless assembly line, the desire to rationalize competition, and the confidence that all material wants had been satisfied by the technology of the day. Unfortunately, there is a good reason 1940s Progressivism replaced 1920s Progressivism, and that is because the latter was a terrible idea, and mostly wrong about its empirical predictions.
Do you have any sources that address this? Because this is still the argument most convincing to me personally, and I don't think anyone has directly addressed this yet.
That your view is similar to early progressivism, or that it was hopelessly wrong on how things turned out?
Because huge multinationals rise and fall fairly regularly, and compete directly with startups. Because competition would certainly be more pleasant if all those niggling competitors went away, at least for the incumbent businesses, because now they get to charge monopoly prices. Because it is clear that people want more than food, shelter, medicine, and warm clothes; people in the slums of El Salvador might not have enough food or safe shelter but you can see the satellite dishes sprouting on the aluminum roofs anyway. In the actual third world, the poor have cell phones more than they have shoes.
Characterizing some business output as necessities produced solely by huge businesses immune to competition and all other output as unnecessary luxuries produced by small businesses is incredibly bizarre; it made a degree of sense a century ago when a majority of GDP was manufacturing and agriculture, both of which were undergoing a process of consolidation into the oligopolies of the 60s. But it is obviously not true today. Healthcare and education are not services dedicated solely to the super rich, but they occupy increasingly large shares of GDP.
This mischaracterizes the argument a bit. Of course multinational corporations will still rise and fall, but when have you ever heard of one going out of business because they can't compete with small businesses in the field of basic necesseties? Tyson food and Monsanto aren't competing with the local farmer's market, because their food is significantly cheaper, so the farmer's market is sort of a luxury. Same with housing- you might hire an independant contractor to build a house for you, but it will be a lot more expensive than buying one premade from a huge building company.
And yes, of course people want more than just the bare necesseties. That's fine-- the problem is that most people don't have a lot of money to spend on extras, and any small business that someone starts is forced to compete for that money.
I'm not saying that big businesses all produce necesseties- I'm saying that all necesseties are produced by big businesses. Luxuries are produced by all sorts of different businesses.
Education and healthcare are sort of hard to classify, I admit- everyone needs SOME, and you could always use more, but everyone has to draw the line somewhere. For right now, those seems like the only core fields that could still employ significantly more workers. But we used to have something like 80% of workers doing manufacturing or agriculture, and now it's more like 10%- are we really going to employ 70% of workers in education and health care?
Why do big businesses need to be replaced by a host of small businesses for competition to be meaningful? All it matters is for smaller businesses to occasionally displace businesses somewhat larger than them.
It would be surprising if a big business were suddenly replaced by numerous smaller entities that all gain marketshare at its expense; the order of firm sizes generally follows regularities such as Zipf's law (or, more concretely, the structure of the underlying costs of making stuff and economies of scale). Why would these change suddenly? A larger business that can't keep up with competition still has tons of valuable business capital that it can sell to keep itself afloat. It won't just disappear in a puff of smoke due to brief losses.
I have no idea why you think the mechanism of price competition for necessities (by your definitions) functions in a substantially different manner from the mechanism for non-necessities. Nor do I know why you think people don't substitute between the two. Clothing is a necessity, but the vast majority of people in the first world buy clothing far more expensive than the cheapest possible clothes that might meet their need to stay warm; there is a substantial non-bare-necessity component of spending here.
Yes, your characterizing all necessities as produced by big businesses was what I said the first time, and it is still bizarre. All food, shelter, and medicine are produced by big businesses? Really? Not just "most", but "all"?
Yes, we are going to employ more and more workers in service industries. Actually, statistics for the US and EU are approximately 1%-24%-75% for agriculture, manufacturing, and services, and manufacturing as a percentage of employment is going to continue shrinking from there, even as manufacturing output increases.
Well the big problem I see is that all of the real, literal, needs have already been filled. What do you need, exactly? You need food, shelter, medicine, and some clothes to stay warm. That's it. You don't need anything else. All of those things are produced by huge, multi-national organisations, which an independant startup can't possibly compete with. And the same problem exists with the indirect needs- stuff like cars, and computers, stuff which isn't strictly necessary but helps a lot with everything in modern society- you can't do that yourself. There's a small number of people who produce enough to go around, for everyone. We don't need anyone else producing those things.
When people go in to business for themselves, what they do is produce luxuries. Stuff like handmade crafts, or paintings, or computer games, or a coffee shop, or a restaurant- all that stuff is fun, and I enjoy it, but we don't really need it. And they're all competing with each other- people only have a small amount of excess income to spend on luxuries like that. In order for a new startup like that to succeed, another small business has to lose money. Those small businesses would be more pleasant if they weren't trying to cut each others' throat to stay alive.
edit- there is another way to run the economy. There's a small group of people with effectively infinite income to spend on luxuries- the super rich. We can all start small businesses that service their every desire. That's pretty much the way the US economy is headed right now - a small group of oligarchs, and their servants. I just really don't want to go down that road.
is amazingly straight out of 1920s Progressivism, right down to the proclamations of the ascendancy of the faceless assembly line, the desire to rationalize competition, and the confidence that all material wants had been satisfied by the technology of the day. Unfortunately, there is a good reason 1940s Progressivism replaced 1920s Progressivism, and that is because the latter was a terrible idea, and mostly wrong about its empirical predictions.
Do you have any sources that address this? Because this is still the argument most convincing to me personally, and I don't think anyone has directly addressed this yet.
That your view is similar to early progressivism, or that it was hopelessly wrong on how things turned out?
Because huge multinationals rise and fall fairly regularly, and compete directly with startups. Because competition would certainly be more pleasant if all those niggling competitors went away, at least for the incumbent businesses, because now they get to charge monopoly prices. Because it is clear that people want more than food, shelter, medicine, and warm clothes; people in the slums of El Salvador might not have enough food or safe shelter but you can see the satellite dishes sprouting on the aluminum roofs anyway. In the actual third world, the poor have cell phones more than they have shoes.
Characterizing some business output as necessities produced solely by huge businesses immune to competition and all other output as unnecessary luxuries produced by small businesses is incredibly bizarre; it made a degree of sense a century ago when a majority of GDP was manufacturing and agriculture, both of which were undergoing a process of consolidation into the oligopolies of the 60s. But it is obviously not true today. Healthcare and education are not services dedicated solely to the super rich, but they occupy increasingly large shares of GDP.
I just want to pop in and say this.
Ronya, that last paragraph there is kind of what I was concerned about in my PM to you. A lot of my argument hinges on a characterization of some services as needs and others as wants, and my position is that the government should supply as much of the "needs" to its citizens as is possible.
I just woke up and am doing lots of things right now, but I will come back to this later.
Some people will choose not to work. Please provide your estimate of how many that is, and then provide an estimate of the number of grandmas that you'd allow to starve in order to prevent those people from quitting their Starbucks jobs.
False dichotomy. We already have programs in place to prevent grandmas from starving. I don't see the point of replacing those programs with ones that will lead to more lazy layabouts not having to work.
It is not a false dichotomy. Any program with barriers to entry will leave out some "deserving" person (even if only because they die before the application is approved). Any program without infinite barriers to entry will support some slackers.
I guarantee that there is at least one grandma who is starving. How many slackers would you be willing to support in order to save her?
There's an underlying moral assumption here that slacking is intrinsically bad.
There should be a population, ideally tiny but extant, for whom the lowest wages are not sufficient to bring them into work. This would imply that there is negotiation between the workforce and employers. Right now, there are people for whom their only choice is to work or starve - even if the conditions of working are untenable. We address these conditions explicitly through labor law, but as Ronya implied earlier, the law is a clumsy blunt instrument while economics can be more subtle. If people had a meaningful choice whether to work or not, there would be more incentive for employers to improve working hours and conditions.
OR, they'd just hire illegal immigrants. Employers always look for the best route, whether legal/illegal. Imo, people have too much pride in themselves to sacrifice their time to take a certain job because it's not what they want. That is probably a large number that assume they're suited for better things when that job isn't out there.
I think people need to get over themselves and make sacrifices. Not the other way around - people who have jobs who made the sacrifice are basically being punished at the expense of what amounts to slackers.
Like Feral said, you still make the assumption that a "slacker" is bad, and someone with a job is good. No matter what. Even if that job creates harmful externalities, and the person got it only by taking it away from a "slacker".
I have my own interpretation of a slacker, which might be a more severe definition than what other people use, and that's why I'd assume they're bad. But I'm biased because I work 80 hours a week and don't understand the idea/notion that you can't make sacrifices in your day to help. Oh, that's because I'm a workaholic. lol
No, you're not a workaholic. You're an incredibly silly goose. If you're working 80 hours, I would think yo need to reevaluate things.
The Puritan work ethic really needs to get the Ol Yeller treatment.
Be more ignorant? Graduate/pharmaceutical research usually demands more than 50+ hours of work. I love it. I took the retail position because I needed a job that made me communicate with people more. I don't mind the reading/thinking of research, but I do enjoy a position where I interact with people more. And working 70-80 hours doesn't severely limit you from having a social life and it improves your ability to prioritize your time/be responsible. When you only have 5 hours on a weekend to get shit done - YOU GET IT DONE. I had to work on my car this past Saturday and only had 5 hours to pull my intercooler/turbo and replace the turbo - prime it/drive it - take off the downpipe/exhaust on my car, check for shaft play on the turbo and then get the car up - get back to my place, shower and then be at work...in 5 hours.
I absolutely hate the whole "9 to 5 with a lunch break" routine. And a social life is definitely in the schedule. Considering most people my age don't do shit until 10pm, I'm in a perfectly fine situation.
Also, I'm definitely helping myself out in the long run. Showing that I can maintain a 70-80 hour work schedule means I can definitely work and make sacrifices when I need to. That's what employers want to see. I'm sorry if you're upset by this, but I'll do whatever I can to sell myself as a hard worker.
This is a page late, but I couldn't let this one go. The unemployment rate is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics only using the number of people who have actively looked for work in the past four weeks. Beyond that, I think they're considered "marginally attached" to the workforce or "discouraged workers" and aren't featured in the calculation of the headline rate. Thus, "everyone unemployed" pretty much is trying 100% to get a job.
Not to stir the pot with a hatred/rage of temper, but what is "actively looking"? I don't doubt that some of the people are trying to get a job, but I really would like to know what "actively looking" means. I could be actively looking by applying online/filling out job applications, right? Sure, I'll go ahead and submit a resume for a position that I feel I am fit for.
Well the big problem I see is that all of the real, literal, needs have already been filled. What do you need, exactly? You need food, shelter, medicine, and some clothes to stay warm. That's it. You don't need anything else. All of those things are produced by huge, multi-national organisations, which an independant startup can't possibly compete with. And the same problem exists with the indirect needs- stuff like cars, and computers, stuff which isn't strictly necessary but helps a lot with everything in modern society- you can't do that yourself. There's a small number of people who produce enough to go around, for everyone. We don't need anyone else producing those things.
When people go in to business for themselves, what they do is produce luxuries. Stuff like handmade crafts, or paintings, or computer games, or a coffee shop, or a restaurant- all that stuff is fun, and I enjoy it, but we don't really need it. And they're all competing with each other- people only have a small amount of excess income to spend on luxuries like that. In order for a new startup like that to succeed, another small business has to lose money. Those small businesses would be more pleasant if they weren't trying to cut each others' throat to stay alive.
edit- there is another way to run the economy. There's a small group of people with effectively infinite income to spend on luxuries- the super rich. We can all start small businesses that service their every desire. That's pretty much the way the US economy is headed right now - a small group of oligarchs, and their servants. I just really don't want to go down that road.
is amazingly straight out of 1920s Progressivism, right down to the proclamations of the ascendancy of the faceless assembly line, the desire to rationalize competition, and the confidence that all material wants had been satisfied by the technology of the day. Unfortunately, there is a good reason 1940s Progressivism replaced 1920s Progressivism, and that is because the latter was a terrible idea, and mostly wrong about its empirical predictions.
Do you have any sources that address this? Because this is still the argument most convincing to me personally, and I don't think anyone has directly addressed this yet.
That your view is similar to early progressivism, or that it was hopelessly wrong on how things turned out?
Because huge multinationals rise and fall fairly regularly, and compete directly with startups. Because competition would certainly be more pleasant if all those niggling competitors went away, at least for the incumbent businesses, because now they get to charge monopoly prices. Because it is clear that people want more than food, shelter, medicine, and warm clothes; people in the slums of El Salvador might not have enough food or safe shelter but you can see the satellite dishes sprouting on the aluminum roofs anyway. In the actual third world, the poor have cell phones more than they have shoes.
Characterizing some business output as necessities produced solely by huge businesses immune to competition and all other output as unnecessary luxuries produced by small businesses is incredibly bizarre; it made a degree of sense a century ago when a majority of GDP was manufacturing and agriculture, both of which were undergoing a process of consolidation into the oligopolies of the 60s. But it is obviously not true today. Healthcare and education are not services dedicated solely to the super rich, but they occupy increasingly large shares of GDP.
I just want to pop in and say this.
Ronya, that last paragraph there is kind of what I was concerned about in my PM to you. A lot of my argument hinges on a characterization of some services as needs and others as wants, and my position is that the government should supply as much of the "needs" to its citizens as is possible.
I just woke up and am doing lots of things right now, but I will come back to this later.
And I respectfully disagree. People take advantage of that, more often than not, and it causes loopholes/debts that we're seeing now. Look at medicaid as a perfect example.
80 hours of week will eventually kill you. It doesn't take long.
My friend was working I think 76 hours a week for about a month and had a heart attack at 25.
For some people. You do realize doctors do this for their entire career, right? I can't believe how astounded you guys are at my schedule. I know of plenty of people doing it and they're fine. It's about maintaining a healthy lifestyle and managing your day correctly. Couple that with the fact that I can easily counter your argument with people who live lazy/slacker lifestyles that die at 21...
Most doctors rotate on-call. How long have you worked 80 hours a week and what do you do outside of those 80 hours? How are they spread out?
Huge part of it, but, it is a detriment to your health in the long run. Granted you still have 32 hours to do whatevs, but after housework, eating, cooking, you've pretty much got 0 free time to yourself. Maybe an hour a day but that's hardly healthy.
Most doctors rotate on-call. How long have you worked 80 hours a week and what do you do outside of those 80 hours? How are they spread out?
Huge part of it, but, it is a detriment to your health in the long run. Granted you still have 32 hours to do whatevs, but after housework, eating, cooking, you've pretty much got 0 free time to yourself. Maybe an hour a day but that's hardly healthy.
Ha. Talk to med students and residents. Actually, just talk to residents. While you're at it - talk to investment bankers, lawyers and grad students doing research. They work that schedule. And why would I need more than 32 hours to have fun? I work out (which I enjoy) 3 x's a week, I hang out with friends on weekends. The only minor concern is that I sleep 6-7 hours a week - which I've done before I started doing this. I'm tired when I get back to my place, but I know that I've been productive. I can't stand not doing things - which is why I always try to work when I'm not. I work on my car - if I can - which is stressful/hard work considering the hours doing labor. I work on my comic book. I mean, I think people in this thread are not happy with their current jobs that they can't seem to fathom working more than the required hours. I like it. If I didn't have my second job, I'd work more hours at research.
When you say "look at medicaid as a perfect example"...of what do you mean?
People that take advantage of it or people who don't necessarily need it. When someone is getting medicaid but spending $100/mo on cigarettes, I call foul. I've seen it numerous times working at the pharmacy/hospital that it annoys the hell out of me. You can afford it, you just want the needs more than the wants. THAT'S the problem with us today. We have this idea that we're entitled to that glorious lifestyle we see on TV and think the needs should be given to us. How is that teaching us responsibility?
When you say "look at medicaid as a perfect example"...of what do you mean?
People that take advantage of it or people who don't necessarily need it. When someone is getting medicaid but spending $100/mo on cigarettes, I call foul. I've seen it numerous times working at the pharmacy/hospital that it annoys the hell out of me. You can afford it, you just want the needs more than the wants. THAT'S the problem with us today. We have this idea that we're entitled to that glorious lifestyle we see on TV and think the needs should be given to us. How is that teaching us responsibility?
Most doctors rotate on-call. How long have you worked 80 hours a week and what do you do outside of those 80 hours? How are they spread out?
Huge part of it, but, it is a detriment to your health in the long run. Granted you still have 32 hours to do whatevs, but after housework, eating, cooking, you've pretty much got 0 free time to yourself. Maybe an hour a day but that's hardly healthy.
Ha. Talk to med students and residents. Actually, just talk to residents. While you're at it - talk to investment bankers, lawyers and grad students doing research. They work that schedule. And why would I need more than 32 hours to have fun? I work out (which I enjoy) 3 x's a week, I hang out with friends on weekends. The only minor concern is that I sleep 6-7 hours a week - which I've done before I started doing this. I'm tired when I get back to my place, but I know that I've been productive. I can't stand not doing things - which is why I always try to work when I'm not. I work on my car - if I can - which is stressful/hard work considering the hours doing labor. I work on my comic book. I mean, I think people in this thread are not happy with their current jobs that they can't seem to fathom working more than the required hours. I like it. If I didn't have my second job, I'd work more hours at research.
Not the case. I'd be willing to work 80 hours. Do I do it? No. Is it bad for your health? In certain situations. You specifically probably will not have as many issues as the aforementioned person that I know, but in a few years you'll probably start to notice the wear and tear on your body and other stress related health issues (ulcers come to mind). Mainly because the person I mentioned work more than 80 hour weeks.
There's also a reason why the government (at least from what I remember) is trying to reign in hours worked by doctors and residents because that's peoples lives on the line.
When you say "look at medicaid as a perfect example"...of what do you mean?
People that take advantage of it or people who don't necessarily need it. When someone is getting medicaid but spending $100/mo on cigarettes, I call foul. I've seen it numerous times working at the pharmacy/hospital that it annoys the hell out of me. You can afford it, you just want the needs more than the wants. THAT'S the problem with us today. We have this idea that we're entitled to that glorious lifestyle we see on TV and think the needs should be given to us. How is that teaching us responsibility?
Medicare and Medicaid made an estimated $23.7 billion in improper payments in 2007. These included $10.8 billion for Medicare and $12.9 billion for Medicaid. Medicare’s fee-for-service reduced its error rate from 4.4 percent to 3.9 percent.
So, it's there. They're combating it, which means it's an issue.
So the error rate is 4%, if I am reading that right?
Meaning only 4% of medicaid/medicare spending is fraudulent?
I mean 23.7 billion in improper payments looks like a lot, but unless it is a huge percentage of the total spending I would hardly state that it is a perfect example of loopholes and debt.
A 4% margin of fraud/waste is excellent. Most businesses wish they could get that close. At this point they're probably going to end up spending more money trying to drop that further than they'd save just by letting it slide as an "uncontrollable fraud" portion of their spending.
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If I want to work 80 hours/week, who are you to tell me otherwise?
Would you say the same thing about alchoholism?
No. I wouldn't say the same thing about huffing paint either.
I would, but everyone knows I am a goose.
Seriously? 80 hours a week? That's assinine. The standard work week was instituted for a reason. Granted, you've got 40hrs of overtime pay; good for you. You've got all that money to spend on... doing fucknothin, because you're at work or maybe sleeping, mayyyybe eating. So, yeah, enjoy that vacation time, I guess?
I mean, money is great; but only because we need it to obtain things.
More importantly, I wouldn't want to live in country that tells me I'm not allowed to work as much as I want to. Obvious exceptions being the underage and the mentally disabled.
there are health reasons why you can't work as much as you want to, if the amount you want to work is absurd.
you probably do live in a country where your employer will tell you to go home at a certain point, because they are liable for you overworking to the detriment of your health.
this is a good thing.
I guess I just put a lot of value on free time. Like... what's the point of having money "for the future" if your now is nothing but work. I guess I'm the grasshopper in the Grasshopper and Ant parable.
this is not a reason. i'm not asking why it's unnecessary to abuse yourself with an 80hr work week. i'm not even asking about "puritan work ethic" literally (the idea that hard work and success is a sign of divine favor).
what exactly are you talking about when you say it needs to disappear?
This is a page late, but I couldn't let this one go. The unemployment rate is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics only using the number of people who have actively looked for work in the past four weeks. Beyond that, I think they're considered "marginally attached" to the workforce or "discouraged workers" and aren't featured in the calculation of the headline rate. Thus, "everyone unemployed" pretty much is trying 100% to get a job.
Didn't get implemented. It's just funny how things turn out.
Anyway, as automation increases, and humans become increasingly obsolete at a lot of jobs, eventually modern industrialized states are going to have to accept that perhaps a majority of their citizens is going to just flat out need a basic income provided gratis because otherwise there would be nothing for them at all.
Well all of these things are harmful to the individual and society so why is regulating the latter okay, but not the former?
I'm not buying this. People still need to create/maintain the machines. When jobs become obsolete people gravitate to other careers. Manufacturing bases become service oriented societies over time. This is not new. Yes there is pain in transition, but that's less painful than completely destroying an economy to prevent it.
The example was 80 hours of week worth of week, which isn't uncommon for a small business just starting out. At sub minimum wage no less. Are you suggesting this shouldn't be allowed?
Huh? What does that have to do anything I said?
I didn't say all jobs were going away. But at a certain point, you are going to have a large population of people who won't be needed to produce a wealthy, vibrant society because of the productivity force multiplier of technology. And since the only things left will be intellectual tasks like creative endeavor and specialized training...everyone not really capable of doing those things is gonna have nothing to do.
And you can't just let those people starve. Ergo, welfare-leisure state. It's a natural and inevitable consequence of technological growth. Better medicine and food production means more people, better automation leads to more production with less people...you end up with more people than you need to produce goods who are effectively nothing more than consumers and perhaps occasional publishers of fan fiction on a micropayment website.
But there is a maintenance cost to labor, too; even in the total absence of legal distortions like minimum wages, employee safety legislation, etc., there is permanently the cost of relying on a 'machine' who pursues goals which are, fundamentally, not the same as the organization employing it. There is risk and the risk is costly, and the higher the ratio of capital to labor, the more damage can be done, and thus the more costly this risk is.
There's a little passage from Clark's A Farewell to Alms that illustrates the problem:
Automation will eventually reach this point. I don't think we are there yet. Unlike horses, people do adapt and change careers; however, the material costs of resorting to labor at all places a de facto tax on employment and thus unemployment is an inevitable outcome. Such high productivity would imply an income far higher than today's, if one is employed, and even if all one does is sweep the streets. But high structural unemployment may be the market outcome.
I will honestly trade that to be playing WoW:Cataclysem on a three years old PC in a modest room while eating good, in neutrtion no taste, food. Seriously, I only get a new PC every year because I can, not because I really want to, just 'slightly want' is enough.
So a garunteed income will stop society from making use of my ablity, I'm really that much in love with my free time.
in the long-run, the liability is already accounted for in a lower wage. Much of the incidence of the liability tax falls instead on the employee, who will not like it but will pay it anyway.
The moral here is that it's very hard to stop people from pursuing as much earned income as much as they want to; you can make it more inconvenient for them to do so but people who willing to do all that, um, work tend to work through those inconveniences, too.
liberals here should be more worried about instances where employers exercise a disproportionate amount of power and therefore the approximate idea of employment as a mutual agreement between employer and employee is no longer true; this is happily not generally true of employment but occasionally it does happen.
e: to enc0re. Don't efficiency-wages imply that labor is generally overpaid, with resulting unemployment + overwork of the employed? There is an argument for market failure here, even if intervention solutions are hard to concoct.
I hope you don't do any of the technical writing... You may say/think this, but currently you could, in exchange for a pay cut, become a STEM teacher in a secondary school and get way more vacation time, exchanging a reduction in pay for increased leisure time. Yet you haven't made that decision. You also could seek part time employment as an engineer, yet you haven't done that either.
The problem is, we don't have structural unemployment right now. With very few exceptions, there aren't any career fields or cities where workers are highly in demand, but no one qualified is there to do the jobs. In almost every case, the number of qualified workers greatly exceeds the number of jobs. So what are those workers supposed to do? Go to work for a much lower wage?
Nah, don't worry about the writing, there are tools that can hide my gross illiteracy which I don't use to post.
As for your suggestions, you do raise a valid point, there are pleanty of places between where I am and living on goverment income, and the fact I haven't explored them yet makes a huge dent in my theory. But there is some strange allure to the absolute low end of this spectrem, to sleep knowing that I will only wake up to play? I don't know, its like, I really should try to rethink this on a weekend, my position might change.
That your view is similar to early progressivism, or that it was hopelessly wrong on how things turned out?
Because huge multinationals rise and fall fairly regularly, and compete directly with startups. Because competition would certainly be more pleasant if all those niggling competitors went away, at least for the incumbent businesses, because now they get to charge monopoly prices. Because it is clear that people want more than food, shelter, medicine, and warm clothes; people in the slums of El Salvador might not have enough food or safe shelter but you can see the satellite dishes sprouting on the aluminum roofs anyway. In the actual third world, the poor have cell phones more than they have shoes.
Characterizing some business output as necessities produced solely by huge businesses immune to competition and all other output as unnecessary luxuries produced by small businesses is incredibly bizarre; it made a degree of sense a century ago when a majority of GDP was manufacturing and agriculture, both of which were undergoing a process of consolidation into the oligopolies of the 60s. But it is obviously not true today. Healthcare and education are not services dedicated solely to the super rich, but they occupy increasingly large shares of GDP.
Like I said, I don't think we are there yet.
As for what is going on right now: we have sticky prices and sticky wages and growth below trend, and therefore excess capacity and excess unemployment. Workers could go to work for a much lower wage, which would reduce unemployment, and prices could adjust, which would raise the real wage back up. The most relevant actor here is the Federal Reserve. There isn't a need to postulate anything more complicated than this.
This mischaracterizes the argument a bit. Of course multinational corporations will still rise and fall, but when have you ever heard of one going out of business because they can't compete with small businesses in the field of basic necesseties? Tyson food and Monsanto aren't competing with the local farmer's market, because their food is significantly cheaper, so the farmer's market is sort of a luxury. Same with housing- you might hire an independant contractor to build a house for you, but it will be a lot more expensive than buying one premade from a huge building company.
And yes, of course people want more than just the bare necesseties. That's fine-- the problem is that most people don't have a lot of money to spend on extras, and any small business that someone starts is forced to compete for that money.
I'm not saying that big businesses all produce necesseties- I'm saying that all necesseties are produced by big businesses. Luxuries are produced by all sorts of different businesses.
Education and healthcare are sort of hard to classify, I admit- everyone needs SOME, and you could always use more, but everyone has to draw the line somewhere. For right now, those seems like the only core fields that could still employ significantly more workers. But we used to have something like 80% of workers doing manufacturing or agriculture, and now it's more like 10%- are we really going to employ 70% of workers in education and health care?
It would be surprising if a big business were suddenly replaced by numerous smaller entities that all gain marketshare at its expense; the order of firm sizes generally follows regularities such as Zipf's law (or, more concretely, the structure of the underlying costs of making stuff and economies of scale). Why would these change suddenly? A larger business that can't keep up with competition still has tons of valuable business capital that it can sell to keep itself afloat. It won't just disappear in a puff of smoke due to brief losses.
I have no idea why you think the mechanism of price competition for necessities (by your definitions) functions in a substantially different manner from the mechanism for non-necessities. Nor do I know why you think people don't substitute between the two. Clothing is a necessity, but the vast majority of people in the first world buy clothing far more expensive than the cheapest possible clothes that might meet their need to stay warm; there is a substantial non-bare-necessity component of spending here.
Yes, your characterizing all necessities as produced by big businesses was what I said the first time, and it is still bizarre. All food, shelter, and medicine are produced by big businesses? Really? Not just "most", but "all"?
Yes, we are going to employ more and more workers in service industries. Actually, statistics for the US and EU are approximately 1%-24%-75% for agriculture, manufacturing, and services, and manufacturing as a percentage of employment is going to continue shrinking from there, even as manufacturing output increases.
I just want to pop in and say this.
Ronya, that last paragraph there is kind of what I was concerned about in my PM to you. A lot of my argument hinges on a characterization of some services as needs and others as wants, and my position is that the government should supply as much of the "needs" to its citizens as is possible.
I just woke up and am doing lots of things right now, but I will come back to this later.
Be more ignorant? Graduate/pharmaceutical research usually demands more than 50+ hours of work. I love it. I took the retail position because I needed a job that made me communicate with people more. I don't mind the reading/thinking of research, but I do enjoy a position where I interact with people more. And working 70-80 hours doesn't severely limit you from having a social life and it improves your ability to prioritize your time/be responsible. When you only have 5 hours on a weekend to get shit done - YOU GET IT DONE. I had to work on my car this past Saturday and only had 5 hours to pull my intercooler/turbo and replace the turbo - prime it/drive it - take off the downpipe/exhaust on my car, check for shaft play on the turbo and then get the car up - get back to my place, shower and then be at work...in 5 hours.
I absolutely hate the whole "9 to 5 with a lunch break" routine. And a social life is definitely in the schedule. Considering most people my age don't do shit until 10pm, I'm in a perfectly fine situation.
Also, I'm definitely helping myself out in the long run. Showing that I can maintain a 70-80 hour work schedule means I can definitely work and make sacrifices when I need to. That's what employers want to see. I'm sorry if you're upset by this, but I'll do whatever I can to sell myself as a hard worker.
Not to stir the pot with a hatred/rage of temper, but what is "actively looking"? I don't doubt that some of the people are trying to get a job, but I really would like to know what "actively looking" means. I could be actively looking by applying online/filling out job applications, right? Sure, I'll go ahead and submit a resume for a position that I feel I am fit for.
And I respectfully disagree. People take advantage of that, more often than not, and it causes loopholes/debts that we're seeing now. Look at medicaid as a perfect example.
My friend was working I think 76 hours a week for about a month and had a heart attack at 25.
For some people. You do realize doctors do this for their entire career, right? I can't believe how astounded you guys are at my schedule. I know of plenty of people doing it and they're fine. It's about maintaining a healthy lifestyle and managing your day correctly. Couple that with the fact that I can easily counter your argument with people who live lazy/slacker lifestyles that die at 21...
Huge part of it, but, it is a detriment to your health in the long run. Granted you still have 32 hours to do whatevs, but after housework, eating, cooking, you've pretty much got 0 free time to yourself. Maybe an hour a day but that's hardly healthy.
When you say "look at medicaid as a perfect example"...of what do you mean?
Ha. Talk to med students and residents. Actually, just talk to residents. While you're at it - talk to investment bankers, lawyers and grad students doing research. They work that schedule. And why would I need more than 32 hours to have fun? I work out (which I enjoy) 3 x's a week, I hang out with friends on weekends. The only minor concern is that I sleep 6-7 hours a week - which I've done before I started doing this. I'm tired when I get back to my place, but I know that I've been productive. I can't stand not doing things - which is why I always try to work when I'm not. I work on my car - if I can - which is stressful/hard work considering the hours doing labor. I work on my comic book. I mean, I think people in this thread are not happy with their current jobs that they can't seem to fathom working more than the required hours. I like it. If I didn't have my second job, I'd work more hours at research.
People that take advantage of it or people who don't necessarily need it. When someone is getting medicaid but spending $100/mo on cigarettes, I call foul. I've seen it numerous times working at the pharmacy/hospital that it annoys the hell out of me. You can afford it, you just want the needs more than the wants. THAT'S the problem with us today. We have this idea that we're entitled to that glorious lifestyle we see on TV and think the needs should be given to us. How is that teaching us responsibility?
I uh, was hoping for numbers and not anecdotes.
Not the case. I'd be willing to work 80 hours. Do I do it? No. Is it bad for your health? In certain situations. You specifically probably will not have as many issues as the aforementioned person that I know, but in a few years you'll probably start to notice the wear and tear on your body and other stress related health issues (ulcers come to mind). Mainly because the person I mentioned work more than 80 hour weeks.
There's also a reason why the government (at least from what I remember) is trying to reign in hours worked by doctors and residents because that's peoples lives on the line.
http://www.insurancefraud.org/medicarefraud.htm
So, it's there. They're combating it, which means it's an issue.
Meaning only 4% of medicaid/medicare spending is fraudulent?
I mean 23.7 billion in improper payments looks like a lot, but unless it is a huge percentage of the total spending I would hardly state that it is a perfect example of loopholes and debt.