ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
3d ago
Ah, so I realize now that the comment I was replying to was talking about the rising cost of low-end labor more generally; when I had written my reply, I was for some reason just focusing on the change in hotel cleaning strategies.
I do not know fully what the nature of it is. There's probably a JMP somewhere that does a good job. Here are a couple fed papers talking about it.
I did, however, notice that there was an NYT article this morning claiming that the price for crops is apparently low enough that some farmers are considering letting it rot in the field. Not even unharvested; it's talking about possibly dumping them back onto the field. Also last week Brian Potter took a longer view, observing that crop prices have trended significantly down. These things would be a bit strange for a view that is sort of one-dimensional (labor shortage from immigration restrictions/COVID/magic/etc -> higher wages -> higher prices). These things are obviously multifactored. That second fed paper definitely talked about higher wages on the low end being a thing. Perhaps the price of crops would have been even lower if we could have counterfactually, magically tweaked just the one variable of agricultural workers/wages.
The multifactored nature of an incredible interdependent thing like an economy makes it pretty dangerous to overly focus on any one component. That's why I find it useful to scope back out to more broad reasoning to at least level set. Tightening immigration restrictions moves the supply curve to the left, which raises prices and reduces output. How much? It depends. Probably not infinity. It will likely also have effects that spread beyond the narrow markets that employ the most illegals. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? More information is required about the value function in question.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
I'm not sure whether the roll back was entirely supply-side. Hotels probably thought that consumers wanted hotel staff to stay out of their rooms during COVID. Then, different consumers likely had different preferences over time (some folks wanted to "get back to normal" very quickly, while others stayed in "pandemic mode" longer), they probably pretty rationally came up with the idea of just making room cleanings a bit more optional rather than routine. At some point, the light bulb probably flipped, and they realized they could probably save a fair amount of money by just fiddling with the default.
Even pre-COVID, it was still 'optional'. You could just put up the Do Not Disturb sign if you didn't want it. But the default was every day. More recently, I've seen defaults that are every other day or twice a week or whatever; I don't remember the details of every one. It's always been, "Don't worry, we obviously thoroughly clean for new guests, and also if you ever want a cleaning, just ask," but this allows them to skimp on costs with almost no consumer bad will. Honestly, this is probably part fluke that they just somehow didn't think of it before (or felt like they couldn't get away with deviating from the 'industry standard' until they had COVID push everyone off the equilibrium).
ControlsFreak
3d ago
eventually I will need to leave
You may choose to. They may choose to wait.
The SCIF
...but I kinda doubt they'll wait.
The Government doesn't describe arresting law breaking citizens as "Maximal-Opposition" and my parents very much spanked me as a kid and I doubt they would consider corporal punishment as "Maximal-Opposition" in respect to defiance either.
That's not at all what I've said. I've said that you can very very easily find examples of the government or parents doing things that are non-violent. Nevertheless, if you persist at coming up with ways to be oppositional (example), they either have to escalate or give up on enforcing the rule. If you repeat the steps of being oppositional and escalating enough times, you end up in violence. That doesn't mean the first thing was violent.
When your parent says that you can leave the dinner table, but if you're hungry later, you're just going to get the dinner that you didn't eat, that's not violent. If later comes around, the kid escalates, and the parent moves on to corporal punishment, that doesn't somehow convert the first encounter into being a violent encounter.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
Take your job, if you don't wish to do something you can leave
What if you don't leave? Remember to apply the assumption of maximal-opposition at every stage.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
It's probably unlikely that we'll end up with zero janitors, general construction workers, drywallers, or hotel maids. Prices find equilibria. Both supply and demand matter.
the end result of that is far fewer janitors, not janitors getting a pay raise.
Adding illegal workers shifts the supply curve to the right; removing illegal workers shifts the supply curve to the left (at a first approximation in the linear range). Both elasticities will matter, but the only way that you can shift the supply curve to the left and not have the price rise is if the demand for janitors is almost perfectly elastic. That seems unlikely.
As I mentioned, removing illegal immigrants very likely has both the effects of increasing price and decreasing output. That is, both increasing wages and decreasing jobs. The proportion depends on elasticities as well as factors in the rest of the general equilibrium, as the market adjusts.
Nothing in anything I've said has any claims on which occupations will or will not make "well above average salaries". That will be up to the market to decide. What counts as "completely unaffordable" is also subjective, but could in theory be supported by quantitative estimates. Prices will rise; wages will rise (they are prices, after all); output will fall; jobs will fall. This is all very standard economic theory and not really contestable. Any other statements about magnitudes of effects require quantitative argumentation.
ControlsFreak
3d ago
jobs it is difficult to get an American labor force on
...at what price? If you raise the price, you can likely get American labor force on it. If you don't have to raise the price massively to get American labor force on it (because illegals don't make massively less than citizens doing the same job), then it seems somewhat minor. If you do have to raise the price substantially to get American labor force on it, well then I guess we're back to potentially significant cost increases for various crops/clean hotel rooms/etc.
far more reliable than the non-working class that would theoretically be doing those jobs.
If one raises the price, it is not clear to what extent the people attracted to those jobs will come from the currently-non-working and to what extent it will come from folks working other jobs. You can generally get the reliability you desire by raising the price. Of course, this will compete with other job opportunities, pushing wages up more broadly and likely ending some jobs that are at the low end of value. This could increase costs for other goods/services that don't directly employ illegals now.
The open boarders economists like Bryan Caplan make the argument well that immigration restrictions have effects like ending those low value jobs, reducing overall economic efficiency and total output. I've already observed that, for example, hotels have significantly rolled back on regular room cleanings post-COVID. You could imagine effects that feel kind of like that, possibly still in combination with price increases, as the market adjusts. Some folks think the tradeoffs are worth it (and may point to various different things that are trading off, one prominent example being distributional affects purely in terms of American wages), others disagree, and well, yeah, some are probably ignorant of how they're likely to be connected.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
If you forgo the drivers license, and still drive on the road, the state will fine you. If you refuse to pay the fines, eventually the state will arrest you, if you refuse to come quietly because you don't recognize the authority of the state, the state will inflict violence on you until you comply.
This is a perfect example of precisely what I spoke about here:
There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.
If such a proposition holds, it should hold in other domains as well. Let's consider household/family rules. At different stages for children, some household/family rules are directly enforced via spanking or timeouts or whatever (violence/kidnapping). For others, you can often find a similar escalatory process if you posit a sufficiently oppositional child. Another end state may be 'exile', kicking someone out of your house. Of course, if we assume a maximally-oppositional child, what might it take to actually enforce kicking them out of your house? If they just refuse to go? Violence? Kidnapping? Calling the state... to use violence/kidnapping?
I think this reasoning about maximal-opposition holds for essentially every rule ever, government or not. That is, under the hypothesis of maximal-opposition, essentially every rule ever is either ultimately enforced via violence/kidnapping or... well, at some point, it just goes unenforced, as efforts are dropped in the face of maximal-opposition. Of course, one might think that choosing to present maximal-opposition is, itself, a rule that is chosen by someone.
That is, there doesn't seem to be anything unique to government rules here. Yet, I don't think that most people are willing to apply this same standard to the entire set of rules in the universe.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
When I last looked at it, there was no navigation. They had disabled it as an experimental feature, because apparently it was really bad, and the rumor was that they were going to focus on other features with no estimate for when it might come back. So it's not a system where you can set, "I'd like to go to X," and then sit back and let it take you there.
First, I would make a distinction. In this thread, it was not just claimed that every governmental action is always backed up by implicit violence. Instead, it was that every single action was inherently, definitionally violent. I think the latter claim is pretty bollocks. Your change of the claim to being "backed up" by "implicit" violence is far more defensible.
Generally, what it takes to argue that it is backed up by implicit violence is to posit a sufficiently oppositional figure whose opposition contributes to getting into the "back up" situation, where the implicit becomes explicit.
I have not said anything about the claim being "bad".
Instead, this is more accurate. It's not unique to government. Because of reasons, many times other agents outsource the back up enforcement, the turning of the implicit violence into explicit violence, to the government, but not always. Regardless of whether they insource it or outsource it, if they want to make a rule/action/decision/what-have-you that controls another individual, and if you posit a sufficiently oppositional individual, there is likely an implicit threat of violence as a back up. Now, this implicit backup threat is not always actualized in every case; of course not; it's not always actualized in every case with the government, either. But it seems to me that the same form of the argument holds.
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