anon_
1d ago
Hold up -- I thought we're paying people proportionally -- folks at 4 days would be paid 80% of the current salary.
Otherwise what you're talking about is just an across-the-board 25% pay raise for everyone. And that, in turn, just further shifts things from labor to capital, which is (IIUC) the opposite of what you want.
anon_
1d ago
First, I claimed O(logN) as an absolute lower bound, which I think suffices for the purposes of this discussion to disprove the claim that IB could just hire more people.
Second, I think in the absolute (totally imaginary, of course) best case, each instruction would come from the top and be distributed to O(1) people on each level of the hierarchy: CEO tells the VP, VP tells the director, ... and the results are reviewed back on the way up, thus traverse 2*M levels where M is the depth of the hierarchy which is logN. No actual firm runs like this, but it's a lazy way to derive a lower bound / impossibility result.
anon_
1d ago
Busywork is exactly the friction/overhead that comes from having to synchronize information, decisions and tasks across different human minds!
Think about any dumb meeting -- if the entire process could be done by a single mind, that's all overhead. You'd never need any reporting either.
Someone else said it better: white collar work is exactly where the mythical man month rule applies. A team with 4/5ths as many people working full time will be more product than one working 4/5 days a week.
anon_
1d ago
Both camping and espresso are key hobbies of mine, and I can’t state anymore emphatically how wrong this is. Espresso technology is worlds ahead. Camping too.
And yes it was possible (if you lived far enough south) to get fresh food, it wasn’t the norm and it wasn’t nearly as accessible.
Third wave coffee didn’t even happen until the last two decades.
anon_
1d ago
It's not just knowing a recipe -- there is a bottleneck of skill (training of juniors can only really happen at a good restaurants, which requires skilled seniors, although culinary institutes cut some of that). There was also the lack of a nationwide supply chain of fresh ingredients. Heck, what like a third of the produce today is trucked from California's Central Valley, which wasn't even fully developed until after WWII. And even then there wasn't an interstate system to carry those trucks. There was also a lack of affluent customers until the automobile.
But yeah, the median gastro-pub burger is probably > 90th percentile in 1960. Even 95th.
Michelin (and later Yelp) did also help too, that's an important factor.
anon_
1d ago
At the same time, medicine has some of the highest rates of part-time work within that income stratum.
So yeah, long shifts, but the hospital can manage if an ED doc wants to work fewer shifts.
anon_
1d ago
Yeah, the quality question is really quite a wrench in the idea of comparing inflation adjusted GDP.
Or maybe the other way around, if you want to truly compute inflation there’s no principle way to do so that it counts for the difference in quality. Who knows how much healthcare has inflated in real dollars, in terms of like for like treatment.
anon_
1d ago
It’s not just the produce wasn’t available year-round, this was before they engineered the bitterness out of many of them
anon_
1d ago
Most humans in 1960 couldn’t make better coffee than the robot that makes it at the mall for me right now.
anon_
1d ago
Well, yes, the overhead of hiring a taxi for a single meal is significantly higher than hiring a taxi for six meals for your family.
anon_
1d ago
I think his point actually is that the increase in quality of various goods is difficult to account for in the inflation, statistics, and so adjusted GDP is an underestimate of the increase in human welfare.
That’s very far from actually saying GDP is accurate
anon_
2d ago
Consider the following thought experiment, courtesy of Scott Summer
If the official government (PCE) inflation figures are correct, my daughter should be indifferent between earning $100,000 today and $12,500 back in 1959. But I don’t even know whether she’d prefer $100,000 today or $100,000 in 1959! She might ask me for some additional information, to make a more informed choice. “So Dad, how much did it cost back in 1959 to have DoorDash deliver a poke bowl to my apartment?” Who’s going to tell her there were no iPhones to order food on, no DoorDash to deliver the food, and no poke bowls even if a restaurant were willing to deliver food.
Your $100,000 salary back then would have meant you were rich, which means you could have called a restaurant with your rotary phone to see if it was open, and then gotten in your “luxury” Cadillac with its plastic seats (a car which in Wisconsin would rust out in 4 or 5 years from road salt) and drive to a “supper club” where you could order bland steak, potatoes and veggies. Or you could stay home and watch I Love Lucy on your little B&W TV set with a fuzzy picture. So which will it be? Do you want $100,000 in 1959 or $100,000 today?
I think this is a good counterpart to the AGI questions below. There is a massive conceptual gap in defining welfare across vastly different levels of technological mastery.
It also highlights that some of the analysis misses the largest factor here -- that AGI (if it happens, sadly not if it doesn't pan out) will greatly increase the quality and personalization of a large set of goods & services. If that does happen, it will dwarf the distributional aspects.
anon_
2d ago
If the IB wants to preserve its man hours it can simply hire a lot more people
A network of N people working on a problem requires at least order logN overhead to synchronize their efforts and receive instructions/feedback.
So unless someone accepts working 75% time for 50% pay, they are gonna naturally scale to working more.
anon_
2d ago
The white collar world is exactly that place that's dominated by frictions that scale with the number of employees.
I think our modern economy doesn't value the type of work left to be done very well, namely spiritual / emotional / community work.
People don't value it -- or if they did, they would pay for it.
anon_
2d ago
we just shorten the work week
In some industries, ObamaCare already did this -- the mandate for insurance kicks in at 30 hours.
But in other industries this is counterproductive. Those have overhead: training, management and communication (synchronization) that doesn't allow work to just scale. In a competitive market, those firms would always rather pay fewer employees proportionally more -- and those firms would outcompete those paying more employees proportionally less.
So you cannot "just shorten the work week" -- at least not for a large sector of the economy.
anon_
2d ago
"Won't vote" implies that the officer cannot assume the powers of a principal officer. And again, on the meta, the Senators know that not voting means rejecting the candidate.
Imagine applying this to any other clause. The Constitution says that no money can be spent except as authorized by Congress. Senators understand this too.
anon_
3d ago
This distinction breaks down completely at the meta level when legislative leaders won't bring something to a vote because it lacks majority support. It's a waste of time Senators would rather spend fundraising or eating steak on a lobbyist's dime or flying back home.
In this case, Graham specifically said there were not votes to advance Habba. I have no reason to doubt him on that, but I'm fine if you want to make this contingent on the result of that hypothetical vote. What I object to is the idea that it's meaningfully different for the purposes of "advise and consent" for the Senate to have that vote or not.
What does your favorite macroeconomic model say would happen if you raised everyone's wage 25% across the board? It can't be good for prices, either directly or via inflation.
There is a secret third option, which is that profit and wages both remain fixed, and the cost of the good/service provided goes down. This helps ordinary people* as they pay less for what they buy.
Indeed, in a competitive market, productivity gains spread through industries, and the same pressure pushes profit back down.
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