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Notes -
Two frames for the argument about less-skilled migration and similar supply-side tradeoffs
A thought inspired by this article on the UK's ConservativeHome. John Oxley's article criticises the Starmer administration for not saying how they are going to recruit British care workers to replace the immigrant care workers they are cutting visas for. Everyone agrees in principle that pay and conditions for care workers will need to improve to make this happen, and that this is all right and proper as long as the Magic Money Fairy pays for it.
Oxley writes about the problem from the perspective of money flows - if we want to pay care workers more, we will need to funnel money into care homes, either by increasing charges to residents (and therefore making Granny sell her house to pay for care), by raising taxes, or by cutting spending on other things.
I tend to prefer the flipped frame which focusses on the flow of goods and services. If we send British workers (and, in particular, physically healthy British workers with a good attitude - this mostly rules out the argument that better-paid care work would magically bring back all the people who have been claiming disability benefits since the pandemic) into care homes, then the work they are currently doing will not get done. In this frame the median voter will be poorer because their favourite restaurant disappears (people are wiping butts instead of waiting tables), they have to spend time in grubby shops, offices, schools and hospitals (people are wiping butts instead of cleaning), and they have to deal with more unexpected items in the bagging area (people are wiping butts instead of manning tills). The tax rises, spending cuts, or even deficit-induced inflation are just a way of making this impoverishment stick in a market economy.
Whichever frame you use, this doesn't answer the question - there could easily be costs of less-skilled migration which mean it is net-negative for the country. But both are ways of forcing you to confront the tradeoff. I prefer the real resources frame because it makes clear that the tradeoff is inexorable and there is no way out through financial jiggery-pokery.
Do Motteposters have a view on whether thinking about this type of question in terms of money or in terms of real resources is more helpful?
I like your frame partly because it suggests useful ways of addressing the problem. (I don't intend this as a gotcha).
People are wiping butts instead of cleaning -> more robot vacuums / mops.
People are wiping butts instead of waiting tables -> more of those robots that carry food from the kitchen to the table + normalize selecting & paying for food using a ticket machine at the entrance as in Japan.
People are wiping butts instead of manning tills -> put more serious work into unmanned checkouts.
Most of these are not insoluble problems, they are problems that nobody was incentivized to solve.
My only worry would be that so much of our economy is purely financialised at this point that such an approach would neglect serious aspects of reality that matter. No idea if this is true.
Matthew Yglesias has a repeated line that the middle class should not be able to afford full-service dining (except as an occasional splurge purchase) in a country with a functioning labour market. He sees the market shift from low-end full-service restaurants to high-end fast-casual dining as (a) driven by rising low-end wages and (b) an entirely good thing. So the official rat-adjacent neoliberal shill position here is
I think this might have some truth to it, but there is an element of cultural choice involved. Some cultures have different expectations of "full-service dining" — I'm thinking of how American ones tend to push table turnover, whereas other countries expect to serve each table maybe once per evening.
But there is some reasonable bound on "how much time we spend on each other." One could total up "hours wiping butts" versus total hours worked and see that yes, having the median worker work 40 hours, 10 of which are spent wiping butts, is probably not sustainable. Maybe it'd be at 60 hour weeks, but I'd really prefer more leisure time. There are some real culture choices to be made about the relative merits of time spent on arts, capital investments (building stuff!), research, and medicine — is medicine an end, or just a means to it. It's honestly a pretty open question I'd love to see more debate on, rather than neoliberal "we can have it all" platitudes.
I suppose also that some historic cultures adopted senicide rather than spend time wiping (elderly) butts, although to my modern sensibilities that's rather abhorrent, but perhaps a bit understandable in resource-constrained situations.
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One other obvious technology solution would be to automate butt-wiping. I suspect there are fewer qualms about automating geriatric care versus infant care, too.
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I don't think this line of argument necessarily proves anything about the optimal number of semi-skilled or unskilled workers to have in a country. Clearly that number is above 0 (or you get reverse complementary task specialisation where skilled workers get moved into care work because the wages are get so high that productivity suffers in the long-run) and might depend a lot on how the generous the state is to recent migrant workers. The Qatari economy would probably not be better off if they deported all the South Asian construction workers (even if we were to assume they were entirely free economic agents rather than borderline indentured servants). What the balance is in any given country is just an object-level question you can't reason your way to an answer to.
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