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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   36308 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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I’m not convinced you couldn’t get American workers to do it. Much like construction and hotels and housekeeping and so on — Americans used to do all of it. And keep in mind that you have ex-cons and teenagers trying to build a good work history.

Left: we need to move blacks up the ladder so more of them work as doctors, lawyers, politicians, and businessmen.

Right: we need to move whites down the ladder so more of them work day labor in the sun.

Human beings have worked in agriculture picking crops for thousands of years. Modern technology (including novel reflective materials) makes fruit picking more comfortable than ever. Change the incentives and people will do it. Put simply, if I had the choice between starving and picking fruit, I’d pick fruit. Everything else is just moving incentives along a scale.

The high school kid who picks the most fruit gets guaranteed entry to Harvard, suddenly every child of every tiger mom and pushy Indian dad in America is out there training their kids to pick strawberries from the age of 8. You can literally do anything, it’s not hard.

You can literally do anything, it’s not hard.

Yeah no s***, if we really set our minds to it, we can move down the tech tree and make our country's economy more similar to Bangladesh. Why anyone would want to is beyond me.

  • -15

Yeah no s***, if we really set our minds to it, we can move down the tech tree and make our country's economy more similar to Bangladesh. Why anyone would want to is beyond me.

How is promoting higher wages for manual labor and trying to keep those jobs going to actual American citizens "moving down the tech tree?" This seems like a huge jump to me.

Because fit, healthy American citizens with good work ethics already have better jobs than picking fruit.

The unemployment rate is very low, those workers are going to come at the expense of jobs that are higher up the tech tree. I know the MAGA plan is to make the economy more like the agrarian-industrial economy of Bangladesh while maintaining American standards of wealth, because the government can just wave its hand and make these jobs high-paying. It will not work.

Frankly I don't believe the unemployment rate actually reflects the labor pool in the U.S. A ton of people in the U.S. are not working, or are on disability or some other program that hides their labor.

Also, I disagree that working a farm is a worse job than being a cashier for instance at a gas station. It's demeaning work (I have done many low wage service jobs including gas stations), you are directly aiding people in deep sin (selling lotto ticket to degenerate gamblers and booze to alcoholics) and generally is just bad for your psyche, even from a purely psychological view.

On top of that, as others have pointed out I do believe in the self-correcting nature of markets, I find it ironic that you as an economist don't! If we cut the labor pool, the wages and benefits will rise for these jobs.

Frankly I don't believe the unemployment rate actually reflects the labor pool in the U.S. A ton of people in the U.S. are not working, or are on disability or some other program that hides their labor.

Prime age (25-54) LFPR is close to an all-time high as well. Overall LFPR is down somewhat from its peak in the early 2000s, but that is overwhelmingly driven by longer education (i.e. far more people going to college) and a generally aging population.

If we cut the labor pool, the wages and benefits will rise for these jobs.

What makes you think this?

Supply and demand, baby.

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If you constrain the labor supply in one domain while leaving it free in others, it will tend to enable rent-seeking from raise wages for people working in that domain.

Now, this is a universally true statement that would leave all of society dramatically poorer if applied generally and also negatively impacts the workers being excluded. However, if you're narrowly focused on raising the wages of seasonal farm workers without regard for agricultural productivity or the welfare of people who would have done seasonal farm work it makes a degree of sense.

Supply and demand?

If there are 500 employees who can each do any of 30 jobs, then the employees will need to distinguish themselves from the others in order to get the position. If there are 3 employees who can each do any of the 30 jobs, then the jobs will need to distinguish themselves from the others in order to get an employee. Pay and benefits are excellent ways to do that.

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I really don’t get the proposal here. Is it that we naturalize the children of foreigners generation over generation for the service of doing work no one else wants to do, or that we maintain a permanent underclass of legally distinct residents who are restricted to such work? Those are the only two iterated versions of the model that I’m aware of, both have been tried in American history, and the second crashed and burned in a famous way while the first is currently in the process of doing so. So saying, in effect, “we already have a solution” seems a little strange here.

The first isn't crashing and burning though.

And the latter is also possible, just look at the U.A.E.

And the latter is also possible, just look at the U.A.E.

But does the UAE scale? Further, the UAE isn't exactly a democracy, especially not one with birthright citizenship. I've seen some open borders advocates argue for a "billion immigrants" America that follows the UAE model (Nathan Smith for one), but none of them seem very clear on how to get there from here — well, beyond something like just throwing open the floodgates and hoping that the resulting effects force our political elites to make the desired changes and adopt the desired system in order to keep the country from collapsing (and the answers to "and if that doesn't work?" tend to be rather disheartening).

There's a clear path to amend immigration laws to make the immigrants never eligible for U.S. citizenship. Birthright citizenship in the only big stumbling block, but even that is possible, offer the Democrats a compromise of much higher immigration levels in return for abolition of birthright citizenship.

I'll admit there is a certain appealing poetry to ending the immigration debate by offering Democrats a compromise that is front-loaded to what MAGA wants, and then ruthlessly stiffing them on the back end.

And what is thus solution supposed to achieve? Europe has no birthright citizenship, and they still hand them out to anyone that stays long enough. End result is the same.

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You do get that there's already people doing this down-the-tech-tree work, right? If you're this upset at the thought of some college kid or NEET picking fruit instead of playing video games, why do you want to import massive amounts of low functioning foreigners?

You do get that there's already people doing this down-the-tech-tree work, right? If you're this upset at the thought of some college kid or NEET picking fruit instead of playing video games, why do you want to import massive amounts of low functioning foreigners?

So Americans can go to college and get work in offices instead of picking onions in the sun. The foreigners benefit too, win-win.

And when those foreigners are heavily subsidized by tapping into the American welfare systems? When they start voting to pick your pocket, and turn America into Mexico?

Tell you what, let's do 20 million deportations, and we'll save the million or two doing farmwork for last. And on the way, we'll see what effects that had on entitlement spending.

When they start voting to pick your pocket, and turn America into Mexico?

BTW, have ANY of the paleolibertarians updated amidst the massive movement of Hispanics into the Republican Party?

A way more populist version of the Republican Party, though.

You can focus on cutting the welfare spending instead of doing deportations, has the added benefit of not antagonizing business.

Ok. Let me know when you get the political support to even begin tackling that goal. Remember, one party will actively lie and cheat the system to get welfare spending to illegals, so make sure to take that into account in your planning.

Mildly coercive labor practices+pay well above the going rate for unskilled labor has historically failed at staffing American farms with native workers. You could fly in a different set of third worlders, hold their pay in arrears until they get on the plane to go home- but you can't replace the need for migrants from shithole countries.

We haven't tried government issued BFs/GFs yet as an incentive. Hell, government issue hoes with government handler Pimps too.

As @Iconochasm says, if you’re a 19 year old white English-speaking American college student without a summer job, making $30 an hour picking fruits with other white, English-speaking American college students on summer break (who you can chat, joke, flirt with) is a completely different proposition to making $12 (or indeed $30) an hour as the odd one out in a group of only-Spanish-speaking 40 year old Oaxacans with whom you cannot really communicate or talk.

Yeah I have actually done one of these jobs at a plant nursery. It absolutely blows when nobody on your team speaks even the littlest bit of English.

I did pick up a lot of spanish as a result, but still it was not a very fun job.

There is a farm near me that a lot of kids wanted to work at because they hired 14 year olds. Few lasted. You don't get paid by the hour, you get paid by the bushel, and it's well under a dollar per bushel. You aren't chatting with your friends because no talking is allowed. Sunup to sundown every day, and you can forget about taking a vacation. And this was a family farm with a grocery store and a pumpkin patch with hayrides, not some agribusiness with thousands of acres.

"Not paid enough" and "doesn't have good working conditions" are in the same category and both can be improved. They could allow talking (especially if they pay by the bushel so talking wasting time won't hurt them), they just didn't.

Also, people think of family businesses too favorably. Family businesses are often inefficient, and their owners vary much more in pettiness than big businesses.

You aren't chatting with your friends because no talking is allowed. Sunup to sundown every day, and you can forget about taking a vacation.

This is all stuff that can be changed.

The American people famously never get extremely mad about the cost of living.

I'm sure there will be absolutely 0 societal backlash from the resulting increase in prices when farm worker pay goes up and productivity goes down.

If food spending goes up by $300 per year, the media will have an amazingly hypocritical freakout about it. But if, at the same time, rents drop by 10%, ER wait times go down, and many common areas feel less crowded by people who don't share a common culture or language, I think the American people would be quite happy with the outcome.

Yeah that feels like a fairly safe bet. Timing of effect impacts becomes very important though.

We shall see! Or I guess we won't, given Trump gave up

What year was this?

Late 90s early 2000s

This is a reasonable factor, but I think you’re significantly underrating how bad fruit-picking is. Getting college kids to do it is a no go when you can’t get ex-cons to do it.

Ex-cons are notoriously lazy, many of the laziest, most ADHD, most high time preference people in the underclass become criminals precisely because they can’t / won’t keep down a normal job (which they are usually capable of getting). They don’t do anything “for free” and are usually too lazy even for paid employment unless it’s very fast money like selling drugs.

Meanwhile college students do hours of boring, grinding work and studying in the hope that in 4 years they can get a solid entry level job. They are mostly low time preference.

Not defending the work ethic of ex cons, but that is the usual source of native labor for shitty low-skilled jobs because they will be arrested if they don’t hold down a job and decent ones aren’t available to them. Georgia’s program to replace illegals with de-facto corvée labour from the states parole and probation population didn’t go well.

Also college kids are by and large uninterested in doing much higher-paying, more exciting seasonal physical labor as it actually exists- there’s not a ton of guys working on their engineering degrees on fishing boats and oil rigs.

Meanwhile college students do hours of boring, grinding work and studying in the hope that in 4 years they can get a solid entry level job

Do they, though? What with AI and grade inflation, they increasingly can't really read or do basic math. I don't think this stereotype is as universally applicable as it was before.

Worth noting that "all the coworkers are illegal immigrants" is a major disincentive to taking a particular job. Even aside from status stuff, just being able to shoot the shit in a common language vs being the only gringo is a big deal.

Literally saw this dynamic last week when the neighbors behind us were getting their lawn installed. A single white guy on the crew, and the rest of the crew were shouting jokes to each other in Spanish that he couldn't understand.

I worked on an orchard as a teenager and I was the only legal citizen there. They made me do all the shit jobs.

I got pretty good at smoking bees, though, so I've got that going for me.

I wanted to work as a fruitpicker but I saw all the Mexicans yapping in their mumbo-jumbo language and so I became a computer programmer instead. What a country.

  • -26

Consider the possibility that your personal range of options doesn't perfectly generalize to the entire population.

Even the guy who's too dumb to do anything but flip burgers prefers the air-conditioned environment of McDonalds to picking fruit in the sun. You don't make a country richer by moving it down the tech tree.

  • -15

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