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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28027 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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The United Auto Workers have gone on strike: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-auto-union-strike-three-detroit-three-factories-2023-09-15/

What happens if Ford and GM simply say: "okay, you're fired"? This seems to have quite a few benefits, mostly that they can get rid of union workers and remove the threat of another strike.

I'll admit that unions sortof confuse me. I didn't grow up around them and have always wondered the mechanism by which everybody gets to quit their job but then demand extra money to come back. Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?

It should be noted that Tesla is not unionized, and will not be a part of this strike. Do you guys think there is a chance that the government tries to force Tesla to stop making cars during the strike to make things more fair?

I'll be honest about my feelings towards unions: I don't get it at all, and I think I'm missing something. I do think that workers should have an adversarial relationship with their employer, but it seems to me like unions have all but destroyed the american auto industry. I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot. I don't get how places can "vote to unionize". Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing? Sure you can all vote to make a starbucks union, but...I just won't hire anybody in your union.

Union jobs offer stability and benefits for no upside. It's not like you can go from warehouse to CEO with union , like you can with a start-up. no stock options either. It's not like you can get a raise for exceptional work, it's all collective. So it tends to benefit the median or mean instead of the outliers who really excel. So there are downsides to joining a union. But I agree that overall they seem overpaid relative to the value they create.

Not all humans have 135 IQ (supposedly the average here). The people joining the union just want good wages and benefits to have a family. They don’t think like us here who want routes to be rich.

(And I hate unions but I think this is a good understanding of what their people want)

Yes. In the US there's a sense that you don't have the freedom to escape the pressure to try to be rich. It's up or out, striver for everyone. (Unless you want to join the ranks of the homeless, dropping out of any semblance of a normal middle class existence.)

I've been doing contracting jobs for years in tech and anyone not already looking over their shoulder at the next job when they're only a week in to their current one is kind of a sucker. An endless hustle.

The reason capitalism is the most productive economic system is Darwinian creative destruction as new ideas outcompete old ones, often in the form of churning enterprises. People hate this. Even the winners typically hate this. Schumpeter predicted that social democracy, even if it didn't seccumb to Marxism, would inevitably destroy capitalism by turning to a quasi-socialist mush as voters replaced a culture of dynamic entrepreneurship with "laborism" -- i.e. the philosophy that the point of the economy is to make life as cushy as possible for workers rather than products as good as possible for consumers.

America's greatest achievement is keeping the entrepreneurial spirit relatively healthy. In much of the rest of the advanced world its essentially dead. In Canada, we live in a corporatist state and the best research on the subject shows regulation and corporate cronyism is the reason our GDP per capita has slid from 85% of the U.S. level a generation ago to 70% today.

So the role in unions in fostering “laborism” is clearly bad in my opinion as it robs us of economic growth, but I do sympathize with the desire of people to get out of the economic rat race. Many people want to get their credential, get a secure job with a pension and then put their career and livelihood on autopilot until age 65 so they can raise their kids, pursue hobbies, etc. Some people just have extreme risk aversion or grew up in precarious financial circumstances and seek out these jobs.

I just think those jobs should be paid less than market wages, not more.

It’s not even that great then. Unions are a huge reason why America is no longer manufacturing things to the same scale it was. It’s orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to simply build the plant in Mexico or Southeast Asia than deal with the overinflated wages and poor work ethic of union employees.

There's a 25% import tax on light trucks, which are 69% of the market and consist of basically anything bigger than a Toyota Camry. So as long as the unions steal 24% or less, it's not actually cheaper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

https://www.autoweek.com/news/a1714156/light-trucks-take-record-69-us-market/

This is primarily caused by Obama era fuel efficiency rules, which hold big cars to unrealistic fuel efficiency standards but allow trucks to escape fuel efficiency standards by becoming larger. For obvious reasons unions have opposed attempts to fix these rules.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-are-fuel-economy-regulations-to-blame

https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/kdkdx3/normal_truck_vs_american_truck/

I would be enormously unsurprised if workers in the US were paid double that of workers in Mexico, and that's before we even start getting into non-pay related union inefficiencies.

America is at record production from manufacturing. Workers are down but it’s because productivity improved.

Productivity improves mostly by eliminating the overpriced workers.

overinflated wages

Do you even hear yourself? How long has real wage growth been stagnant in the United States? Workers need to get paid more, even if it affects the shareholders or C-suite compensation packages.

How long has real wage growth been stagnant in the United States?

Median weekly earnings hit a nadir of 345 "1982-1984" dollars in Q4 2017, and increased to 362 such dollars in Q4 2019, their highest value to date by far (previous peak was 354 in Q2 2017). The pandemic made everything go screwy and it hit 393 in Q2 2020, it's now 365.

It's not stagnant; there was a stagnant period from 1999 to 2014, though I note these numbers do not take into account total compensation, so likely what was happening is health care was eating it all.

Thats all heavily dependent on which inflation rate you use to do the calcs.

It's the consumer price index. Pulling out some other shadow inflation figure is special pleading.

No it’s standard practice and the whole Index itself is difficult to measure. We don’t buy the same goods one year to the next.

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When automakers can literally cross the border into Mexico and get the same quality work for less than a third of the cost, the auto worker is overpaid.

Or the other auto-worker is underpaid....

Compensation in the US has more or less steadily grown since it started being measured in the 50s.

In pessimist/doomer spaces that want to make the economy seem worse than it is, e.g. Reddit, you frequently see charts that show otherwise. This is pretty much always due to dishonest stats, e.g:

  • Using "household income" instead of per-capita, which is confounded with shrinking household sizes.

  • Using inflators like CPI that doesn't take substitution effects into account (instead of e.g. PCE) and thus overstate inflation a lot if compared over a long period of time.

  • Not counting transfer payments.

  • Counting the decline in hours worked as lowered wages, and not as people choosing to work less when they don't need to.

  • Just completely making shit up, like this tweet that made the rounds a few days ago where real household income is compared to nominal rent prices.

That figure doesn’t account for the four year degree requirement, the grad school requirement for a lot positions, the debt of these two, or the requirement to have a smart phone and laptop, right?

Does the cost of laptops and smart phone really factor in to these figures meaningfully?

Maybe, why not? The average price of a mobile plan is 144 monthly, so 1.7k yearly, so 3% of the median salary.

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"Real Hourly Compensation for All Workers" does not attempt to capture every possible thing in society that affects peoples finances, no.

(Though increases in cost of education will be reflected in the inflation, and as such adjusted for. Also the cost of the minimum viable laptop and smartphone required for getting a job is comparatively very low, and people get them anyway even if they weren't required – even the homeless have phones!)

A mandatory four year period of large debt and fewer working hours is a serious cost on the median citizen and I’m skeptical this is actually conveyed in the inflation metric. Because you can’t just take “tuition increased by this amount”, you also have to measure the fact that it’s required for more workers who may otherwise have forgone it completely

The people joining the union just want good wages and benefits to have a family. They don’t think like us here who want routes to be rich.

It's a long story that involves the Great Migration and George C. Wallace, but my maternal grandfather was a GM retiree, a rarity in the south. It's not an overstatement to say that getting that GM job was the best thing to happen to my grandfather and by extension my family. My grandparents (who grew up as farmers and were fortunate for their time to have received eighth grade educations) went from a working life fit for the Book of Job to being comfortably lower-middle class with a secure retirement.

Where things get interesting is that my father (high school educated) also went from broke to "making it" thanks to the auto industry, only this time it came courtesy of working for a non-union automaker (Nissan; he presently works for Tesla). The free market worked well enough for him. Would it have for 20th century autoworkers? I suspect so. Ford was late to unionization and I'm not aware of their workers having been poorly paid prior to it.

Ford was late to unionization and I'm not aware of their workers having been poorly paid prior to it.

Then why did their workers vote to unionize? Why vote to pay union dues for no benefit? The data here indicates that wages at Ford in 1940 were quite a bit lower than the industry norm ($14.34/hr in 2021 dollars, versus $17.09 for the industry as a whole).

If you read your own link, you'll discover the reason Ford got lower priced workers is because they hired lower priced negros and minimized racial discrimination. As many right wing economists have noted, taste-based discrimination costs money and free markets penalize it.

One reason the (majority white) workers voted for unions was to reduce labor market competition by colored workers. This was a major motivator for many other pro-Union laws such as Davis Bacon and minimum wage.

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/american-labor-movement.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Bacon_Act_of_1931

Of course, having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too–the wages of the white worker who has to compete. And when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage–and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work–it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn’t it?

  • Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, 1957, after many colored workers moved to MA and started competing economically with his constituents

My own link says that, while Ford paid black workers slightly more ($14.53 versus $13.55), they paid white workers substantially less ($14.14 versus $17.38).

Note also that black workers made up 38% of the workplace at Ford but only 6% elsewhere, so the higher salary for black workers at Ford probably reflects the fact that more were working at more highly skilled jobs. It sure seems tough to infer anything other than that, at any given job description, Ford paid less.

One reason the (majority white) workers voted for unions was to reduce labor market competition by colored workers

This is common knowledge. Just as it is common knowledge that employers sometimes brought in black workers as strike breakers. But how does any of that support the incorrect factual claim that pay at pre-unionized Ford was equal to that at its unionized competitors?

Why vote to pay union dues for no benefit?

I was responding to this. They voted for unionization due to benefits they hoped to achieve for white workers, at the expense of black ones.

As noted in the article, the higher pay for black workers also reflects that Ford was greedy where others were racist.

That's the whole point of unionization - letting some workers get a great gig at the expense of others.

Yes, I am agreeing with you. it was OP who opined that it was not true ("Ford was late to unionization and I'm not aware of their workers having been poorly paid prior to it")

Wait, so the claim is that ford paid it’s black workers better than it’s white workers in 1940? That doesn’t pass the smell test- either the blacks were getting paid extra to cross picket lines, or the numbers are simply wrong.

Edit: forget the below. You have misconstrued what I said. The linked data [edit: I meant what I said] does NOT show that Ford paid its black workers better than its white workers. It shows that Ford paid black workers more than its competitors paid black workers ($14.53 versus $13.55), and that they paid white workers substantially less than its competitors paid white workers ($14.14 versus $17.38).

It indeed passes the smell test because, as I noted, the obvious explanation is that black workers at Ford were employed in more highly skilled occupations than the black workers elsewhere. Again, it says that black workers made up 38% of the workplace at Ford but only 6% elsewhere, So, the black workers elsewhere were probably almost entirely janitors and the like.

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It is difficult to teach someone to know something, when his argument depends on him not knowing it.

Not all humans have 135 IQ (supposedly the average here)

Lolwut?

Not all humans have 135 IQ (supposedly the average here)

Lolwut?

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pJJdcZgB6mPNWoSWr/2013-survey-results

Can we finally resolve this IQ controversy that comes up every year?

The story so far—our first survey in 2009 found an average IQ of 146. Everyone said this was stupid, no community could possibly have that high an average IQ, it was just people lying and/or reporting results from horrible Internet IQ tests. Although IQ fell somewhat the next few years—to 140 in 2011 and 139 in 2012 - people continued to complain. So in 2012 we started asking for SAT and ACT scores, which are known to correlate well with IQ and are much harder to get wrong. These scores confirmed the 139 IQ result on the 2012 test. But people still objected that something must be up.

This year our IQ has fallen further to 138 (no Flynn Effect for us!) but for the first time we asked people to describe the IQ test they used to get the number. So I took a subset of the people with the most unimpeachable IQ tests—ones taken after the age of 15 (when IQ is more stable), and from a seemingly reputable source. I counted a source as reputable either if it name-dropped a specific scientifically validated IQ test (like WAIS or Raven’s Progressive Matrices), if it was performed by a reputable institution (a school, a hospital, or a psychologist), or if it was a Mensa exam proctored by a Mensa official.

This subgroup of 101 people with very reputable IQ tests had an average IQ of 139 - exactly the same as the average among survey respondents as a whole.

I don’t know for sure that Mensa is on the level, so I tried again deleting everyone who took a Mensa test—leaving just the people who could name-drop a well-known test or who knew it was administered by a psychologist in an official setting. This caused a precipitous drop all the way down to 138.

The IQ numbers have time and time again answered every challenge raised against them and should be presumed accurate.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/17/ssc-survey-2017-results/#comment-476694

We have this argument every year. Points in favor include:

  1. Survey IQs mostly match survey SATs from IQ/SAT conversion tables.
  2. One year we asked ACT and that matched too.
  3. One time we made everybody describe which IQ test they took and in what circumstance, and the subset who took provably legit IQ tests given by provably legit psychologists weren’t any different from the rest.

I don’t doubt that a lot of the overly high numbers are people who took a test as kids which wasn’t properly normed for kids their age or something.

Interesting. I dont recall any of these polls or participating in any.

There are no good counterarguments to the standard objections that:

  1. People with impressive IQs highly disproportionately respond to "what's your IQ" questions, for the same reason that rich people disproportionately respond to salary threads, and extremely fit people to gym threads, and promiscuous people to threads about sexual histories etc etc etc. The infamous internet picture thread rule holds true - people who post in 'show us your face' threads on anonymous forums are either (a) delusional or (b) hotter than the average user of said forum.

  2. People Just Lie On The Internet. For an even moderately intelligent midwit, coming up with plausible context for a very high IQ score (where it happened, which test it was, how it correlates with ACT/SAT/GMAT/LSAT scores) takes 5 minutes of research via Google. Of course people lie most to themselves, misremember things, think "oh yeah, I'd definitely have gotten y instead of x score if I'd had a better day or had prepared a little more so I'll just say I got y".

  3. The Motte is now like 10 years out of SSC / LW and has a related-but-substantially-distinct audience. Rats are disproportionately high IQ silicon valley weirdos, the CW thread - /r/Motte - website progression and long lifespan of the community, plus big overlap with /r/drama, redscarepod, various other culture war conversation communities picked up a large number of people of more modest intelligence. Sure, likely still well above average, but not 99th percentile.

Despite 1 and 2, I believe old LW being 130-140 and remaining close if lower as it's grown. More than a few posts there are just college-level math, and many of the remaining posts are analytic philosophy tier in attention to detail, precision, and length (not that either are necessarily true as a result), and often come from people who were math/physics majors. 3 is correct though.

I kind of assume this community is 135 IQ. Scott Sumner once said that Iq level doesn’t read the nyt they go somewhere on the blogosphere. My scores would test around there. I’m curious if not here then where would 135 IQ people go?

I haven’t found an above.

Scott Sumner once said that Iq level doesn’t read the nyt they go somewhere on the blogosphere.

Bill Gates probably has an IQ of at least 155, maybe 160 or higher (Harvard Math 55, publishing something interesting on sorting in undergrad etc), and apparently reads the New York Times cover to cover every day. It's a weird thing to say that smart people don't read the news. But in general it's a fallacy to assume there have to be publications that have an average audience of IQ 135. There may be, but they'll be things like some kinds of math journals in niche subfields, not things that cover general interest topics, like this place.

There may be some similar academic discussion boards for math/physics, but a mainstream political discussion board like this one is never going to be predominantly 99th percentile. There are subreddits like some of the ask-X where the politics may be odious but the raw quality of the writing is on the same level as here. You don't need to be 99th percentile to write most posts or comments here. I'd say the 25th percentile bound of The Motte regular users (more than 200 comments per year) is maybe 90th percentile IQ, sure.

apparently reads the New York Times cover to cover every day.

This makes me think less of his intelligence rather than more given the NYT articles I've actually read. That paper has been incredibly suspect and dubious the entire time I've been paying attention to the media.

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Ya he might. Nyt definitely aims for more of the top 10%. But what’s north of there?

It’s the blogosphere or Reddit.

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