Serious question - have you ever been poor? Are you aware that sometimes people have to work at shitty jobs because they have no other options? And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?

I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.

OP was talking about the problem from a practical perspective (ie. "We really need farm workers", presumably worried about a future where there aren't enough farm workers and we starve or something), and I was addressing that in the same way. Your objection seems to be from a humanitarian perspective (ie. how can we provide a minimum standard of living to non-STEM workers?), which is valid concern, but ultimately not relevant to the original problem.

>And, if employers really would "be forced to pay higher wages" as you claim, why are all the restaurants in my city still short staffed?

combination of:

1. stubbornness/price stickiness

2. belief that it's better to hold out in the short term and wait for the labor supply to return, then it is to give out pay raises now. Wages are sticky, which mean wage hikes would turn into ongoing expenses into the future.

3. belief that the raising wages would raise prices, which would decrease demand and ultimately make the business worse off.

>I'm not claiming to have a solution but claiming "the market will fix it" seems like such a cop-out, like telling someone god will take care of it.

The market seems to be working just fine in my area. Some restaurants have shut down. Some have raised prices. Some have decreased service. Which is the right approach? I don't know. The restaurants that took the right approach will win out in the end. In the meanwhile I'm still able to eat out.

If the owners were competent, the businesses might have grown to the point where the enterprise isn't so much an extension of the owner's personality. A small restaurant's style extrapolates strongly from the owner's quirks - whether they feel they make enough money, they're disorganised, they're under stress going without leave or getting hit by taxes at the worst times. I figure they're the ones most likely to hold wages down almost out of angst because they themselves feel hard done by. "Why should that teenager get $15/hr?! I have the risk of the lease. I started this business! I got $5/hr when I was a kid!" I'd bet this is a solid factor in local restaurants.

Once a business is large enough to have a tier or two under the owner, I suspect this buffer helps. I notice this separation a lot when working directly with an owner versus with their marketing person. The latter has to uphold their end of the relationship with me or they'll get fired. The owner meanwhile can miss deadlines and forget to write copy and so on, and usually their worst case is they keep flying by the seat of their pants. If their business fails, it's usually much later and harder to tie to specific issues along the way.

What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.

I suppose it's "not working" if by "not working" you mean "behaves exactly like economics 101 models that assume rational actors". But as it relates to this context, business are reacting approximately in the way we would expect, albeit with some delay/hesitancy. Average pay has gone up in the past few months, for instance.

>What you're really arguing isn't that the market will sort things out to someone's satisfaction, you're just saying the market is a jungle and whatever survives survives.

I don't argue that because it's not clear what "satisfaction" entails. If you mean the optimal choice every time, I don't think you'll find any free market advocate who would make that claim. In the meantime, I'm pretty satisfied. I can still eat out, and I have the choice between "higher wages but more expensive" restaurants and "lower wages but worse service" restaurants. It's not really clear right now which is the best choice here (eg. maybe I'd rather accept reduced/worse service than pay more), so letting consumers as a whole decide seems like the best course of action.

Wouldn't the standard response to that be that it's not really a free market, and if it were made more free then such inefficiencies would be less likely to occur?

What does it contribute?

The absolutism was in no one believes it, by the way.

By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.

> By the principle of charity, I don't expect anyone to believe nonsensical things.

You're not being charitable, if you were you wouldn't have begun with hyperbole, then moving the goalposts when challenged, and now cherry picking. You don't seem interested in any case but the one you already favour.

I make "absolute" or even "hyperbolic" statements because I'd like to learn something. If I'm wrong, some example to that effect may easily be provided. In doing so, I'm letting someone else win all the internet points because I care more about learning than about internet points. As you observe upthread, a statement in such form can be shown to be wrong "with barely any effort". I invite you, if you please, to expend that small amount of effort. However, absolute statements can't simply be assumed to be wrong. Absolute statements exist that are absolutely true. "Any living human will die if deprived of oxygen."

I grant that you've already expended a smaller amount of effort, to somewhat imply that you yourself (or perhaps others not present in this thread?) believe that less regulation of labor markets leads to higher pay, but in the absence of any relevant example that implication is itself suspect. We know that some people believe silly things, and some other people claim to believe silly things that correspond to their particular psychological commitments (this seems common in the context of religion), but those beliefs and claims do not prove their silly objects.

They are. Farmer suicides over the past 10 years have skyrocketed. Farmers are committing suicide at twice the rate of combat veterans. [1]

I'm afraid I can't take your comment seriously as a dispassionate economic analysis since it lacks even basic empathy for people caught in this ongoing trainwreck of "supply/demand" mechanics.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/06/why-are-amer...

The free market might as well be a religion for some people. Nothing (not even historical facts) is enough evidence for it to not be the answers to all economic issues.

Also, there are lots of US tech people here - with overly inflated salaries compared to approximately everyone else. And everyone knows those winning the game have a tendency to lose empathy and think the game is fair, no matter how much evidence against it.

Aside from their lack of empathy and the ignoring of the distortion of the supply of labour happening that makes the "non-problem" an actual problem, what is incorrect about pointing out that supply and demand are, if not the most fundamental factor then close to it, in a market?

Monopolies have historically shit all over the notion that supply and demand is a good model to use for the market.

Much like most economic models, there are underlying assumptions about it that make it bad at actually predicting the real world. Things like perfectly competitive markets (haha), prices being adjustable (haha) and the forces that act on supply/demand being rational (extra hahaha).

There are lots and lots of cases where it fails, like the housing bubble, administered prices and wages.

Still, it might as well be a religion. Afterall, people can say it is close to a most fundamental law about markets with a straight face (despite it failling all the time).

What I would counter is that it that we can see that free markets work preferably to monopolised ones, or any of the other ones you've provided where selfish intervention of one kind or another has interfered with supply or demand.

All those cases I mentioned came arose under one of the most (maybe the most?) free market of modernity.

No. I don't believe you're trying to create a straw man intentionally but if you're going to jump from black to white, and a large jump at that, then it produces the same outcome all the same.

this false dichotomy between monopoly and its precursor is non sequitur.

Ignoring the fallacious teleological argument, I'm happy to rely on Wikipedia for this as this is basic knowledge:

> In economics, a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are self-regulated by buyers and sellers negotiating in an open market without market coercions.

What are market coercions?

> Examples of such prohibited market coercions include: economic privilege, *monopolies*, and artificial scarcities.

And even then, you're usually required to live within reasonable driving distance of the office. You don't make enough to buy a place. At least half your salary post-tax probably goes to rent. So yeah, you've got a few bucks in the bank probably, but it's not like you're saving up to buy your third Porsche or something lol.

It's also important to distinguish between farm workers (hired hands) and the business owners.

But the point that you and others are missing is that if farm works sucks, and pays low, then that means we should not be sending more people to become farmers.

The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done. If we ship many the low/medium skill jobs over seas and then automate many of the remaining ones, what are those people to do? Surely if they were able to get a higher paying job that didn't suck they would have done so.

The better solution is to make sure we appropriately value tasks that are necessary and have some level of potential self sufficiency should we find ourselves in a global event like conflict, famine, etc. Not to mention, the non-industrial farms are generally better for animals and the environment. This shouldn't be a race to the bottom.

I am not saying that we need to retrain all existing farmers. Instead, I am saying that we should simply discourage more people going into that industry, instead of what the original poster was claiming, which is that we'd need more people there.

> The point you are missing is that jobs that suck still have to be done

We don't need more people in that industry, no. We can have less in that industry.

> what are those people to do

At a very minimum we shouldn't be adding more problems by encourage more people to go into these bad jobs, is the point though. That would just make things worse.

As an escape valve for independents we could have them post a sufficiently large bond that will come due in the event of farm failure and bail them out.

Laissez-faire markets are also bad at taking negative externalities into account. Food being too expensive to afford in the stores while it's also rotting in the fields (which has happened in my state multiple times on the last few decades) is really bad. Children not being being effectively taught because teachers are quitting due to burnout and terrible wages is really bad. I don't think it's sufficient to shrug out hands and say "it'll work itself out" when we can actively see very these kinds of detrimental problems

The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'.

Whatever that means. In Alabama the low wages and poor working conditions have now led to a grave teacher shortage. The government's solution? Suspend teacher certification. To use graphic imagery: the talent pool is full of piss, let's open it to the incontinents!

This suggests 'teacher certification' isn't effective at distinguishing between good and bad teachers.

"Suspend teacher certification"

If 'teacher certification' isn't useful for distinguishing good/bad teachers, then removing the requirement may be a good idea.

"In Alabama"

It's hard to fire bad teachers in Alabama. If you're a principal in an Alabama public school, you can't just give a poorly performing teachers 2-4 weeks' notice, freeing up the money to hire someone new. Look up 'Alabama teacher tenure'.

And what's this obsession with firing people? You can get rid of subpar performers, but the rapid turnover isn't going to improve the average unless you manage to hire and retain above average performers. In the long run, it's a supply issue, and the revolving door model is going to do nothing about the subpar supply.

Re: #2 getting rid of underperformers helps you hire good teachers (because, unless you fire someone, you have no money to hire someone new), and retain good ones (because, if you're a good teacher, you're not going to want to work somewhere where your students' other teachers are bad).

I've said it already - it's not the best students that go to work in teaching. You can fire a low performer, but chances are that the replacement is just as bad. It's a supply issue, a training issue and a culture issue - the anti-intellectualism in large swathes of the population really doesn't help matters.

This may be true, but it's the result of how the system is set up and, in particular, the interaction between:

a) politicians

b) teachers and teachers unions

c) school district leaders

d) school district administration staff

e) students

In most systems, group (e) is the one with the least power. Their parents may be able to vote for school board members, but these elections are infrequent, and the way to get elected is not by being an advocate for students, but by aligning with a particular political party, or getting the support of teachers unions.

Parents cannot easily opt out of that system. In Alabama, per pupil spending is ~$10k/year. This distorts the market: a parochial school that costs $10k/year to run cannot compete with a public school that costs $10k/year to run, even if the former better. Because in one case the marginal cost to the parent is $0.

It comes back to what I said at the start of our conversation: The market for teachers, at least in the US, is not a 'laissez-faire market'.

But, with regard to public education systems in the US:

- it's definitely true that some people 'attempt to blame low quality of a system on individuals'

- it's not generally true that this leads to firing (of teachers)

If you want to know more about some of the problems, you might enjoy the documentary 'Waiting for "Superman"': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_%22Superman%22

That’s exactly what’s happening. With a steady flow of cheap labor to take these jobs, the wages for them will remain stagnant. It makes perfect sense for low income workers to be complaining about immigrants taking their jobs because that’s exactly what happens.

Cut off illegal immigration for a few years and watch as the price of all unskilled labor increases. It’s basic supply and demand.

The ones at the top generally don’t care because the people coming in are not competing for their jobs. And they arguably benefit from the cheap low end labor through lower prices for staples and even luxuries like landscapers and nannies.

Even that is changing with remote work and offshoring. I don’t know if it will take five years or a decade, but the so called knowledge workers who don’t sock away their savings now are in for a rude awakening when their own paper pushing jobs get replaced.

For knowledge workers who want to work from home, the end result will be competing on a global market against workers from developing countries who can afford to do the same work for less. We already see this on various freelancing platforms where it's only a viable side gig for those in places with a low cost of living.

At the end of the day, workers need some kind of protection against these movements, by putting local workers first and managing immigration to protect the middle and working classes. The problem is that we have a political class who have gotten rich on the back of removing such protections, because they're also business owners and property investors.

Nothing I said precludes aid for these people, to ensure a minimum standard of living. I'm just pointing out the implied consequences of not making "non-STEM work to be a viable option", isn't we run out of farmers and we all starve because the market will correct it long before the number of farmers drop dangerously low.

>All the while people complain about immigrants crossing the border and "taking their jobs".

I don't get it. Just a few sentences ago you implied that the jobs are crap, and that people are "forced to do these jobs or starve", yet here you're implying that we should allow "immigrants crossing the border" to take those crap jobs?

>Graduating high school seniors aren't lining up to mow grass or pick fruit or work as a meat packer for $15/hour. They want to come out of college to a 6 figure job with no skills or training.

People don't want hard jobs and want easy money. Can you really blame them for that? Also, the solution to this, as mentioned in the previous comment is to raise wages.

>A lot of people coming out of school with out a tech or medical disposition would be best served by picking a trade. We have a shortage already and it is only going to get worse. Running a 3 person plumbing company could easily compete with most tech jobs.

In other words, the market is working as intended, by making jobs more lucrative because there's a shortage?

You’ll have to back-up that assertion.

Supply/demand mechanisms fail the labor market badly. By law of supply and demand, professions introduce artificial scarcity to boost their income; and the market responds either through some combination of: Immigration, automation, consolidation (less businesses), cut-corners

Farming has aspects of all three, and it’s a major national risk.

> If farm workers' job gets sufficiently bad from a value proposition perspective, then people will leave the occupation and employers would be forced to pay higher wages to attract workers.

Is this really applicable to this context? In other words, are farming jobs really going to get to a point where the pay is $10M a year, and people only take the job for a year and then never work another day? Considering that being a farmer has basically no barrier to entry, I doubt it will get to that point. Not to mention, if farm labor was really that expensive, so would the cost of living, so those would be FIRE farm workers would have to come back to pay the increased food bill.

Every mechanism has regimes in which it fails. 'Supply and demand' isn't always the answer any more than 'mongodb' or 'rust' are always the answer.

Care to breakdown the costs?

It´s going to be a fuckin´mess, 4 dudes richer and everyone else screwed

How will the four people get richer if the food they create is priced so high that no one can buy it?

I get this is deeply economic and philosophical, but it’s an interesting thought experiment.

Taking this to its logical end, the owners of said farms will get richer as the general population earns less on average (due to their labour no longer being needed).

Either that or everyone else gets fed up and violently overthrows them. It could, perhaps, be avoided with higher taxes on the rich, but the rich have the most influence over the tax code.

>We really need farm workers

But point maken

How so? Sustainable farming has nothing to do with a man vs machine doing the labor. Moral as in we need to make sure people can keep doing this job or what kind of argument are you even making? I'd rather see improved social safety nets and job training then some appeal to history that people need to work the fields because we've always done that.

Modern industrial farming practices, designed to optimize agricultural output per unit of labor, are an ecological and environmental travesty. They require the widespread use of pesticides and toxic fertilizers that are decimating the biosphere. Monocropping unsustainably degrades soil quality. And the large contiguous areas used for industrial agricultural operations are extremely disruptive to wildlife.

The most obvious solution to the above is an agricultural system with many more, much smaller farms, where human beings do the work currently done by machines and chemicals.

i suspect the amount of money that farms would need to pay workers to fix these shortages would drive all producers into bankruptcy

Their meager wage increase is not worth uprooting your entire life just for 2 months or less of work unless you are sending that money back to a country where a dollar goes much farther. They need far more than just add 2 bucks to an already way underpaid job to not only attract workers now but keep them around and available for following years.

>i suspect the amount of money that farms would need to pay workers to fix these shortages would drive all producers into bankruptcy

I definitely think it's the latter rather than the former. Producers being driven to bankruptcy is an issue, but that seems like it's something that's going to happen regardless if we made "non-STEM work to be a viable option". At the end of the day, if it's a shitty job, then you'll have to pay more to get people to show up.