> It baffles me that our markets are so inefficient that it’s 125% more effective for me to take time off my ‘highly skilled’ engineering job to do ‘low skilled’ renovation/repair work myself.
I don’t think it’s particularly baffling. A large class of jobs, including the trades and so-called “low skilled” professions, are in very high demand - which indicates that what they do is valuable to a lot of people - and while you could theoretically do their job yourself, many people simply don’t want to “get their hands dirty.”
In my opinion that’s a good thing by the way. People who do jobs that are important for us and few people want to do should be paid accordingly.
That’s the charge out rate. The people actually doing the labor (overwhelmingly immigrants) are only seeing a tiny fraction of that money (~1/10th or less).
I don’t think it’s particularly baffling. A large class of jobs, including the trades and so-called “low skilled” professions, are in very high demand - which indicates that what they do is valuable to a lot of people - and while you could theoretically do their job yourself, many people simply don’t want to “get their hands dirty.”
In my opinion that’s a good thing by the way. People who do jobs that are important for us and few people want to do should be paid accordingly.