mwengler comments on Unemployment explanations - LessWrong

28 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 07 November 2014 05:12PM

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Comment author: mwengler 26 November 2014 09:25:42AM *  2 points [-]

The problem is that there are too many people who want to be television workers. Having a market that pushes some of those people out of that industry and into something more productive is useful.

Do you really think you know what is more productive and what is less better than the market? If only the centrally planned economies had had access to your expertise before they collapsed, we might now be living in a worker's paradise!

The fact that universities who get huge tuition fees use graduate students who haven't learned anything about teaching to teach is appalling. If you force a university to pay the people who teach more money than they will have higher standards and pick people who can teach better. The university doesn't suddenly stop teaching.

You're not from around here, are you. I was a professor, a higher priced teacher at a university. I had NO training to teach and was not hired based on my ability to teach, but rather was hired entirely on the basis of the research I had done. And this is typical. The highest paid teachers are the most famous, and they are notoriously NOT available for a lot of teaching. The higher paid the professor the less time they spend teaching, and none of them got that high pay based on their ability to teach in the first place.

If the signal has turned down and the effect is really small, then the effect maybe isn't that important.

In which case it makes absolutely no sense to pass a law about it.

Comment author: CCC 26 November 2014 09:54:39AM 0 points [-]

Do you really think you know what is more productive and what is less better than the market?

The market is not what decides which skillsets are over-supplied and which are under-supplied. The market merely reacts to this over- or under-supply by adjusting salaries.

What decides which skillsets are over- or under-supplied is a whole lot of students, fresh out of high school, deciding which career(s) to pursue. If more of them decide to pursue a career in television than there is demand for careers in television, then the market-clearing price for careers in television will drop; possibly even to below a living wage. (The market does not care about whether people live or not). On the other hand, if virtually nobody wants to pursue a career in (say) medicine, then those few who do will be able to earn vast amounts of money... but they will not be able to provide medical care to everyone, which would be a bad thing.

Personally, I find it easy to believe that ChristianKi is better at predicting which careers are productive than an average student just out of high school.

Comment author: ChristianKl 26 November 2014 01:12:03PM -2 points [-]

Do you really think you know what is more productive and what is less better than the market? If only the centrally planned economies had had access to your expertise before they collapsed, we might now be living in a worker's paradise!

This discussion isn't about central regulation of television workers but on setting parameters within with market forces can act. I don't advocate solving the issue through quota but through using the market.

In which case it makes absolutely no sense to pass a law about it.

Unless you don't pass the law to effect the number of job but you want that the people at the bottom that have jobs have higher payed jobs.

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