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Why is it that the hardest workers are the lowest paid?
supply and demand. flipping burgers has no gatekeepers, natural or artificial, and lots of people are overall willing to do it, so workers are easy to replace and wages can be pushed down a lot. there are low skill jobs that are actually well-paid, but they usually involve way less savory stuff that fewer people like to do.
of course, if a strong social safety net, or heavens forbid, universal basic income happened, way fewer people would be willing to flip burgers, while the demand for burgers would likely go up slightly, so people flipping burgers would get paid better, because a lot fewer people would want to flip burgers. hence the comparisons to the good half of europe where people flipping burgers get paid better.
but the point is, when a job is easier to do, it’s because it’s gatekept in a way that some harder jobs aren’t. sometimes that’s due to skill, other times it’s entirely artificial. but a gatekept job can’t be a universal “hey, do that job instead” thing, specifically because it’s gatekept.
ubi would be great because it would make it disproportionately more difficult to hire for hard jobs than for easy ones, but when the alternative is starving to death, a lot of people accept the hard job instead.
1980s: You could flip burgers to help pay for the college and not be thousands in debt at graduation.
1960s: You could flip burgers during summers to entirely pay for college.
1770s: what the hell are you doing with that cow?
The challenge here is the instructions were not very clear. All they said was go to college. They didn’t tell you what to study, and it turns out there aren’t a lot of jobs in medieval literature, gender studies, etc.
How many people do you think majored in gender studies? The biggest field by far is STEM. Engineers, scientists, mathematicians/physicists, and IT still find it hard to find a job and are facing unprecedented layoffs.
Sure but it doesn’t explain why teachers need to flip burgers as a second job, or why doctors and lawyers are drowning under all the debt.
(probably not that) Hot take. But I think that not having everyone study STEM or “productive” (by capitalism’s standard) studies is a good thing for the world.
Sure, philosophy doesn’t pay. But is the world better with, or without, people who study philosophy?
