

What Is Business Waiting For? Start hiring today. - joshwa
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/opinion/nocera-what-is-business-waiting-for.html

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nazgulnarsil
Uncertainty leads to more conservative investment and a greater demand for
savings to absorb exogenous shocks. There is a great deal of regulatory
uncertainty about obamacare amongst other things.

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gte910h
Honestly, the fact it might be _Defunded_ is the issue to me. I can't afford
to offer healthcare in the old regime.

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jerf
If businesses aren't hiring, it's because they don't see the benefits of a new
hire exceeding the costs of a new hire. Begging businesses to please please
ignore the costs in the spirit of amity and, ahem, not proving the numerous
policies the NYT has agitated for that have the effect of raising the cost of
an employee a bad idea (a full listing of which would take quite a while!),
isn't going to work. Any business foolish enough to do so will simply find
itself outcompeted. It turns out employers are not in fact a font of endless
money that can be without cost harnessed for the purposes of social
engineering by the government. Cost/benefit analyses can _never_ be ignored.

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joshwa
Did you read all the way to the end of TFA?

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jerf
Yes. It solves the _wrong problem_. The problem is that the cost of an
employee exceeds the benefits. Everybody agreeing to take on employees whose
costs exceed their benefits is just a mutual suicide pact. You can't get
around that fact. If the benefits exceeded the costs, they would already be
hiring, and there would be no problem to solve. If the costs exceed the
benefits, then slapping _yet more_ costs into the equation, even if everybody
agrees to shoulder them, doesn't solve the problem!

And the idea that you can get entire industries to agree to mutual suicide is
just idiocy. In the startup world, we call that a "boil the ocean" plan.
Businesses would have massive incentives to defect.

This is all just blithering economic idiocy from top to bottom. (Of course, in
NYTland, people never respond to economic incentives, and a business is _prima
facie_ acting immorally if their income exceeds their expenditures. Also,
cost/benefit analysis is a radical and controversial political idea that must
be downvoted, rather than a simple, direct consequence of basic economic
reality.)

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joshwa
The interesting part of this article is the "contingent commitment
facility"... kind of like Kickstarter for new jobs. Or maybe more like the
opposite of mutually-assured destruction?

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greenyoda
As far as I know, the NY Times itself has been laying off staff for the last
few years, not hiring new people.

