
Why Garbagemen Should Earn More Than Bankers - kschua
http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-bankers/
======
armenarmen
> Nearly a century ago, economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that
> we would work fifteen-hour weeks by the year 2030

In 1930, when Keynes predicted the 15 hour work week, the average American
earned $1,368/year which is roughly $19,500/year in todays dollars.

19500/52 = $375/week. In 1930, in manufacturing, the average person worked
50.6 hours per week. ([https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-
history/](https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/)). so
about $7.50/hour

In 2015 the average family income was $53657. 53657/52 = $1031/week But in
2015 the average person worked on average only 34.4 hours per week
([http://fortune.com/2015/11/11/chart-work-week-
oecd/](http://fortune.com/2015/11/11/chart-work-week-oecd/)) so just shy of
$30/hour.

If modern Americans were content living at the same level of consumption as
their 1930's counterparts they would only have to work 12.5 hours per week to
earn that same $375 in purchasing power. Outdoing Keynes' prediction 15 years
ahead of schedule.

~~~
meric
60% of families are dual income. [1]

(53657/1.6) / 52 = $644. That makes the hourly rate $18.72.

So around 20 hours to make 1930's purchasing power.

Keynes prediction still ahead.

[1] [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/18/5-facts-
abou...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/06/18/5-facts-about-todays-
fathers/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2012-2/)

~~~
armenarmen
Very true, I just did a quick Google search. Thanks for the link!

------
WalterBright
My father told the story once of a secretary who told him "my pay is a
disgrace. Even garbage men get paid more than me!" To which my father replied
"why don't you quit and get a garbage man job?" And the secretary says "are
you kidding? That's a filthy, dirty job!"

------
meric
[http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-
workers-h...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/24/news/economy/trash-workers-high-
pay/)

Some garbagemen do make $100000, more than some bankers (and some software
engineers), as they rightly should, as described in this article.

~~~
GFischer
Garbageman used to be a very highly sought-after job a few years ago in my
city.

160.000 out of a population of a million registered for a lottery to be
considered for one of the 200 spots back in 2006.

It helped that they had an employment contract that basically guaranteed them
employment for life and several perks.

Nowadays the city government privatized most of the garbage collection, so
it's not such a great deal anymore (the employees they hired before on
advantageous conditions are still employed and working though).

[http://www.espectador.com/sociedad/83328/se-realiza-el-
sorte...](http://www.espectador.com/sociedad/83328/se-realiza-el-sorteo-entre-
los-anotados-para-la-imm)

------
lmm
Where is the money coming from, hmm? The author describes finance as a "tax on
the population", but how could such taxation possibly work? The HFT firms are
taxing ordinary people's retirement accounts by... undercutting the human
market-makers, providing a much better service while employing fewer traders?
Um, yeah.

No doubt there are inefficient companies - those with an excess of management
(say) or some other kind of employees in "bullshit jobs" that aren't adding
value. That's ok; those companies will be competed out of the marketplace.
We're already seeing plenty of SV companies experimenting with different
management models, for example.

In some cases "bullshit jobs" are forced upon companies. If we have so many
more lawyers than Japan, maybe we need to simplify or otherwise improve our
legal system. Or maybe not - maybe the Japanese have a worse quality of life
as a result - certainly I've heard complaints about e.g. the treatment of
people who suffer serious injuries, or even the ability of small businesses to
break into markets that are dominated by racketeers.

But in many cases, if a job really is "bullshit", who is paying for it, and
why? It's not like banking isn't competitive - you only have to look at the
recent quarterly results to see how much effort the industry has put into
cutting costs (much of which comes in the form of employing fewer people).

------
askyourmother
One of the most important jobs in a hospital, is the cleaner. To help prevent
the spread of infections like MRSI, to help keep outbreaks of vomiting virus
under control, and help reduce the number of admitted and post procedure
patients dying as a direct result of infection acquired in the hospital
itself.

And yet, they are treated as the lowest employees there, well, most are not
even employees, outsourced three or four levels removed as a cost to be cut to
the cheapest provider, damn the consequences.

Society has some warped views sometimes.

~~~
monk_e_boy
> Society has some warped views sometimes.

At the moment, stopping to help a homeless person isn't worth anything. We
should live in a society where helping someone in need makes you a
millionaire. Where people are out hunting down the homeless, fighting to help
them.

A society where helping a kid to become happy makes you rich. Making a
classroom of kids happy and teach them something at the same time earns you
tens of millions a year.

~~~
xlm1717
Talk about rose tinted glasses! You would need to invent some new product that
did those things for kids and convince parents to buy it, otherwise no one
will ever pay you millions to make kids happy and teach them something.

~~~
monk_e_boy
That's the point I was making. In a post money society (think reddit karma or
Star Trek) this could be a thing.

The money loving capitalist couldn't imagine being rewarded for helping
someone. It makes me sad.

------
facepalm
Garbagemen are paid from taxer money, bankers aren't. If you don't like
bankers, don't give them your money. Problem solved. I get more angry at
people with cushy bullshit government jobs than at bankers.

The example of the Irish pubs seems to show that actually bankers do something
of value. Otherwise anybody could have replaced them, instead it was Irish Pub
owners because they had knowledge of their customers financial situation.

------
golemotron
The thing about markets is that they cut through all of the fuzzy thinking
about what jobs "should" pay more than others, and tell us what we actually
pay - what we collectively find valuable.

That reality escapes most people.

~~~
mac01021
That's probably 90% true, but there are phenomena that defy this.

Imagine you live in a society where the population is mainly composed of two
segments. Members of the first segment enjoy consuming service A. Members of
the second segment would benefit tremendously from service B, but all the
money is held by the first segment. Which service are you going to spend your
time offering to the public?

This is at least part of the reason that, as a software engineer, I am much
better off selling my time to an advertising company than (say) running a
programming/compsci dojo for middle school kids in a low-income urban
community.

You'll say, of course, that advertising is so lucrative because businesses
around the world (and therefore the society made up of them) value the extra
income that advertising provides. You'll say that society as a whole does, in
fact, want more, better advertisements. But I suspect that there is a segment
of the population just as large that would rather everyone in the advertising
industry do something else. Only that segment can't pay.

~~~
Chris2048
> selling my time to an advertising company than (say) running a
> programming/compsci dojo for middle school kids

There are lucrative teaching jobs, and lucrative consumer products bought by
low-income communities. But in this case, teaching dojos don't scale the same
way ads do.

Also, high-income communities can often incubate products that eventually
become available to low-income communities, after they get over initial cost
burdens.

Advertising _is_ a good example though: If everyone uses ads, there is no
individual (company) advantage to using ads, but you still have to use them to
compete.

~~~
mac01021
At the risk of hurting my case, advertising is probably not quite as good an
example as you're making it out to be.

In particular, competition between two brands of the same product need not be
a zero sum game. If every beer company runs ads in which beautiful women fawn
over a guy drinking beer, the outcome might be that _every_ company sees
higher profits than in a world without any ads at all.

------
bertjk
> Some law firms even make a practice of buying up patents for products they
> have no intention of producing, purely to enable them to sue people for
> copyright infringement.

 _sigh_ copyright != patent

------
atemerev
A strike of HFT traders would actually make some news. HFT is in a fragile
balance. Markets disturbance would be enormous.

------
marmaduke
I remember when they did this in Marseille a few years back and it didn't take
a week but just a few days before huge trash piles in the streets, set on fire
by bored kids, got cleaned up by the army.

------
digestives
My grandfather recalled once how his Latin teacher told him the most important
job in society is that of the garbage collector - how can it function properly
if everywhere is piled high with waste?

~~~
Chris2048
> how can it function properly if everywhere is piled high with waste?

Reminds me of
[http://joek.com/jokes/joke_102.shtml](http://joek.com/jokes/joke_102.shtml)

------
maehwasu
The writer thinks of money as something people give to you, and so he's never
going to make much of it.

He's totally right that no one would mourn a strike of lobbyists or high-
frequency traders. But those guys aren't waiting to be handed money--they're
actively finding ways to get it, for better or worse.

~~~
hvm
Exactly the problem the author is writing about: because of the way the system
works - people are striving to make money, not value.

~~~
lmm
Those two things should be aligned - that's how capitalism works. There are
cases where we create the wrong incentives - e.g. the whole HFT industry
exists because the sub-penny rule forbids market-makers from competing on
price - but let's fix those. Fundamentally the best way to make money should
be - and in my view largely is - by creating value for your clients.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Fundamentally the best way to make money should be - and in my view largely
> is - by creating value for your clients._

Should be - yes. And to a great extent it was - that's why capitalism is
undeniably responsible for propelling (most of) us into the age of prosperity
we now enjoy. But I disagree creating (social, not just economic) value for
clients is the best way to make money now. Profit and value motives are
increasingly misaligned. It is to be expected - we've picked up all low-
hanging fruits years ago. Now the money is being made on gaming the system, on
exploiting the fact that profit is only a proxy for value.

Companies nowadays know that they can get away with almost anything because
the market has _very_ short memory. They also know they can sell any kind of
bullshit with enough advertising, and that marketing expenses have much better
ROI than actually delivering a working product. In contemporary marketplace,
providing _honest value_ to customers is not a competitive strategy - hence
less and less of it happens (it's painfully visible in our industry - it's why
most Internet startups are bullshit).

~~~
lmm
> In contemporary marketplace, providing honest value to customers is not a
> competitive strategy - hence less and less of it happens (it's painfully
> visible in our industry - it's why most Internet startups are bullshit).

Examples? People might not like what Facebook/Snapchat/Uber/Amazon/etc. are
doing (and in some cases I would agree with the criticism - I certainly think
startups whose business model involves getting people to break the law need to
be held to account), but they're undeniably providing a lot of honest value to
their users.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I wasn't thinking about Facebook, Snapchat, Amazon or even Uber - those are
examples of companies that do provide a lot of honest value (not to mention I
wouldn't call either of them a startup now). I meant all your random SaaS
businesses that try to "change the world" by doing something utterly
irrelevant that's only meant to give them enough growth to have a shot at
getting acquihired by an established corporation.

~~~
lmm
You're going to have to give some concrete examples. All the "typical" SV
startups I can think of were very much about creating value for the user. (If
anything the lacuna in the business model tends to be around getting the user
to pay for that value).

------
mac01021
As someone who does not live in a high-density urban environment, I would
rather keep my bank than my garbage man.

My waste is about half compostable and the other half, through a slight change
in purchasing decisions, could easily consist solely of easily-burnable paper
and cardboard.

Meanwhile, if I had noone to finance the purchase of my house or manage my
retirement savings then I would be considerably worse off.

------
Sam--------
IMO this is wrong: Most any banker can become a garbageman. They are way
overpaid, that's why there is a lottery for the jobs. Is the reverse true?

Relying on strike time to tragedy is complete BS. As we saw in 2007/8 when
banker messed up the consequences are indeed harsh.

None of this works without gov putting its thumb on the scales. Where do you
think the lack of innovation came from?

~~~
oarsinsync
> IMO this is wrong: Most any banker can become a garbageman. They are way
> overpaid, that's why there is a lottery for the jobs. Is the reverse true?

The article actually states exactly this as part of it's "bullshit jobs"
discussion.

> Relying on strike time to tragedy is complete BS. As we saw in 2007/8 when
> banker messed up the consequences are indeed harsh.

You're mixing up a strike with a very complex series of events that can
arguably be described somewhere on a scale between "messed up" and
"maliciously and fraudulently manipulated markets for their own profiteering
at the expense of everyone else". However, determining exactly where on that
scale they sit is a much bigger discussion than HN allows in a comment.
Eitherway, the article again compares a garbage collection strike with a
banking strike, which is a fairer comparison, and suggests that the biggest
losers from that strike were the bankers.

------
maruhan2
I wish there was a way to get rid of these bullshit jobs. Also, I wish there
was a way to make entertainment business such as singing, acting, and sports
much much less profitable.

~~~
nyandaber
The problem with entertainement isn't that it's too profitable, it's that the
top earner are taking a huge part of the pie while the majority is fighting
for crumbs. It's easy to see the few soccer stars making millions by the
dozen, but there are way more people playing soccer professionally that are
barely getting by.

------
kartickv
If some people are getting paid highly without making a positive contribution
to society, they are either: \- Taking advantage of gullible customers or, \-
Exploiting loopholes in the system, as with HFT.

In the latter case, regulation should take care of these people.

