I've worked a variety of manufacturing jobs; from medical manufacturing of catheters the size of fishing lines with three inner diamters, running 5 story oven stack extrusion lines, laser etching tooth insert threading, and suface coating PTFE into sheet material for military radar and industrial applications, to grunt work factory assembly lines making the rubber gun butts for Ruger.
They all carried serious risks of bodily injury, and some far more so than others - but this is what's crazy to consider: the difference in wages we are talking is no more than $3 per hour. Meaning, that grunt work where you could lose your hand to a steel injection mold was $9, the teflon coating job where someone working third shift on the machine I ran was struck in the skull with the peg-end of a steel 72+ inch roller pin holding a full 300 yard roll of coated fabric, nearly (millimeters from), resulting in her having a steel plate surgically placed - that position paid a whopping $12 in 2014.
I've worked as a line cook, over 5 years, and as a driver, 6 years. None of these paid well, and all are inherent of risks. It's always seemed silly to me when you zoom out of this picture and see it like this; the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
One of the common defenses of capitalism is that the capital owner is risking capital so should get to enjoy a disproportionate amount of their profits. The standard rejoinder is: "what exactly are they risking? If the capital owner is wiped out, they simply become a worker like everyone else".
I remember reading about the life expectancy of people who have worked construction all their working lives. The life expectancy in this same was (IIRC) 59. The life expectancy of the guy who owns the construction company was over 80.
So who exactly is taking a risk here?
To your point, you can look at an awful lot of incredibly dirty and dangerous jobs in undesirable locations and they pay surprisingly bad. As an example, underwater welding on North Sea oil rigs pays $100-160k. That is an incredibly dangerous job that wrecks your health. Even if there isn't a risk of acute injury or death, often it wrecks your body. And this fact also gets lost every time the idea is resurrected of raising the retirement age. How exactly is a construction worker or an airport baggage handler meant to work until 68 instead of 65 exactly?
On top of all that, the people who are getting paid very little in a possibly dangerous job can often cost a fortune if they screw up. International shipping tends to use fairly low paid sailors from countries like The Phillipines. The cost of a screw up can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day when they might be earning as little as $30.
I'm not arguing either perspective but being 59 and out of money looks very different than being 80 and out of money. If you have built up capital and that's how you make your living, you become very dependent on that capital.
I've known people who believed they would never live past 20. I've also known people who want to live to 200. The difference in mentality between the two as well as the different approach to life is large. IMHO, the difference is directly comparable to working for what you need for the day/week vs saving for when you are 80.
Frankly, if you had just enough money to simply retire, would you risk it on employing folks who drink themselves to death, wreck expensive equipment, take responsibility for as little as possible and generally don't care about your bottom line? ... or would you retire?
Most "capital" used to be workers who risked everything they've worked for because they thought they could do a better job than their boss. People mortgage their homes to get their businesses through hard times.
It's easy to frame the owners of capital as the bad guy when you act like they are the Monopoly man but most businesses are small businesses and sole proprietorships.
Most businesses aren't a problem because they are many and small.
Contrary wise, most Capital is a problem for many because most of the capital (literal trillions) is tied up in the hands of a very few individuals and boards who are exerting an undue influence on hundreds of millions.
That is not true tho. They did not risked "everything". That is super exaggerated framing. They risked not succeeding and being slightly worst off then other guys at most.
And big capital people risked "becomming a middle class" at worst.
It is. That is the whole thing where American setup is supposed to be better then European - you can fail, fail again and then again with little punishnent or consequence. And it is not like European consequences were grave, you are just less likely yo get another investment once you failed.
Frankly, too many people like to talk about risk taking in fairly low risk situations.
When you look at capital and risk, the risk are not that large. And economic policy favorwed capital over labor literally for decades on top of it.
> One of the common defenses of capitalism is that the capital owner is risking capital so should get to enjoy a disproportionate amount of their profits. The standard rejoinder is: "what exactly are they risking? If the capital owner is wiped out, they simply become a worker like everyone else".
That standard rejoinder is completely dismissive of how the capital owner came to be in the position of owning capital in the first place. That capital owner - or his ancestor - either worked exceptionally hard or took exceptional risks to get into that position.
But nobody answers the question of why that would allow them to treat others like basically slaves.
The standard answer is: but the others could do the same thing. Well, if everybody tried to become a capitalist at all costs then we'd be in a pretty bad place.
Not trying to argue on the downsides of capitalism, but what comes to mind is the Endicott Johnson Corporation. They paid decent wages to their workers during 1950s, but got overcompeted by Nike partly because they were unwilling to lower their wages to stay in business
> That capital owner - or his ancestor - either worked exceptionally hard or took exceptional risks to get into that position.
That’s nuts. The industrial barons of 19th century America neither worked hard nor took amazing risks. They were lawyers and bankers who manipulated stocks and broke unions.
When you suddenly limit a discussion to a very specific time and place, sure, you could discount any point ever made.
I live in neither the 19th century nor in America. The wealthy people I know all earned everything over the past three generations - three generations ago my people were completely devastated and many started off with no more than the single torn shirt they fled with.
"Or his ancestor"? What are we, an aristocracy? Personally I don't think there should be any inherited wealth beyond a few million dollars but that's another story. Luckily, this hasn't been a big problem yet. The heirs tend to be very bad at maintaining or building their inherited wealth. Cornelius Vanderbilt II is an obvious exception.
But in the middle we do have an increasing problem of trust fund kids dominating industry. Hollywood is an obvious example. But even in the startup world, your education matters an awful lot. And you going to Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Yale has a lot to do with elite private schooling and all of it has a ton to do with the luck of birth not merit.
I'm actually curious who you think risked their fortune? Is it anyone in particular or is it just some romanticized idea? Bill Gates came from a privileged background. Jeff Bezos's parents had a quarter million in retirement savings to lend him in the 1990s and he was playing with investor money after that.
Now wealth creation seems to be taking other people's money and buying up industries with inelastic demand to extract wealth from ordinary people. Housing, medical care, vets, utilities, that sort of thing.
And then there's slavery and its aftermath. How much generational wealth was created from slavery? Even a century after Emancipation, we had the government creating wealth for white people with the GI Bill post-WW2. Free college and cheap mortgages. Who was taking a risk there?
You get sufficiently wealthy and you aren't allowed to fail. The government will bail you out.
I feel like James Cameron has never tried anything safe. He was a truck driver early on. Some dentists took a risk and financed a truck driver to make a movie.
That’s the thing about pension schemes like American social security: they were originally set with a retirement age that matched mean mortality, so half of potential recipients would die before drawing on them. In other words, half of workers were not meant to retire, and the half that did would be protected by the contributions of all. Modern medicine completely changed those expectations, keeping the elderly alive twenty years longer and making twenty years of unproductive, publicly funded retirement an expectation and entitlement for everyone. It’s political suicide to discuss whether something should change about that.
> the capital owner is risking capital so should get to enjoy a disproportionate amount of their profits
Anyone who advanced that ‘defense’ has a poor understanding of economics.
Risk is not an essential element of capitalism. Some investments are effectively risk free. ‘Disproportionate’ return seems to be something you’ve just made up. There’s no mention of the proportionality of returns in any economic treatise I’ve ever read.
Lastly, there’s nothing to defend. There’s simply the observation that if there is no return on capital then there’s no reason at all to provide capital. Nobody has ever come up with a working alternative.
In that case most capitalists and owners don't understand capitalism, because there are only two standard arguments - one is the one about risk, and the other is that everyone should be grateful when a capitalist creates jobs at all.
As for defences - capital is just political power by other means. If the capitalist is wasting money on yachts while workers can't afford food and housing, the return is morally disproportionate, and the usual outcome is socially catastrophic, in various possible ways.
Capitalism reduces every transaction to personal opportunism, with no concept of broader consequences. That's a shockingly stupid way to run anything - as we're all about to find out.
> Capitalism reduces every transaction to personal opportunism, with no concept of broader consequences
It is people who ALWAYS reduce everything to personal opportunism (no matter capitalism or not). Capitalism is the smartest way to run anything exactly because it is build on concepts of broader consequences of that fact.
> if there is no return on capital then there’s no reason at all to provide capital.
Untrue. Capital accumulates. People have desires for their world/society/community beyond their own wealth. They want to see certain things happen, and owning capital puts a person in a position to influence whether it does (or does not).
The problem is that "the owner can simply become a worker" doesn't really work like that because they likely sacrificed career advancements, education, time, saved up money, etc.
If someone starts running a company at 20 years old and goes bankrupt at 40, they can't simply go back to working a regular job. They don't have a resume, they sacrificed 20 years of career progress. They'll be working at Walmart while their peers who got the same education and have the same intelligence are becoming partners at law firms or investment banks.
Precisely the same objections can be made about someone who takes one particular job instead of another. There's an opportunity cost to deciding to go and work for company/person X instead of company/person Y (or maybe to not work at all, and instead study, or raise young children etc. etc.)
Yeah completely unlike the regular worker whose factory gets shut down or gets injured on the job or any of a million things that breaks the fragile little house of cards that gives them any kind of basic human dignity at all.
The capital class doesn't need you to defend them. You're embarrassing yourself.
sans_souse · · focus · HN ↗
They all carried serious risks of bodily injury, and some far more so than others - but this is what's crazy to consider: the difference in wages we are talking is no more than $3 per hour. Meaning, that grunt work where you could lose your hand to a steel injection mold was $9, the teflon coating job where someone working third shift on the machine I ran was struck in the skull with the peg-end of a steel 72+ inch roller pin holding a full 300 yard roll of coated fabric, nearly (millimeters from), resulting in her having a steel plate surgically placed - that position paid a whopping $12 in 2014.
I've worked as a line cook, over 5 years, and as a driver, 6 years. None of these paid well, and all are inherent of risks. It's always seemed silly to me when you zoom out of this picture and see it like this; the more your job pays the less it exposes you to physical harm.
jmyeet · · focus · HN ↗
I remember reading about the life expectancy of people who have worked construction all their working lives. The life expectancy in this same was (IIRC) 59. The life expectancy of the guy who owns the construction company was over 80.
So who exactly is taking a risk here?
To your point, you can look at an awful lot of incredibly dirty and dangerous jobs in undesirable locations and they pay surprisingly bad. As an example, underwater welding on North Sea oil rigs pays $100-160k. That is an incredibly dangerous job that wrecks your health. Even if there isn't a risk of acute injury or death, often it wrecks your body. And this fact also gets lost every time the idea is resurrected of raising the retirement age. How exactly is a construction worker or an airport baggage handler meant to work until 68 instead of 65 exactly?
On top of all that, the people who are getting paid very little in a possibly dangerous job can often cost a fortune if they screw up. International shipping tends to use fairly low paid sailors from countries like The Phillipines. The cost of a screw up can be hundreds of thousands of dollars a day when they might be earning as little as $30.
hanibrel · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
imoverclocked · · focus · HN ↗
I've known people who believed they would never live past 20. I've also known people who want to live to 200. The difference in mentality between the two as well as the different approach to life is large. IMHO, the difference is directly comparable to working for what you need for the day/week vs saving for when you are 80.
Frankly, if you had just enough money to simply retire, would you risk it on employing folks who drink themselves to death, wreck expensive equipment, take responsibility for as little as possible and generally don't care about your bottom line? ... or would you retire?
parineum · · focus · HN ↗
It's easy to frame the owners of capital as the bad guy when you act like they are the Monopoly man but most businesses are small businesses and sole proprietorships.
defrost · · focus · HN ↗
Contrary wise, most Capital is a problem for many because most of the capital (literal trillions) is tied up in the hands of a very few individuals and boards who are exerting an undue influence on hundreds of millions.
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
And big capital people risked "becomming a middle class" at worst.
nomorewords · · focus · HN ↗
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
Frankly, too many people like to talk about risk taking in fairly low risk situations.
When you look at capital and risk, the risk are not that large. And economic policy favorwed capital over labor literally for decades on top of it.
folkrav · · focus · HN ↗
dotancohen · · focus · HN ↗
cowboy_henk · · focus · HN ↗
amelius · · focus · HN ↗
The standard answer is: but the others could do the same thing. Well, if everybody tried to become a capitalist at all costs then we'd be in a pretty bad place.
ahalay-mahalay · · focus · HN ↗
dotancohen · · focus · HN ↗
enoint · · focus · HN ↗
That’s nuts. The industrial barons of 19th century America neither worked hard nor took amazing risks. They were lawyers and bankers who manipulated stocks and broke unions.
dotancohen · · focus · HN ↗
I live in neither the 19th century nor in America. The wealthy people I know all earned everything over the past three generations - three generations ago my people were completely devastated and many started off with no more than the single torn shirt they fled with.
nkrisc · · focus · HN ↗
The capital owner risks his status, the laborer risks his life.
jmyeet · · focus · HN ↗
But in the middle we do have an increasing problem of trust fund kids dominating industry. Hollywood is an obvious example. But even in the startup world, your education matters an awful lot. And you going to Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Yale has a lot to do with elite private schooling and all of it has a ton to do with the luck of birth not merit.
I'm actually curious who you think risked their fortune? Is it anyone in particular or is it just some romanticized idea? Bill Gates came from a privileged background. Jeff Bezos's parents had a quarter million in retirement savings to lend him in the 1990s and he was playing with investor money after that.
Now wealth creation seems to be taking other people's money and buying up industries with inelastic demand to extract wealth from ordinary people. Housing, medical care, vets, utilities, that sort of thing.
And then there's slavery and its aftermath. How much generational wealth was created from slavery? Even a century after Emancipation, we had the government creating wealth for white people with the GI Bill post-WW2. Free college and cheap mortgages. Who was taking a risk there?
You get sufficiently wealthy and you aren't allowed to fail. The government will bail you out.
enoint · · focus · HN ↗
Telemakhos · · focus · HN ↗
That’s the thing about pension schemes like American social security: they were originally set with a retirement age that matched mean mortality, so half of potential recipients would die before drawing on them. In other words, half of workers were not meant to retire, and the half that did would be protected by the contributions of all. Modern medicine completely changed those expectations, keeping the elderly alive twenty years longer and making twenty years of unproductive, publicly funded retirement an expectation and entitlement for everyone. It’s political suicide to discuss whether something should change about that.
sarchertech · · focus · HN ↗
The number of men who make it to 65 after having made it to 21 is about 20% higher than it was in 1940.
And the average remaining lifespan for men reaching 65 is about 3 years higher than in 1940.
These factors certainly change the calculations, but the size of the baby boomers is a much larger factor.
mr_toad · · focus · HN ↗
Anyone who advanced that ‘defense’ has a poor understanding of economics.
Risk is not an essential element of capitalism. Some investments are effectively risk free. ‘Disproportionate’ return seems to be something you’ve just made up. There’s no mention of the proportionality of returns in any economic treatise I’ve ever read.
Lastly, there’s nothing to defend. There’s simply the observation that if there is no return on capital then there’s no reason at all to provide capital. Nobody has ever come up with a working alternative.
TheOtherHobbes · · focus · HN ↗
As for defences - capital is just political power by other means. If the capitalist is wasting money on yachts while workers can't afford food and housing, the return is morally disproportionate, and the usual outcome is socially catastrophic, in various possible ways.
Capitalism reduces every transaction to personal opportunism, with no concept of broader consequences. That's a shockingly stupid way to run anything - as we're all about to find out.
MentalM · · focus · HN ↗
It is people who ALWAYS reduce everything to personal opportunism (no matter capitalism or not). Capitalism is the smartest way to run anything exactly because it is build on concepts of broader consequences of that fact.
PaulDavisThe1st · · focus · HN ↗
Untrue. Capital accumulates. People have desires for their world/society/community beyond their own wealth. They want to see certain things happen, and owning capital puts a person in a position to influence whether it does (or does not).
djaro · · focus · HN ↗
If someone starts running a company at 20 years old and goes bankrupt at 40, they can't simply go back to working a regular job. They don't have a resume, they sacrificed 20 years of career progress. They'll be working at Walmart while their peers who got the same education and have the same intelligence are becoming partners at law firms or investment banks.
PaulDavisThe1st · · focus · HN ↗
Capital has no special position here.
idiotsecant · · focus · HN ↗
The capital class doesn't need you to defend them. You're embarrassing yourself.