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the Reich stuff, revisited

Wednesday,  10/28/09  04:47 PM

Revisiting the Reich stuff...  I reread this post which lists a number of "inconvenient truths", and realized there was one statement in his list with which I disagree:

  • Helping people at the bottom earn more is going to cost higher income people more money.

This might be true but isn't necessarily true.  It depends on how you help them; this is a "give them fish" vs. "teach them fishing" argument.  If you educate low-income people and otherwise make them more productive, they can make more money without costing high-income people anything, in fact, it can be a "rising tide lifts all boats" situation.  Of course if you simply pay them more without raising their productivity, then the statement is true, which is why minimum wage laws are so dumb.  And also why union-imposed pay scales are dumb.  Etc.

This combines nicely with another statement on his list which is true:

  • Anyone who does an unskilled, repetitive job will lose it in the near future to outsourcing or automation.  And there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

There's definitely nothing you can do about the "losing the job" part; unskilled, repetitive jobs will be replaced by outsourcing or automation.  But there is something you can do about it in the sense of helping the people who've lost their jobs; you can teach them to perform skilled, unrepetitive jobs, which won't be replaced by automation (could be replaced by outsourcing though) and which would make them more productive.

Which means we should all celebrate the University of Phoenix :)