The thing I hate the most about economists and economics is the condescendingly simplistic way economic models work. Anyone sheep-dipped into engineering or, to a lesser extent, physics and chemistry will tell you is that your model should include everything relevant to the system and exclude everything that does not aid you in answering the question you're posing. Economists? The model should only include the stuff that proves your point and anyone who questions your boundary conditions is a heretic who should be burned at the stake.

This is what drew me to Wallerstein. His whole point is that the only way you can study sociology in a limited way is by analyzing stunted little failurecultures that don't fucking get it and if you aren't analyzing the Triangle Trade AND everyone involved in it you aren't analyzing you're fearmongering.

This whole 'who's subsidizing who' thing. It's overly simplistic.

LA Times did an analysis back in 2016, 2017. The majority of people in LA under 30 were getting an average of $3k a month just to fucking live in LA. That was the beforetimes so good luck finding the article now, but USA Today wants you to know that the number of adults under 30 living with their parents has gone from 52% to 47% since 2020 so... obviously shut the fuck up.

LA was a real wake-up for me. I was paying $800/mo for a shithole in North Hollywood and mixing reality TV so I could afford to go to meetings. Buddy of mine flew out from Hawaii, immediately moved into a $6000/mo penthouse and proceeded to work for free, 90 hours a week, for 18 months in various writer's rooms. Guess which one of us got staffed on Private Practice? Granted, he also nearly destroyed his marriage and did two stints in rehab but I mean... you can get a lot more done if your parents are subsidizing you $10k a month.

Some industries are just.fucking.full of shit like that. Whenever we were having a miserable time on some show or other I would say "hey we could be wearing bags in Victorville at $350 for 12!" 'cuz the thing is? Those gigs exist, they're about half what they should be paying, and people take them because their parents are paying their rent and they are living the dream until they get sick of it, at which point they're going to go work at Daddy's bank anyway. Ask me about the Kings season opener I saw from the corporate box seats because a screenwriter friend's daddy couldn't find anyone to use the tickets.

The reception gig is $13/hr because at any professional or legal organization with any kind of prestige, it's done by unpaid interns now. I knew a production company with five of them at any given time - people paying $20k a year to go to school at Emerson, then paying $8k a month to live in LA, so they could get "work experience." And because they were at Emerson, they worked for Emersonians, and got the gigs that nobody else could get when they were out. A lot of it? Script reading. I know a guy who did that professionally, had been doing it long enough to reject Being John Malkovich for HBO (I know). For reading your 20k word screenplay and writing up a 2500 word analysis of it, he made $25. He'd do five or six a day. And that's about all he did.

So let's get back to the welder. If you are a welder and being paid $14/hr and the guy up the street is a "maker" who mostly herds packets at a data center but bought a MIG welder at Harbor Freight last week? He's going to take your business for practically free, right up to the point where he's decided he's bored with it.

Let's get back to Quats. She's making $13 an hour because half of the jobs she could do have been taken up by children of friends doing it for nothing. "low prices are a reason they overlook their scruples" is a misrepresentation and he knows it and that's why we have each other blocked - so much easier to keep making your fallacious points when nobody calls you out on it.

It's disingenuous to say that Quats is being subsidized by her family because we're talking about wages. It's more accurate to say that Quats' workplace is being artificially suppressed by every other family out there.

There's a photographer in our building, or will be until December. She's 20. She has absolutely fucking no idea what she's doing, but she rented an office for $800 a month so that she could look professional. Lo and behold she's going through "family difficulties" and asked to be let out of her lease. She's the reason I stopped photographing for money - not her personally, but the legion of bored white women with an Amazon DSLR rig who basically need to earn a dollar to justify to their husbands that they're not hobbyists, they're professionals.

The pandemic did a big, important thing - it pushed young professionals back in with their parents. And now? All those parents are saying "get a job."

Whenever people who need the money to live compete against people who need the money for validation, wages go down. Libertarians don't see this because their boundary conditions are whatever justifies their hatred of their fellow man.

And when I need welding services I call around, get quotes for $30/hr and $40/hr, and support the business that has minimized costs and passed the savings on to me, because that's how competition works.

You might be willing to spend more money on a business that you know pays employees better (even if you get exactly the same service from them). If there are enough customers like you, a business can get some market advantage with a pro-employee reputation.

I doubt there are many such customers. The most vocal critics of Amazon on Hubski are also Prime members, paying $139 a year for the privilege of patronizing Bezos. They even admit that low prices are a reason they overlook their scruples, as if low prices and minimizing labor costs are completely unrelated.

I shop at Trader Joe's all the time. I believe staff there is well-compensated; they seem loyal as I see the same faces week after week. I look for two francophone workers and try to chat with them. Their compensation costs more than what they would get at Walmart, and that extra compensation comes out of my pocket, obviously. I have a comfortable budget for groceries, so I am willing to pay more for the pleasant atmosphere. If my budget were tighter, I would save money by giving up on charming staff and shopping elsewhere.

I mean you pay the bare minimum that you can or you find some way to show your customer value in the fact that you can hire significantly better talent for 25 than I can for 13. Business leaders (professional management class not small biz owners) are Penny wise and dollar foolish so more often then not my shitty 13 dollar high school drop outs look equivalent to your 25$ professionals.

In your example I’ll undercut you with people that get paid 5$ a day in India because that’s business. That’s how we ended up in the shitty support situation we’re in today,