Do people have choices?

[Coito ergo sum]

On another thread - devogue wrote:

McDonald's offers terms in return for labour. It is the right of anyone to accept or reject those terms. If someone decides to accept them, then they must be more attractive than any (or no) alternative.

Seraph responded,

"So much for choice, Seth."

My question following that exchange was "what alternative are you suggesting? Employee demands whatever wage he deems appropriate which the employer has not choice but to accept? Government sets wages via a wage board, which neither party has a choice about?"

Seraph responded:

I was objecting to the sentence: "Employees are there by choice." Libertarians are very big on the legendary decision-making capacity of freely acting, autonomous individuals. It is the biggest impediment to social progress in democratic countries.

It seemed to me that this exchange reflected a fundamental disagreement over what it means to have a choice. In my view, acknowledging that people may and do have economic and other pressures that compel them to agree to things that they otherwise wouldn't if all such pressures were removed isn't telling anyone anything they don't already know. It's not like any libertarian I've ever talked to (I'm not one) has thought that a guy with a wife and two kids to support has no incentive to accept a less attractive position than someone laying on a pile of cash who can take or leave a job. Everyone knows that. It is not a basic assumption of libertarianism that each individual has as many practical options or as much bargaining power as every other individual. In fact, it's a basic assumption of libertarianism that the exact opposite is true.

So, what is the choice that we have when we are being interviewed for a job, and the employer offers us his or her terms. He or she, say, is willing to pay $X in salary, plus Y benefits. The employee may or may not accept that offer. Does the fact that the employee perceives a need for the job because of a shortage, or because of financial necessities at home mean that he has "no choice?" Or, does it mean that he is not a good bargaining position?

What alternative is there besides raising the minimum wage? Should we have a wage board setting private wages for all jobs? Should we have a board of approval, assessing a person's financial and familial situation and setting a wage based on that?

[Pappa]

It's become quite noticable over the past 10 years or so in the UK that the majority of the lowest paid jobs have been taken by migrant workers who are willing to accept minimum wage for shit jobs which the natives are unwilling to do. I am fairly sure that this has also enabled employers to keep the pay for these jobs significantly lower than it would need to be if not for migrant workers. I almost said "artificially low" but that would imply there was something wrong with the way we allow migrant workers to live and work here. Capitalism requires cheap labour, and the international movement of labour produces that in spades. An unfortunate side-effect is that people are then left to choose between very low wages or no job at all. Either option gives them a very poor standard of living and there are few oportunities to improve your skill-set in that situation. Drudgery for no recompense isn't much of a choice. The migrant worker will stereotypically have a much greater financial incentive to work for low pay (a better choice), and they surely can't be faulted for taking the oportunity when they see it.

[PsychoSerenity]

As I understand it, we don't have choice because it's a deterministic universe - and I've yet to get my head around Compatibilism as described by Daniel Dennett - I watched this lecture:



- And it just left me scratching my head.

As for the job, employer, minimum wage situation - I again refer you to the lecture in this thread for what I consider the best description I've seen so far for a moral basis of what would be fair. As to what system you build on top of that, I'd say there are an unlimited number of possibilities. Personally I'd like to see a system without money - but that's just me.

[Coito ergo sum]

I take issue with the idea that capitalism requires cheap labor. Capitalism requires a relatively free market for labor. It doesn't have to be cheap. Feudalism required cheap labor - communism requires cheap labor. In capitalism, the market for labor will be reflected in the cost of goods/services sold, and an equlibrium will be reached. Whether the labor is cheap or expensive is not a "requirement." If capitalism required cheap labor, then how did American capitalism manage to have an unprecedented rise in real income per capita throughout most of the 20th century?

[Atheist-Lite]

The world appears deterministic just like a famous painting appears to be a painting. Every story is determinstic but life isn't a story.

[Coito ergo sum]

The world appears deterministic just like a famous painting appears to be a painting. Every story is determinstic but life isn't a story.

It doesn't appear deterministic to me. It actually appears as if living beings may make choices as to do this or that - jump off a cliff or not - eat a bear or not - etc.

I can type these words, or not. Sometimes some things are harder than others, granted.

[Santa_Claus]

I take issue with the idea that capitalism requires cheap labor. Capitalism requires a relatively free market for labor. It doesn't have to be cheap. Feudalism required cheap labor - communism requires cheap labor. In capitalism, the market for labor will be reflected in the cost of goods/services sold, and an equlibrium will be reached. Whether the labor is cheap or expensive is not a "requirement." If capitalism required cheap labor, then how did American capitalism manage to have an unprecedented rise in real income per capita throughout most of the 20th century?

Cheap labour. Just that the labour pool expanded to include furriners. Of course wasn't just cheap labour. cheap capital and cheap natural resources helped with the American "Miracle". Dismembering and looting the British Empire in the 20th century kinda helped.

Not to say anything wrong with all that (especially given the British Empire stole most of it's wealth ) - nor that Capitalism fundamentally requires cheap anything. Just that Western "Democratic" Capitalism does. Unfortunately our main sources of cheap resources are dissapearing - furriners are unreliable types The Western world is like the British Empire, once past the tipping point it can't sustain itself - and part of that tipping point involves the ROTW realising that the Emperor has no clothes.

The answer is a new socio-economic model. I was going to call it Santafarenism - but it's too much of a f#cker to spell. So it's just easier for me to let the West collapse economically instead. and, yeah, it did involve buses

[Ian]

It's become quite noticable over the past 10 years or so in the UK that the majority of the lowest paid jobs have been taken by migrant workers who are willing to accept minimum wage for shit jobs which the natives are unwilling to do. I am fairly sure that this has also enabled employers to keep the pay for these jobs significantly lower than it would need to be if not for migrant workers. I almost said "artificially low" but that would imply there was something wrong with the way we allow migrant workers to live and work here. Capitalism requires cheap labour, and the international movement of labour produces that in spades. An unfortunate side-effect is that people are then left to choose between very low wages or no job at all. Either option gives them a very poor standard of living and there are few oportunities to improve your skill-set in that situation. Drudgery for no recompense isn't much of a choice. The migrant worker will stereotypically have a much greater financial incentive to work for low pay (a better choice), and they surely can't be faulted for taking the oportunity when they see it.

Some things to think about, regarding the future...

The costs of money and labor are factors that are going to confound a lot of economic models in the coming decades. For the last few centuries, particularly throughout the economic growth of the 20th Century, labor was relatively cheap and reliable, since there were always more and more younger workers to replace the older ones. But that's going to change a lot as the 21st Century progresses. Demographics is one area of study for which trends are relatively easy to predict. One of the dominant trends affecting absolutely everything in this century will be the plateauing of world population sometime several decades from now; by the end of the century, the world will likely have a rather level (or possibly even declining) population.

The shift from growing populations to older and stable or even declining populations will cause some serious pain as economies first struggle with how to adjust to it. Several advanced countries are already starting to experience serious challenges. Whereas a developing's nation's demographic profile might look like a pyramid, and an advanced country should look more like a fat obelisk, Japan will be the first major economy to have its demographic chart look like a narrow kite: lots of old people around the top, and a tapering effect to a smaller generation at the bottom. Europe, particularly the eastern parts, will also face demographic crises of coping with declining and aging populations and coupled with shrinking productive workforces. In the cases of Japan and Russia, they're going to have many millions fewer people at mid-century than they do now.

These problems won't hit the US quite as acutely as they will elsewhere in the advanced world, but the US will be facing a similar major crisis over the next five to twenty years as the swell of baby boomers start to retire. As they do, they'll be cashing in on homes and equities to live off their values, and they'll also not only be leaving vacanies in the workforce for the slightly smaller generations that follow them, they'll also be retired and in demand of services (health care, to cite one gigantic example) to take care of them. And as a bloc of voters, they'll be intensely interested in making sure that Social Security will remain strong enough to see to their needs. By the late 2020s, the US economy will be squeezed badly by its demographics. Unemployment will not only be extremely low, but wages will be high since the price of labor will be at a premium; unfortunately, those wages will be drained badly by high taxes, high interest rates or high inflation, or (most likely) a combination of all.

As the baby boomers gradually die off the US crisis will fade a bit, but the underlying 21st Century problem of a stabilizing population and smaller workforce will not somehow go into reverse. One big solution to this crisis of labor will be the influx of immigrants from the developing world. It might seem bizarre now, with Americans griping about 11 million border jumpers and Europeans resentful of muslim migrants that haven't been mixing well in their new countries, but two decades from now the developed nations will be competing with each other to attract new immigrants. In this, the US has the same great advantages it has always had; plenty of living space and a more flexible background culture; the US is, after all, the great "melting pot" for immigrants seeking to make a new life. Nevertheless, this solution will in time likely give rise to a host of other problems.

[hadespussercats]

As I understand it, we don't have choice because it's a deterministic universe - and I've yet to get my head around Compatibilism as described by Daniel Dennett - I watched this lecture:



- And it just left me scratching my head.

As for the job, employer, minimum wage situation - I again refer you to the lecture in this thread for what I consider the best description I've seen so far for a moral basis of what would be fair. As to what system you build on top of that, I'd say there are an unlimited number of possibilities. Personally I'd like to see a system without money - but that's just me.

I enjoyed that lecture-- but I thought he sort of hamstrung himself with his slow, careful pace-- ended up leaving what seemed to be major points of his lecture feeling like footnotes.

My sense was that he was saying we do in fact have choice, in the present. There's a discussion relating to the statement "Can the future be changed?" where he points out, " Changed from what? From what to what?" From our perspective in the present, then, we do have choice-- though that choice is constrained by circumstance and ability-- as shown in his example contrasting dodging a bullet with dodging a brick, where we recognize many people, though not all, could dodge a brick, but few, if any, could dodge a bullet.

Where choice disappears is when we are examining options that have already been played out-- as in his example of "I could have made that shot" in golf. I get a little hazier in his gist here, but I think what he's getting at is that it may seem to you as though you should have been able to make that shot, but you didn't make it, for any number of reasons, unknown variables, etc., and there is no way to ascertain, in the aftermath, that events ever could have played out differently. And there's no way to replay those events exactly. So choice disappears.

My interpretation could be wildly off-- and this has little to do with the economic choices considered in the OP.
But there's my two cents.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

People do what pleases the most or hurts the least.

[hadespussercats]

It's become quite noticable over the past 10 years or so in the UK that the majority of the lowest paid jobs have been taken by migrant workers who are willing to accept minimum wage for shit jobs which the natives are unwilling to do. I am fairly sure that this has also enabled employers to keep the pay for these jobs significantly lower than it would need to be if not for migrant workers. I almost said "artificially low" but that would imply there was something wrong with the way we allow migrant workers to live and work here. Capitalism requires cheap labour, and the international movement of labour produces that in spades. An unfortunate side-effect is that people are then left to choose between very low wages or no job at all. Either option gives them a very poor standard of living and there are few oportunities to improve your skill-set in that situation. Drudgery for no recompense isn't much of a choice. The migrant worker will stereotypically have a much greater financial incentive to work for low pay (a better choice), and they surely can't be faulted for taking the oportunity when they see it.

Some things to think about, regarding the future...

The costs of money and labor are factors that are going to confound a lot of economic models in the coming decades. For the last few centuries, particularly throughout the economic growth of the 20th Century, labor was relatively cheap and reliable, since there were always more and more younger workers to replace the older ones. But that's going to change a lot as the 21st Century progresses. Demographics is one area of study for which trends are relatively easy to predict. One of the dominant trends affecting absolutely everything in this century will be the plateauing of world population sometime several decades from now; by the end of the century, the world will likely have a rather level (or possibly even declining) population.

The shift from growing populations to older and stable or even declining populations will cause some serious pain as economies first struggle with how to adjust to it. Several advanced countries are already starting to experience serious challenges. Whereas a developing's nation's demographic profile might look like a pyramid, and an advanced country should look more like a fat obelisk, Japan will be the first major economy to have its demographic chart look like a narrow kite: lots of old people around the top, and a tapering effect to a smaller generation at the bottom. Europe, particularly the eastern parts, will also face demographic crises of coping with declining and aging populations and coupled with shrinking productive workforces. In the cases of Japan and Russia, they're going to have many millions fewer people at mid-century than they do now.

These problems won't hit the US quite as acutely as they will elsewhere in the advanced world, but the US will be facing a similar major crisis over the next five to twenty years as the swell of baby boomers start to retire. As they do, they'll be cashing in on homes and equities to live off their values, and they'll also not only be leaving vacanies in the workforce for the slightly smaller generations that follow them, they'll also be retired and in demand of services (health care, to cite one gigantic example) to take care of them. And as a bloc of voters, they'll be intensely interested in making sure that Social Security will remain strong enough to see to their needs. By the late 2020s, the US economy will be squeezed badly by its demographics. Unemployment will not only be extremely low, but wages will be high since the price of labor will be at a premium; unfortunately, those wages will be drained badly by high taxes, high interest rates or high inflation, or (most likely) a combination of all.

As the baby boomers gradually die off the US crisis will fade a bit, but the underlying 21st Century problem of a stabilizing population and smaller workforce will not somehow go into reverse. One big solution to this crisis of labor will be the influx of immigrants from the developing world. It might seem bizarre now, with Americans griping about 11 million border jumpers and Europeans resentful of muslim migrants that haven't been mixing well in their new countries, but two decades from now the developed nations will be competing with each other to attract new immigrants. In this, the US has the same great advantages it has always had; plenty of living space and a more flexible background culture; the US is, after all, the great "melting pot" for immigrants seeking to make a new life. Nevertheless, this solution will in time likely give rise to a host of other problems.

This is really interesting, Ian-- and one of the more hopeful interpretations of the global population crisis I've encountered.

I'm almost done reading Jared Diamond's Collapse-- where he discusses the problems of ecological/economic unsustainability as the Third World tries to ascend to First World living standards by either migrating to the First World or raising their countries to First World status through economic initiatives.

What do you think might mitigate this situation? Will we all move around enough that we end up meeting in some sustainable middle? Will people in current First World countries stand for a decline in their lifestyle? Will they (we) have a choice?

[Santa_Claus]

So, what is the choice that we have when we are being interviewed for a job, and the employer offers us his or her terms. He or she, say, is willing to pay $X in salary, plus Y benefits. The employee may or may not accept that offer. Does the fact that the employee perceives a need for the job because of a shortage, or because of financial necessities at home mean that he has "no choice?" Or, does it mean that he is not a good bargaining position?

What alternative is there besides raising the minimum wage? Should we have a wage board setting private wages for all jobs? Should we have a board of approval, assessing a person's financial and familial situation and setting a wage based on that?

Seemed rude of me to ignore your original point

I would say the answer is clearly Yes. and No.

No - he has no immediate choice (or at least he has already made that choice / realised that it's his best choice (shitty though it might be. but no rule that says one choice must be a good one )....otherwise he wouldn't be at the interview - at that point it is pretty much a take it or leave it deal).

Yes - within the bigger picture he has the choice to do something else (now or in the future). including working for himself. To my mind as long as the route to self-employment remains open to everyone, then everyone does not have to work at McD because they have "no choice" (not to say that McD does not provide opportunities - even if simply the motivation to do something better!). Doesn't mean that everyone will be successful, or that they would be better off working for others. But you don't have to be a rocket scientist to work for yourself (trust me ).....unless you are building rockets - then being a rocket scientist would probably help. but not essential, I'm building a Pyramid on the moon and for that I will need a spaceship - and I know shit about stuff like that, but for me that is a minor detail

[.Morticia.]

I take issue with the idea that capitalism requires cheap labor. Capitalism requires a relatively free market for labor. It doesn't have to be cheap. Feudalism required cheap labor - communism requires cheap labor. In capitalism, the market for labor will be reflected in the cost of goods/services sold, and an equlibrium will be reached. Whether the labor is cheap or expensive is not a "requirement." If capitalism required cheap labor, then how did American capitalism manage to have an unprecedented rise in real income per capita throughout most of the 20th century?

capitalism requires companies to survive in the market by competing for profits ( except in mature capitalism where the larger companies form anti-competitive cartels to keep out competition )

so it's really small to medium companies that have to "fairly" compete

and to "win" they must have


new products

new processes

or cheaper labour

[Coito ergo sum]

In real life, the employer interviewing a candidate has little knowledge of the personal situation of the person he's interviewing. So, when the employer makes the offer, it's usually based on an analysis of the market and an analysis of what makes financial sense to the employer. Some employees are able to say no to jobs; others are in a less comfortable position. I really don't know how people would expect to remedy this situation.

[hiyymer]

I would ask this. In an ideal free market capitalist system workers get paid their real economic contribution. That is the economic outcome. Is that a moral outcome?

Let's assume that we don't consider it a moral outcome; a fair distribution of income just on our gut feel of what's fair. So then the question is, what is the best way to deal with the situation? In my humble opinion free market capitalism is by far the best economic system for maximizing the total economic welfare. That is because it is the best system for dynamically allocating resources to the most efficient means of production OVER TIME. If we want to change the outcome then we should change the outcome and not distort the market with things like minimum wages and rent controls and price fixing and government subsidies of business. How about a nice simple negative income tax.