Einherjar86
Active Member
I don't understand how Smith is claiming that fewer employers = lower wages breaks supply/demand modeling. That relationship seems to be precisely what you would expect.
To your point, I feel like the article lacks clarifying details. For starters, the article itself focuses solely on the number of employers and not the amount of labor available. I'm not familiar with the two papers it links, but I assume these offer more specifics.
As I understand the argument the article is making:
More employers means more supply, in which case employers have to sell their products at a lower cost to undercut the competition, meaning they can't afford to pay their workers higher wages. So more employers = lower wages. This is the traditional model, I assume.
By contrast, the fewer employers there are, the smaller the competition, the less supply there is (since they can dictate how much they sell). In this scenario, employers can charge more for their product and therefore pay their employees more. So fewer employers should equal higher wages. The article is saying that recent research contradicts these assumptions.
It strikes me that this would vary, however, depending on the amount of labor available to employers and the opportunities available to potential employees. The articles says that the two papers it links looked at different time periods, demographics, and used different methodologies; but I'd want to be familiar with their content before taking the Bloomberg piece at its word.
Separate, from Bakker:
Goddamn, that's some commitment to his ideals. I'm skeptical about plenty of things in psychology, and the half-life of anything I produce is going to be like 5 years or something anyway, but I'm still going to finish the thing regardless.
I guess if you know you can write fiction that'll sell, then fuck the (grad)grind.
