this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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Communism
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I am of the opinion we should strive for all people to have their needs met.
That said, society needs some things more than others, and some of those things require incentive to have enough of.
If we give the same to a janitor who requires 6 months of training the same outcome as a doctor that requires a decade of training, we'll have all the janitors and almost no doctors. We need both for society to function.
I'm not trying to diminish the human aspect of either vocation, both are needed. Both deserve empathy and help if they need it. Both deserve a good life. Both deserve the chance to have a home and a family. Both deserve the respect of the society they contribute to.
But how do you have enough doctors while providing no tangible incentive? Not ridiculous, unsustainable incentive, but some. How do you convince people to spend 10 years training to do something if it isn't their explicit calling that will do it in spite of the lack of tangible reward?
Look at the US teacher shortage. Our society doesn't see capitalist profit in k-12, so we pay teachers shit and don't have nearly enough. We incentivize people becoming useless MBAs and ~~Hedge fund managers~~ professional rigged-casino gamblers whose vocations are largely self-serving. We incentivize the wrong things and thus lack many necessary professionals in roles vital to society's well being. Any society with any economy will suffer if they don't incentivize citizens to have pro-social vocations and disincentivize antisocial vocations.
You’re assuming we can only allocate work and compensation through the market.
That people will only respond to the lure of compensation.
There are many examples to the contrary and some even show that active sabotage was required to stop their function.
Cuba for example, produces a significant number of doctors without the lofty compensation their Anglo-European counterparts are provided. Cuban doctors are even expected to volunteer abroad as a matter of course.
The ddr didn’t erect a wall out of the deep desire to suppress free movement of people across borders, it did so in opposition to policies to impose brain drain by its rivals.
I didn't say or infer the Market would or should be setting those levels. The market, ie greedy capitalists only out for themselves, are the last people who should be setting those levels. Democratically elected Government should, again with capital interference being subject to the harshest of criminal incarceration for the slightest offense, with an agency that analyzes and using scientific, sociological means, to predict and determine what society needs and will need, and adjusts compensation accordingly, with teachers, doctors, mental health professionals, getting a little more than widget sellers or workplace efficiency experts and the like for doing good for society with their choice of vocation that took extra effort to learn but is vital to society. There really should only be 3 metrics to determine wage: difficulty to aquire the skill, utility/vitality of said skill to society's function and well-being, and predicted scarcity of said skill. If a skill is hard to learn but benefits no one else in society, it shouldnt pay much beyond the minimum, for example.
I'd be curious to see if the average cuban janitor generally has the identical quality of life in terms of creature comforts as an average cuban doctor. I very much doubt you wouldn't be able to discern significant difference.
Again, I am in opposition to the degree of incentive western culture provides and for which professions.
In a vacuum though, Id have to see hard evidence that in a society where a janitor out of primary education makes X or collects X social resources immediately, and a doctor who necessarily trained for 10 high pressure years after primary education makes the very same X will somehow yield enough doctors. Your entire society would have to be made up of people with benevolent Stephen Fry like outlooks, intellect, and nobility.
Edit: I looked it up, and cuban professionals with higher education is significantly higher. The minimum wage is 2100 cup, the average is 4000, and the average for health and higher ed professionals is 6100. See? Incentive. Not crazy bling "I'm worth 10 of you" incentive, but enough to make enough of what society needs.
https://horizontecubano.law.columbia.edu/news/calculating-cost-living-cuba
You identified yourself as an advocate for (regulated) capitalism
Yes there is more to this, welfare capitalism exists where in exceptional circumstances (e.g food, sometimes basic shelter, etc.) goods are distributed outside of the market system, but it's totally fair to infer that a capitalist would advocate that the market is setting the levels of compensation for the vast majority of professions.
Arguing that these levels of compensation should be agreed upon democratically is an entirely socialist position. This is an advocacy for central, democratic planning that flies in direct opposition to capitalism.
It seems like you're probably a capitalist-realistic (you believe no other economic system is viable), but you recognize the faults of capitalism and are trying to reform essentially every aspect of the economy to be socialist while still keeping some extremely small sliver of bourgeoise so you can call yourself a capitalist and feel like your position is a "realistic" one.
The irony is that keeping this however small and crippled parasitic class of capitalists around is always an existential threat to the working class. They're a group of people whose economic interests are in opposition to our own. We don't need people with different relationships to capital just by a happenstance of birth or luck.
That’s great information and I think it would be worthwhile to find out what drives the difference in compensation as opposed to assuming it comes from incentive.
Cubas an interesting example because it’s development of biomedical industry comes from the transition away from an only nominally free agricultural economy.
Without all the people producing cash crops for export (they still were, but with less human labor as the industry mechanized) and the urban service sector out of casino work there was a glut of people and need to put them to work.
Medicine was not just an industry compatible with their international communist politics but also their resources at hand.
So I think even with the difference in compensation there’s an argument to be made that labor training and output can be driven by much, much more than incentives in compensation.