My first career was welding. MIG welding to be specific. I learned shortly after MIG welding machines were first being produced back in the mid-1970s.
I made good money doing it, but the work was hit or miss and it wasn't really the welding I was getting paid for, it was knowing how to cut up vans and modify them for severely handicapped people and I'd learned how to do that by building "custom cars" with my father who was a "bodyman" by trade and went on to become a "custom car builder".
By the time I quit customizing vans for the handicapped the State of California required you be a "certified welder" to do the work I did on the vans and cars they purchased for people who were in wheelchairs so you had to pay to go to a "welding school" to get a certification.
But none of those welders I met who did that actually knew how to weld. How to lay down a bead that penetrated the steel. They all did what those I learned from called "bird shit" welds. A cold weld that laid on top of the metal and didn't penetrate all the way through, and were thus prone to fail. And none of them started those jobs for much more than $5-$7 an hour.
That's when I decided to learn how to code. It was only a few years after that when the Internet started taking off, so I learned HTML and Perl by buying books written by the likes of Steven Brenner, "Selena Sol", Lincoln Stein and Randal Schwartz and there were no college level classes that taught it. I got invited to teach some after hour classes at SMS because they didn't have any at the time.
Now, more than 20 years later companies want to hire someone with a CS degree, and really they often don't know any more about it than those guys who took those welding classes did about laying down a bead that stuck.
But in both cases those who sold the classes lobbied their State Reps to make them mandatory and raked in the cash afterwards.
You realize $7 an hour is $95,000 a year in 2019 cash? If i were offered that for hangover quality work burning rods at a good union job i would not think twice. id be able to afford the median home price in 1970 which was $23,000. These numbers seem to support the idea of the wealthy welder. Its entirely possible fossilized republicans are thinking in 1970 dollars.
Fast forward to 2019. auto mechanics START at just shy of 22,000 a year and thats assuming you keep track of your time and work for a shop that doesnt engage in the rampant practice of wage theft. master mechanic? depends, maybe $28 an hour in 2019? but nowhere near the $46 an hour a twice convicted tombstone welder made back when the Love Boat sailed.
The problem is not trade, or college, its the seemingly endless wealth gap between people who do work, and people who just seem to collect mansions and yachts.
You realize that he said the machines were first made in the mid-70s?
If he stopped welding around the time that the Internet was taking off, that would mean that it was $5-7/hour in the early to mid 90s NOT 1970. The "now 20 years later" later in the comment backs this up.
$5-7/hour in the 1990 is $20-30k in 2019 money, which is about what your example mechanic is making.
You're right. 1990-92 is "about the time I quit" building vans for quadriplegics to drive and that's what I was referring to in regards to the $5-$7 per hour those companies I sub-contracted from were paying. And that was at most and it was not a "living" wage in Los Angeles back then.
Inflation was rampant in the 70s though. He says mid-70s. $7/hr in 1970 would be $95K today, but $7/hr in 1975 would be like $68K. And that seems comparably the high end of pay given in the article.
"when the internet started taking off" was the late 90s. Not the mid 70s when he started.
Even if he meant $5-7 (average $6) in 1975, the $95k doesn't work. bls.gov inflation calculator gives $12,000 a year in January 1975 (2000 hrs at $6/hr) as $59k for August 2019.
The last sentence really hits the nail on the head. Just to add to that, during the 2008 recession I saw my portfolio swing pretty wildly going negative one day and positive another but the amount was more than I made that day or maybe even that week. It was then it dawned on me, American capitalism rewards ownership, not labor nor time devoted to a task. Those changes in my net worth would have happened regardless of if I worked or took the day off. Time and labor can get you to ownership but that's not guaranteed nor probable in some fields. I don't want our country to discourage property ownership and accumulation of wealth but the paths leading to that from working hard seems increasingly fewer and narrower.
This comment shouldn’t have been downvoted because it’s completely accurate, and provably so: tax rates for earnings on capital are by and large less than earnings on labor. Warren Buffett has complained for years that he is taxed at a lower rate than his secretary. The system we have rewards trust fund babies, and punishes hard working people.
I get that Piketty's work isn't without controversy or criticism. Summers and others have criticized it, but their critiques haven't seemed very strong.
One article [1] (which discusses Piketty's shortcomings) claims the biggest reaction to Piketty is silence:
"But perhaps the greatest rebuke of Piketty to be found among academic economics is not contained in any of these overt or veiled attacks on his scholarship and interpretation, but rather in the deafening silence that greets it, as well as inequality in general, in broad swathes of the field—even to this day."
...
"The economics elite, it seems, answered by stonewalling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, so it would not have the impact on economics research agendas that it merits."
Anyway, it's not clear to me that Piketty's fundamental thesis is wrong. Happy to follow a link or two, thank you.
Even if it wasn’t wrong in the past, it can certainly be wrong going forward. With all the governments printing money to cause asset prices to inflate, of course ROI of capital will be > ROI of labor, since price increases for labor will always lag price increases of capital.
Piketty looked at like ~200 years of econ data (wages, asset values, rents) and allowed for inflation and even depreciation.
His thesis is actually that r > g, wherein r = ROI of capital and g = the rate of economic growth (gdp).
This has to be true, because rich people exist and we can measure that they get richer and richer faster than others. You can gauge faith in the likelihood that it will continue to work that way given that funds like Y Combinator exist and are successful, and because activities like buying and maintaining rental properties "works" in terms of creating personal wealth faster than the rate of economic growth.
The research has shown multiple other ways to reach the current results without r>g (housing stock is one method, if I recall) and authors have shown r>g leads to results we do not see.
Thus it’s not true to claim existence of rich people implies r>g. If it were that simple people before Piketty would have reached that conclusion earlier.
The papers linked in this thread show the flaws.
It’s also the case the rich don’t get richer, if you mean a rich person gets richer. For any dataset where you can track rich individuals over time, pick a level you call rich, track everyone meeting that definition, and you find they get poorer, reverting to mean. That is why most millionaires are first gen. It’s why the Forbes 400 is mostly first gen; the rich that were top 400 lose wealth. It’s why St. Louis Fed has papers showing the majority of the top quintile or the top 1% are not there 10 years later, or from generation to generation.
Sure some rich keep wealth. But for any level called rich, if you track all those in it, that group mostly falls out.
>If it were that simple people before Piketty would have reached that conclusion earlier.
Perhaps you've heard the expression, "The rich get richer while the poor get poorer"
What Piketty did was put extensive data and a pretty rigorous methodology to work to explain why. I've not read a critique that undermines his main conclusions in a meaningful way.
It's no secret that if you already have a pile of money or capital assets you can put those to work for you which will also generate income and you will come out ahead and faster than someone without the same pile of money.
> price increases for labor will always lag price increases of capital
Let's also keep in mind that that is a policy choice, because it's necessary to dislodge workers off their sticky wages and some sort of mumbo jumbo about the Phillips curve.
I don't really understand what was special about Picketty, though, so I can understand the silence. It's been recognized for a very long time, amongst certain economists, that capitalism rewards capitalists - that is, those who own things. Mainstream economics is mainstream because it ignores these economists. It doesn't matter how you come to this conclusion, no economics department is going to give it the time of day - and those that do can expect to become targeted by politicians, as hotbeds of 'left wing academic bias'. Which is a very good way to shrink your department.
So amongst those that are not professionally immune to this kind of argument, Picketty get's a, 'well, duh'. Amongst the rest (mainstream economists) it gets a resounding silence. It isn't really relevant to the field, because the field is constituted by a kind of professional avoidance of politically charged topics.
> We find evidence of pervasive errors of historical fact, opaque methodological choices, and the cherry-picking of sources to construct favorable patterns from ambiguous data.
> I conclude that Piketty’s data for the wealth share of the top 10 percent for the period 1870 to 1970 are unreliable.
The values he reported are manufactured from the observations for the top 1 percent inflated by a constant 36 percentage points. Piketty’s data for the top 1 percent of the distribution for the nineteenth century (1810–1910) are also unreliable.
> A key observation in Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Piketty 2014) is that the share of aggregate income accruing to capital in the US has been rising steadily in recent decades. The growing disparity between the income going to wage earners and capital owners has led to calls for government intervention. But for such interventions to be effective, it is important to ask who the capital owners are.
> Recent research has shown that the long-run rise in the net capital income share is mainly due to the housing sector (e.g. Rognlie 2015, Torrini 2016 – see Figure 1). This phenomenon is not specific to the US but has been evident in almost every advanced economy. This suggests that it is not entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that are taking an increasing share of the economy, but land owners.
> The results from at least four studies were compared for three measures of income change: change in median incomes, share of growth captured by the top 10 percent, and the changing income share of the top 1 percent. In all cases, Piketty and Saez (2003) were the outlier, showing the most increased inequality. And in all three measures of income change , Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018) found much less growth in income inequality than Piketty and Saez (2003).
The counter-argument is that Piketty's models and data are at least as credible as the standard models and data used in policy econ.
For example Magness & Murphy prefer the UK's Office of National Statistics to Piketty's figures - because it's supposed to generate gold-standard objective economic data.
In reality the ONS produces the UK's unemployment figures by considering anyone who works one hour a week as employed. Similarly anyone who labels themselves self-employed for tax purposes is considered "employed" even if they do no work at all.
It says this clearly on the ONS site.
It's quite strange to accuse Piketty of cherry-picking and distortion when these egregious - even comically obvious - distortions pass for official economic "fact" at the national level.
Hell, raising kids and taking care of disabled/elderly people is an investment in the economy too. Those folks and their caretakers are consumers just as much as you and me.
Why does there need to be a privileged reward to invest? Everyone and their dog knows if you keep your money stuffed in your mattress it’ll lose value over time from inflation, and who doesn’t want to have a nest egg to retire on? Nobody needs an additional incentive to invest their capital beyond the bare bones basics of personal finance.
> American capitalism rewards ownership, not labor nor time devoted to a task.
It's in the name, after all. One performs labor to (ideally) incrementally increase ownership. The concept thrives in the public mind as go-pay-off-a-house but (ideally) would also stick as go-buy-some-equities too.
One performs labor to enrich the bourgeoisie. The only way anyone was able to “work hard” to increase any kind of ownership was through supportive government after WWII. It’s no coincidence that the middle class is shrinking and wealth is being accumulated in fewer and fewer hands.
Indeed, capitalism rewards those who own the means of production at the expense of the people who labor to support it. A lot has been written about this.
I'd argue that people who read 4 or 5 books on programming don't know much about anything either when they first start out.
In fact, I'd argue that a graduate knows much more than most people think. The problem is that it's usually general knowledge that doesn't apply to some specific framework that 90% of developers use. It's all abstracted away to learning X framework.
The plight of the typical grad isn't just that they have overly general knowledge for any one task, but that they have just emerged from a system that filtered their thoughts for possibly several decades into completing assignments and taking tests for a grade.
And once you get into industry you have to unlearn that because the clear objective goals and grades disappear, and you are left with an array of subtle values and more pernicuous consequences to any action. And that stuff is absolutely vital to being good at intellectual jobs - it's mostly crushed out by the system, fostering the "narrow STEMlord" mindset that is constantly surprised by things blowing up when they followed the book exactly.
> once you get into industry you have to unlearn that because the clear objective goals and grades disappear, and you are left with an array of subtle values and more pernicuous consequences to any action
Which is one reason I continue to think that a broad education, including humanities and social sciences, is valuable even for folks looking to work in STEM fields. It's in those academic disciplines that you learn to work with subtle nuances, and how to originate and defend an opinion or point of view.
Why? Here's the repo, clone it, set up the dev env, maybe connect to VPN to reach some test instances, here's the issue tracker, here's a ticket, explore it, see if it's reproducible, if yes, get to the root cause, solve it, get it reviewed, goto 10.
Naturally, this should lead to a lot of questions, but which part is not a clear step with clear goals? Plus in industry the employer has vested interest to make you efficient, because it pays you. It'll check up on you daily. (Or initially/constantly you will do pair programming, get mentoring, sprint retros, etc.)
And if you are stuck you can ask questions and there are usually domain experts right next to you.
This was a real problem at my last employer, new grads couldn’t really tell the difference between coursework and actual work. And if it wasn’t up to standard thought they could plead with “the professor” (their boss) for a better “grade”.
I was never this person and still struggled when I initially got into industry and still do.
Part of it is because most businesses are run by people that have no knowledge of the timescale of their projects and therefore try to squeeze as much work as possible in ridiculous time frames and society trains you to stop "whining" and get it done.
The lack of empathy in industry is enormous due to profit motive. And because of the ambiguous nature of software, it's always difficult to know exactly what needs to be done. And because most people want to please their bosses, the incentive to estimate low and push yourself to get a project done is very real.
> I'd argue that people who read 4 or 5 books on programming don't know much about anything either when they first start out.
I would say that's a function of a lot of complex items, including their prior educational experience, general intelligence, and just how closely they read the book. There exist many books I've "read" once and mostly forgotten, and precious few I've read a half-dozen or more times and know intimately.
If the former, I agree with you. If the latter, not so much.
> In fact, I'd argue that a graduate knows much more than most people think.
In my experience there are two kinds of graduates, those who spent years memorizing material to get a piece of paper, and those who learned how to learn and applied it to get their piece of paper.
When folks talk about shit graduates they have the former in mind, when folks extol the virtues of a university education they are thinking of the latter.
Unfortunately universities spit out both and it's very hard to distinguish on-the-fly.
HN regularly has posts where people justify cheating their way through college. I can't help but think these are the ones who do poorly at their jobs, and then the "years memorizing material to get a piece of paper" gets blamed.
Or people generally don't distinguish between good graduates and bad ones. In most discussion, the distinction boils down to "college graduates suck and don't know anything" to paraphrase.
While granted there's obviously people who don't take college seriously, many do. And unfortunately, I'm one of those people that worked very hard to get through college and didn't attend hardly any social functions. Same as high school. I would spend weekends from 8am to 6pm reading textbooks and doing assignments.
However, I often feel that doing this was somewhat of a detriment to both my ability to socialize and my ability to really solve problems organically.
I think the "learning to learn" thing is a myth propagated by people raking in tons of money. I'm sure it happens, but I personally did not meet a single person who "learned to learn" while in college beyond some very basic studying techniques that could be picked up from watching a couple of Youtube videos.
Hm, at least college exams required some serious effort. And learning that comes handy when you are faced with big challenges at work. (Eg to design, understand, debug a big complex system.) What they don't teach is team/project work.
Though if there were more emphasis on hard math/CS/programming/ITsec problem solving, that'd probably translate well to industry setting.
No one knows a lot when they first start out. However, there's a lot of value in learning new skills by doing. It's the main skill programmers need to succeed in their jobs. No one becomes a great programmer by taking a new college class for each new API.
Sure, and that's pretty much what this guy was saying. How much does theory help you properly weld? Same way learning when to use bubblesort vs. quicksort helps me figure out why my css is working in firefox but not ie11.
The metallurgy of welding is complex. When performing a bespoke weld, you have to know what type of filler metal to use (it frequently is not identical to the pieces being welded...), heat pre-treatment, heat post-treatment, and range of available current for the job. All of those factors vary with the job. While the reference texts can help you, you have to at least know enough to figure out where to look. Then you need to have enough practice to to recognize when things go wrong, and how to correct it.
Much as in the current programming industry, the problem is people coming out with an education on paper, yet not actually knowing either the theory or practice the of welding.
Knowing how to judge the complexity of an algorithm (which is what learning about different sorts helped teach me) is useful to me in developing software on a regular basis. That includes javascript sometimes.
Well, not just welding: we're considered engineering tradespeople - that's what it says on my trade certificate.
Earned over $100k last financial year, doing 50+ hour weeks, so plenty of over time, we certainly work for it.
If you're in the right workshop, or doing the right site work, we're getting paid reasonably well. If you can buy a house away from the major centres, maybe one that needs a bit of a refresh, and don't need a brand new car every few years, we can live quite comfortably.
In WA to get a license to weld you have to pass a 4G or 5G test. You can't really pass those without a penetrating weld as the lack of penetration will be very obvious when they slice and fold the cupon. I could see that people who can pass the test would not know how to weld in many positions or on many automotive type materials/parts, but they should at least know how to get a penetrating weld.
One of my first job’s after hishschool was Aluminum TIG and MIG welding. I learned to weld throughout highschool and was hired because of the reputation my school had for teaching welding.
Unfortunately, I think most of the trade skills are no longer taught at that school.
My welding career was only for a couple years, but during that time I focused on improving my TIG skillsets and was able to move into the number two postion at a high end shop that manufactured Aluminum wakeboard and fishing towers (Samson Sports).
The welding quality was superb, and every inch was looked over for visual and structual perfection. Needless to say, the pay still wasn’t that great.
I used to watch a lot of https://www.youtube.com/user/weldingtipsandtricks for fun and the impression I got from this guy was that welding school and certification tests are hard and require verification of exactly the kind of good welds you describe.
How can you go to school for welding and still suck at basic MIG techniques? Is it all theory with no practical?
I learned MIG basics in an afternoon. So far none of my welds have cracked. I'd expect much better welding from people coming out of school than what I can do.
Yes. All of them are in active use and subjected to hundreds or thousands of pounds of force.
Considering my lack of experience I suspect over time I'll find at least one weak joint. That said it's really not hard to tell if you get penetration, especially if you grind them.
I made good money doing it, but the work was hit or miss and it wasn't really the welding I was getting paid for, it was knowing how to cut up vans and modify them for severely handicapped people and I'd learned how to do that by building "custom cars" with my father who was a "bodyman" by trade and went on to become a "custom car builder".
By the time I quit customizing vans for the handicapped the State of California required you be a "certified welder" to do the work I did on the vans and cars they purchased for people who were in wheelchairs so you had to pay to go to a "welding school" to get a certification.
But none of those welders I met who did that actually knew how to weld. How to lay down a bead that penetrated the steel. They all did what those I learned from called "bird shit" welds. A cold weld that laid on top of the metal and didn't penetrate all the way through, and were thus prone to fail. And none of them started those jobs for much more than $5-$7 an hour.
That's when I decided to learn how to code. It was only a few years after that when the Internet started taking off, so I learned HTML and Perl by buying books written by the likes of Steven Brenner, "Selena Sol", Lincoln Stein and Randal Schwartz and there were no college level classes that taught it. I got invited to teach some after hour classes at SMS because they didn't have any at the time.
Now, more than 20 years later companies want to hire someone with a CS degree, and really they often don't know any more about it than those guys who took those welding classes did about laying down a bead that stuck.
But in both cases those who sold the classes lobbied their State Reps to make them mandatory and raked in the cash afterwards.