undefined | Better HN

0 pointsfullshark1y ago0 comments

There's many incentives encouraging people to work in America. Many of them are positive ones (pride, a sense of community, ambition) and many of them are negative (inability to pay rent, health insurance, food otherwise).

A lot of terrible jobs are required in our society to be done by people from negative encouragement. The belief that all jobs can be done purely through positive encouragement I think is potentially naive. Maybe nurse was a bad example but people who work from this negative encouragement are in many ways "forced" to.

For illustration some of the worst farm labor jobs in America are done by illegal immigrants, and it's not obvious legal citizens would do those jobs at any rate that makes economic sense. The economic engine that gets us food in our grocery store runs on their desperation.

0 comments

1 comments · 1 top-level

skybrian1y ago

I broadly agree that the economy works that way, but I’m somewhat doubtful that “running on desperation” is quite the right way to describe it. It seems a bit reductive.

Consider joining the military. Most Americans would never consider enlisting. There are people who consider possibly getting shot at or killed to be worth it. Maybe some of them were desperate when they joined, but often not.

Similarly, people who decide to immigrate to the US have a variety of motivations. Is hoping for a better life desperate? It depends.

Sometimes people regret their choices in life, which means they had choices and the other choice wasn’t obviously worse, in retrospect.

More generally, there are a lot of ways that people can get into situations that feel like a trap, and a bad job could be one of them.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse