For the middle-ish class in the US, tons of low-skill service jobs. If you could pay someone $4/hour (or whatever) a lot of people would have lawns mowed, brush cleared, laundry done, maybe meals cooked (less low skill), errands run, etc. Contrast with the level of personal service in, say, SE Asia in many cases. The bar is pretty high to hire someone for a lot of stuff you can easily do but don't really want to, until you're very high income.
ADDED: Now some of this has been mitigated by gig economy and other shared resource types of jobs that pay (theoretically) ~ minimum wage or better but are more efficient than a driver waiting around to take you someplace. Or getting meals delivered rather than a personal chef. And laundry with modern appliances is much less of a big deal than it was previously. But the basic point still applies.
Also retail businesses in SEA tend to employ more workers than would be considered necessary in the west. e.g. hiring far more shop assistants than they need. If your labour costs are a small fraction of your overall costs then you have an incentive to hire many workers to provide better service in peak times even if most of the time they are doing nothing, or just to make your business look good.
Right. If people are relatively expensive , as with US retail, you use fancy retail scheduling software and you maybe share a maintenance or a bookkeeper with other businesses so they're not sitting around twiddling their thumbs most of the time. Ditto for household helpers. If, on the other hand, relatively unskilled people are cheap relative to your salary or a businesses profits, it's easier for you just to keep them around all the time even if it's not as efficient.
As someone else noted, there may also be value in specialization. Rather than have a full-time all-around handyman, it may make more sense to just call a plumber if that handyman isn't that cheap relative to the [plumber anyway.
If anything, you seem to be saying the opposite of the Baumol effect! From Wikipedia:
> The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains derives from the requirement to compete for employees with jobs that have experienced gains and so can naturally pay higher salaries, just as classical economics predicts.
You claim that those low-efficiency jobs would still have workers if we were allowed to pay them a low enough price. Baumol effect says they'd choose to work higher-efficiency jobs until you paid them the same wage as a high-efficiency job worker.
> You claim that those low-efficiency jobs would still have workers if we were allowed to pay them a low enough price.
I think you misunderstood "If you could pay someone $4/hour..." It's not a statement about minimum wage or anything like that; GP isn't claiming that there's a potential market of $4/hr labor that would exist without regulation. Instead I interpreted the sentence as "Consumers value certain tasks at e.g. $4/hr but due to the Baumol effect nobody is willing to work for that amount."
But why can you not afford to live on $4/hr? Or, why is everything so much more expensive than it used to be? These questions may have answers or they may have broken assumptions, but you did not even attempt to address the point at issue.
Data really doesn’t back that up. Adjusted for inflation it’s cheaper to get lawn care done today than 40 years ago. Minimum wage was actually higher back then and automation was worse. Landscaping is extremely common with industry revenue hitting $51,908,304,000 in 2016 or an average of ~400$ per household per year across the US.
In the case of lawn care specifically, automation that requires some capital beyond what may be worth it for an individual probably helps. I have a lawn service and a small crew shows up every two weeks with various gear and they're out in 20-30 minutes.
That said, I'm not sure how common getting a lawn service is among middle to lower-middle class households is.
And I'm pretty sure most middle class-ish households don't outsource all yard/garden work generally.
In my part of the US, even in an upper middle class suburb, most of the people in my neighborhood do their own mowing and edging. I hate mowing so I’ve actually priced out lawn services and I just can’t justify it. About $40 per service (for a fairly small yard) at 4-5 times a month adds up.
I think in the US, there's often a bit of an attitude too about people doing things for you that you're perfectly capable of doing yourself. In this case, I justify it on the grounds that I usually travel a lot and, especially in the spring, the lawn does need to get cut regularly. But I just get it done every two weeks. That's on the long side in the spring but it works for me.
More of a luxury for me is having a housekeeper once a month although it's nice to have someone give the house a good cleaning now and then. It's totally unnecessary with me not traveling at the moment but I wouldn't feel right about canceling them.
Gardening is something of an exception specifically--although even there, there are landscaping projects that aren't necessarily "gardening." But, while some people do just like an excuse to get of the house and do some outside work, generally people are happy to have their lawns cut, leaved raked, brush cut, trees trimmed, etc.
Why would they? The 4$ wage wouldn’t even scratch the surface of college costs these days. The cost/wage ration is unreal now. Gone are days where a summer paper route paid for the semester. The more rational thing to do would be to spend the time studying, or enjoy your free time before you lose it for a decade.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
How would someone paid $4/hour be expected to sustain themselves though? Or is the expectation that they would a higher paid job and do that on the side? But then why do they need the $4 job?
To be clear, I'm not advocating for $4/hr jobs. The parent asked what jobs don't exist because there generally aren't $4/hr jobs for valid reasons.
[And yes, low income jobs may make sense for kids doing babysitting, etc.]
By and large you need a pretty large disparity between middle income jobs and unskilled but reliable labor for a lot of the jobs to exist except for truly wealthy individuals.
The point is $4/hour isn’t sustainable in part due to more-productive people bidding up the cost of living and in part due to almost everyone having better options for employment (or unemployment).
> How would someone paid $4/hour be expected to sustain themselves though?
By decreased living standards and working more hours. Take a look at farm labor for an example: the work is largely done by foreign labor where their opportunities in their domestic market is even worse.
Lots of people can do useful work without being sole breadwinners, and can use money even in small amounts.
Homemakers doing part time work, kids or young people making money (and getting experience) after school, retirees, disabled people on benefits (who may be able to work in limited capacity), travelers/itinerants, or people taking extra quick work on the side like you said.
ADDED: Now some of this has been mitigated by gig economy and other shared resource types of jobs that pay (theoretically) ~ minimum wage or better but are more efficient than a driver waiting around to take you someplace. Or getting meals delivered rather than a personal chef. And laundry with modern appliances is much less of a big deal than it was previously. But the basic point still applies.