Generally true, but not always! There are often very real bottlenecks on education too. We need a ton more electricians but it's nearly impossible to get into schools. Or you need union apprenticeships and their are not enough slots.
Pay is part of it, but for most skilled professions there's big bottlenecks on the training for the skills.
Or look at police officers in places like San Francisco. The pay is actually fantastic but the process of getting hired is hellish and takes a year or something ridiculous.
Or doctors, there's a massive shortage because there aren't enough residency spots, something controlled by the AMA. Pay is amazing (hours suck) and there are people clamoring to do it, but the bottleneck is structural, not because of pay.
I'd argue that the "structural" bottleneck is actually just the same "pay" bottleneck.
This was the whole issue with allowing guilds in the first place... If you only allow a guild to do a job (legally) and the guild also controls how many members they train and accept... The end result is a labor shortage.
Because it's better for the existing members of the guild.
If they train a large number of new members... they spend time and money on training, and they've increased their competition during bidding which drives down rates.
So instead you train the bare minimum for replacements. This keeps your members' rates high and competition low.
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Any time the "pay is great" but the "process to get it sucks!"... you're seeing this in action. It's not that the process really needs to suck, it's that the process roadblocks are there to maintain high pay for the existing trained members.
If there's one thing monopolies don't like... it's competition. And legally enforced certifications are wonderful monopoly creators if you don't manage them carefully.
That's one of the reasons US-trained doctors are in such short supply. The government controls the number of slots in medical schools, and from what I can tell the government does pretty much whatever the AMA wants.
Communists don't like competition, capitalists don't like competition either, what does that leave us with?
Where are the free market advocates that aren't just phonies?
I'd argue that without competition, it isn't capitalism, and before someone "no true Scotsman"'s me, Adam Smith wrote about the dangers of monopolies in The Weath of Nations. Where Scotsman isn't a well defined term, and neither is capitalism, coloquially anyway, maybe, but a free market would have rival trade unions with different certification processes and employers would decide which certification was preferable.
"Neoliberalism" became a dirty word for lots of reasons (mainly because it caused a ton of people in developed nations to lose their jobs, as manufacturing capacity shifted to developing nations and developed nations leaned into the information economy), but there was a time when the word wasn't tainted and the pro-market Democrats of the Clinton era absolutely self-identified as Neoliberals.
They liked competition and markets, delivered strong economic growth, and brought the deficit down, but they fucked up by not funneling some of those efficiency gains into education and training, and toward building a robust social safety net to help the economically displaced.
pro-communists want a system without competition. Pro-capitalists do want competition or at least no restrictions. People who are practicing capitalists would love to not have competition.
Think of a prize race. The people organizing the race and the audience want a highly competitive race. But the racers, if they are in it for the prize, would love to have little to no competition.
Artificial restrictions on who can do a thing is not good and it is violence behind, whether it is government or not.
Anarcho-capitalists are the true expression of the ideology of free markets.
I prefer 90% free 10% preventing monopolies, myself.
Its not that there is not enough education, its that there is too many regulatory barriers preventing licensing. It should be more like the DMV where anyone can take a test and get licensed if they pass. Forced experience and education requirements are touted as essential but are truly nothing more than regulatory moat building.
Maybe a test should be sufficient, but that test should be comprehensive, i.e., passing it should mean you had to do the education (formally or informally).
(Would you want someone performing surgery on you who "passed a test" but didn't have any formal education or training experience?)
I don't know about "not ... not enough education". Have a look at https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/04/us/politics/army-recruiti...
Would you consider the lack of offering apprenticeships to get your trade license or on the job training as more structural or financial?
If there is a shortage of something, I would expect these trade companies to backfill with apprentices who will then grow into their roles.
If there's too high a risk that someone won't be worth the investment, then that seems entirely financial to me.
I'm using the term "structural" here without any clear definition, to be honest. By it I mean that it's about the structure of society, the relationships that are in place, the difficulty of setting up a new school, the resistance of the AMA to open up more residency spots, etc. Points in the process where there's high friction for changing the system to a better "structure", whether or not the change requires financial incentives.
But I don't know if that meaning is shared by anyone else in the world! Thanks for asking for clarification, I'm interested in how you'd communicate that idea.
Police officers in SF make $103k per year.
Making less than $105k per year in SF is considered low income.
The pay is quite a bit higher especially when you count overtime. https://careers.sf.gov/classifications/?classCode=Q002
And they get a kickass pension which is worth a lot
> Or look at police officers in places like San Francisco. The pay is actually fantastic but the process of getting hired is hellish and takes a year or something ridiculous.
As it should be. I’m tired of dumb roughnecks attending a 6-week course and then getting the ability to legally beat people up. It should be difficult to become a police officer, we should hold them to a high standard, especially if we’re gonna pay them so much.
While I agree that police should be held to a high standard and trained well, is this the actual case in SF? Or is it bureaucratic hoops leading to long wait times and/or duplication of effort?
Is their training rigorous or is it just difficult to get hired?
> We need a ton more electricians but it's nearly impossible to get into schools. Or you need union apprenticeships and their are not enough slots.
This got solved in tech 20 years ago. You don't look at credentials and instead design a very arduous interviewing process that selects for both high IQ and people who are willing to study/work at it.
Then you provide lots of training. 20 years ago at Google (or Apple etc) there were tons of well educated non CS hires who were given good training and became exceptional software engineers.
Google spends a shitton on their employees. A large majority of that is on training. And of that, a large amount of that is because what you know about computers from the outside world isn't useful at Google. At the lowest level, Google's computers are still the same as everyone else's, but because of all the layers of automation that have been built up around them, you need to learn all the Google systems on how you interact with them, especially at Google scale. Some of that training is applicable elsewhere, but the trope in our industry is (and I'm as guilty of this as the next Xoogler, try as I might to not do this) "well at Google we did..." and for it to not be useful in the current job's context because the current job isn't Google and doesn't have that kind of resources or culture.
Their "solution" rides on an unfathomably large tsunami of money. Which is great for them (and by extension, my bank account while I was there), but how do we accomplish that when there isn't one?
>but how do we accomplish that when there isn't one?
I worked for a small (~300 engineers) well run org in Verizon before I went to Google, and I was surprised at how well their training was, even with smaller budgets, and a tier below compensation wise and interviewing rigor.
This org supported being deliberate about hires, getting people who were experts and liked coaching/training along with those who were newbies with aptitude and desire. There was good documentation, good shared culture, and lots of safeguards like linting, excessive testing, example projects, if not quite the full fledged codelabs google has.
But part of it, both for Verizon and Google, was signaling that "good people work here and are well rewarded" (comparatively).
Hire, then train them for a long period of time? That is an apprenticeship. It's what they do in the trades already. There aren't enough slots (union or not).
e.g. http://www.calapprenticeship.org/programs/electrician_appren...
You need a diploma, a smattering of algebra, a driver's license, and the physical ability to do the work. Everything else you will be taught on the job, while being paid.
You think a year is a lot? In my country it takes a bachelor of 3 years to become a police officer.
And rightfully so, the cops here are fantastic.
We do have lower level “enforcement officers” though, but they also take 2.4 to 3 years. Just not a bachelors
If these jobs you describe had higher pay rates, then all those bottlenecks you describe will magically go away.
I reckon the San Francisco PD salaries are not really all that "fantastic".
Gatekeepers and rent-seekers are holding everyone else back.
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