by MangoToupe | 2025-05-31 19:49:40+00:00
> While there is skill, pretty much anyone can learn it in short order.

This is also true of my day-to-day work. Granted I pitch myself as a generalist with over twenty years of experience, but my day-to-day work uses a vanishingly-small sliver of that. I'd estimate I could train a teenager to do a substantial portion of the work I do in just a couple of months. Would they offer the same value? No, of course not, but time and money can overcome that for most businesses.

Plus, there is clearly some kind of aptitude that is difficult to teach, and harder still to measure, and even harder still to quantify. I'm not sure I'd call that "skill", though, and I don't necessarily need to make 10x as much as you do because I have that aptitude. In an ideal world, anyway.

> Trades are highly skilled, picking groceries from a list is not.

I'm assuming you're referring to instacart workers?

Normally I'd agree with you that the skill barrier to entry here is quite low, but an astonishing number of workers apparently can't tell the difference between a russet potato and a yam. Granted, AI can at least help with that problem.

But surely this would also apply to many office jobs that require college degrees. For instance, my bestie has a degree in chemistry and works at a local bank branch. This job, inexplicably, requires a degree. It almost seems like the college degree is just a stand-in for, well, literacy. Surely LLMs stand for the automation of literacy on some base level—but you still need to man the bank branch with humans. So is literacy really the skill, or is it just existing with a body? Many if not most workers are not hired for their bodies, but for their literacy. Hell, if you think about it, the janitor probably has more job security than anyone else in the building from the advances of technology.

> The key difference is the supply of workers; the lower the bar for entry, the more supply and therefore the bid is lower.

Why not call these jobs "high supply" or something like that? It gets to the point much easier, and you have less of a chance of being mistaken for saying something semantically completely different.

I'm not saying that the term "unskilled labor", or certainly "skilled labor", is inherently unuseful, but the vast majority of times I've seen it employed I sense incoherence regarding who ought to be paid what for what work, and it rarely does boil down to just "skill". As you point out, supply and demand are much stronger explanatory forces. I'm just saying that some highly-valued skills are just as unimpressive as those supporting sub-minimum-wage work (ie the gig economy), and the allegedly-low supply of workers leaves me scratching my head.

One of my other physical jobs as a teenager (i was a lil rural hustler) was caddying for very rich and occasionally even famous people. Many of these people are hilariously helpless with basic tasks—they can't cook, they can barely button their shirts or tie their shoes, they don't know how their phone works (which was even more baffling back then when phones had about three functions total), they don't know how to talk to their children or socialize with workers (like me), they're terrible drivers, and I even ran into a few I suspect couldn't read (which was jaw-dropping to lil hyperlexic 14-year-old MangoToupe), etc. One of them had a child who could speak better Haitian-accented french and even some patois than she could english because of how much time she spent with her foreign nanny—watching her belt out a filthy swear right next to her blissfully unaware parents had me struggling not to laugh. Serene calm and being quick to laugh at jokes is the ticket to good tips.

of course you would also run into people who grew up poor or middle class before finding financial success, and the cultural and social difference was like night and day—those are the people who would continue to thrive if someone took their wealth.

So—to me, the "skill economy" narrative just kind of fell apart as I grew into an adult. I just don't get why, if it's so obvious to me that "skill" isn't the core driver of many parts of our economy, we retain this language implying that it is (even if I do find my work primarily through my own said skills).