Sorry for the necro-reply, just saw the question. I think it was basic supply and demand. There were jobs that people kept paying for. Municipal workers who drove trams, ran utilities, etc kept getting COLA's, sometimes daily, because people needed those services. I suppose street sweepers came under that umbrella.How did those street sweepers end up getting paid more?To stir the pot, I just read a couple of books on the runaway inflation episodes in post WWI Germany and Austria. Where some stocks performed better than government bonds, cigars were a great investment[1], and street sweepers ended up paid more than professors, etc, etc, etc. There are lots of bad things that can happen in retirement, and their probability distributions have long, if not fat, tails.
My working thesis for retirement planning was: I want a high (upper 9X pct???) probability that the worst news I get in retirement will be delivered by my doctor, not my banker or lawyer or whatever. You can't avoid eventually getting bad news from your doctor[2]. As long as I have made the other risks very small relative to that, I stop worrying. Because worrying is bad for your health
[1]The lady writing the book was married. Her husband liked his cigars, and when war loomed he expected the supply to be disrupted and laid in a huge stock. He then died, the supply was indeed disrupted, and she gradually bartered the cigars for food.
[2]Other than by dying suddenly, so that your spouse gets the bad news from the doctors or paramedics or whoever.
Doctors were another example ... if you need life or death medical care, you'll dig really deep to get it, even if it means going hungry. So demand for doctors didn't go to zero. OTOH, when the entire household income was being used to buy food, and you were still hungry, you didn't go see a doctor for a lot of things where you might have in happier times. IIRC doctor's incomes dropped by more than 50%.
The tl;dr was that you wanted an occupation that was as low on Maslow's hierarchy of needs as possible. When push comes to shove people buy food before education.
Statistics: Posted by whomever — Fri Nov 15, 2024 6:19 am — Replies 189 — Views 16342