“bargaining power of workers vs. employers: diminishing marginal utility. Businesses and employers are richer than their employees the vast majority of the time. It seems like employers can afford to not have a worker more than a worker can afford to not have a job because employers have a larger financial safety net. Given that, how do employers not have more bargaining power over their employees?”
Doesn’t the workers' bargaining power depend more on their alternative opportunities with other employers? Or are you saying that employers can collude explicitly or find a Schelling point that prevents them from competing for workers?
Who is richer seems irrelevant. I could be very rich, but have no bargaining power at all, or very poor but have an advantageous position, depending on the specific transaction. E.g., Bill Gates doesn’t have an advantage over other pork producers, unless his ability to wait counts as a significant advantage over producers with urgent need for cash flow. His ability to borrow could be an advantage, but that doesn’t seem to apply in the labor market.
What is bargaining power? It is the ability to walk away from a negotiation. The amount of money in the bank is at best only loosely related. I might have billions in the bank, but still face an urgent crisis that means I must negotiate or take a loss. Just because I can survive a loss doesn’t mean I like taking losses. And if I am on the verge of bankruptcy, I could still have bargaining power in a specific circumstance, if I have plenty of reasonably attractive alternatives.
Government policy seems related to the plausible sources of any bargaining power imbalance. E.g., one of the most significant costs of switching employers is the need to switch health plans. So workers that would find it hard to change insurers are incentivized not to change employers.
"Doesn’t the workers' bargaining power depend more on their alternative opportunities with other employers?"
On one level, I think this is somewhat true. BUT -- in practice, I do think employers have certain advantages that show up in the negotiations.
1. The way most requests for a raise go is the employer telling you "No." If you're currently underpaid, most of the time the only way you can really correct that is by switching companies. For a lot of people, that's not really a good option. For example, my wife's core skills are only relevant to one organization in our town. If she wanted to work for anyone else, she would probably take a pay cut because her experience wouldn't be as relevant. She can't realistically move towns because we're married with kids and I'm the primary breadwinner. Even if there were more organizations, what if no one were hiring for her specific role?
I think most people who don't live in big cities, and don't have freedom to move cities, face constraints like this in the real world.
2. Suppose none of that's an issue -- you have a new job offer in hand from your employer's competitor, located conveniently about the same distance from your house. An offer which, by the way, you had to work hard to get; probably interviewed at several places, which meant creating excuses to get away from work a number of times, running the risk that your employer found out and just decided to fire you. This other job seems pretty good, and there's a 10% or 20% pay bump, which is what you think you're worth.
But is it worth it? You're not sure how you'll like working at this other company. And maybe you'll be screwed with a lower end-of-year bonus than what they suggested was the typical range, or something like that. Maybe it turns out their health insurance isn't as good as your current one, due to some detail in the fine print. Maybe the job is less secure and that company fires lots of people for minor reasons, and you at least know your current company doesn't do that. Or it's just that there's always a certain insecurity associated with starting a new job and getting thrust into the new firm's corporate politics (this happened to my own father, out-politicked and swiftly fired from a new job that seemed good on paper).
There are two asymmetries here: one in information, and one in downside risk. Your employer knows within a pretty narrow range what the downside is if they have to replace you. And unless you're a truly critical employee, it's not that big a deal. Even if you're 4x as valuable as they thought you were, probably most of the stress falls on your peer colleagues, maybe some on your boss, but your boss's boss won't ever even notice.
But for an individual, maybe the new job is terrible, and you get fired or pushed out, and now you're unemployed, which is a major increase in stress and could cascade down to other major life consequences.
So...looking at all that, if you're at all risk-averse (and most people are, especially people who already hold down ordinary jobs) you probably don't switch jobs for a 10-20% increase in pay. You probably need more like a 30-50% increase. Which gives employers a lot of wiggle room to underpay people.
>If you're currently underpaid, most of the time the only way you can really correct that is by switching companies. For a lot of people, that's not really a good option
Then by definition, you aren't being underpaid. The fact that in some other context, your labor would earn greater compensation, doesn't mean that its worth is always the same. Just as a good could have different values in different contexts. E.g. in a shortage, the value of goods increases.
> This other job seems pretty good, and there's a 10% or 20% pay bump, which is what you think you're worth.
But is it worth it? You're not sure how you'll like working at this other company. And maybe you'll be screwed with a lower end-of-year bonus than what they suggested was the typical range, or something like that. Maybe...
It sounds like besides for the salary, employers offer employees something of very great value - such great value, that employees attach a high premium to it - the comfort of certainty.
The employer has the "upper hand," since the employee has such a good deal, they can't walk away. If the workplace were a toxic work environment, for example, the employee would risk less by going to work elsewhere.
Is an employer, then, exploiting employees by being a reliably comfortable place to work, such that they run a risk by moving elsewhere?
“If you're currently underpaid, most of the time the only way you can really correct that is by switching companies. For a lot of people, that's not really a good option.”
I agree. But that is the mechanism I discussed, externally determined bargaining power, not bargaining power determined by relative wealth.
“). There are two asymmetries here: one in information, and one in downside risk. Your employer knows within a pretty narrow range what the downside is if they have to replace you. And unless you're a truly critical employee, it's not that big a deal. “
I think that might over state it. Turnover is a significant cost for employers, they don’t like it. But even if you are right, that still does not depend on the mechanism described in the post, the relative wealth of the negotiators. Factors in the local economy generally certainly have an effect here, as well as government policies that tend to make jobs stickier. That is just a totally different mechanism than what was discussed in the post. I do not hold that there is no asymmetry, just that the wrong cause was stated.
Also partly fair. But I think the asymmetry I'm describing hits employees of large businesses more so than small ones.
A business absolutely wants to manage turnover. The negotiation here is between two surpluses:
1. Employer's Surplus, i.e. the surplus value the business generates from you, a known quantity, staying instead of leaving. (Your Value + Costs of Turnover - Expected Value of Alternative Employee).
2. Worker's Surplus, i.e., the surplus value the worker receives from not having to find another job (Value of Current Job + Personal Cost of Switching Jobs - Value of Alternative Job).
As long as both of these numbers are positive, the worker will stay at his current job. If Employer's Surplus is negative, he is fired; if Worker's Surplus is negative, he quits and takes another job.
Now, there is a range of acceptable wage agreements (in MBA school we call this the ZOPA -- Zone of Possible Agreements) in which both these numbers are positive; the size of the ZOPA, (which could be measured in dollars), is equal to the sum of the two surpluses. The negotiation is about determining who captures more of that ZOPA.
I'll argue that, while local conditions are very important, large enterprises are generally able to capture more of this value because they can treat turnover as a statistic, and institute more or less non-negotiable policies to manage it against compensation expense.
Small businesses can't really do this, because each individual employee is much more consequential, especially your best employees, and you have more downside risk: one key departure could potentially destroy your business (especially if it represents a key employee starting his own company or partnering with your key competitor). The proprietor is forced to be open to negotiation in this circumstance and in that negotiation is more likely to be willing to part with a larger portion of the surplus this employee is generating. Maybe he makes him a partner.
One problem with this idea is that we might expect it to imply that employees of large enterprises are paid noticeably less than those at small businesses, but I don't think this is the case. However, I would explain that in this way: large enterprises are generally much more profitable on a per-employee basis than small businesses. Which means that all three variables that go into what I'm calling Employer's Surplus are generally going to be higher for them in absolute dollar terms, and the net number usually works out to being higher as well.
In other words, it's easier to negotiate with a small business to take more of your surplus value from your employer, but there's just less of that surplus to go around.
The main way for labor to take more surplus from large enterprises is unionization. The union wage premium in the US is estimated to be around 10-20%. Which is also around the threshold where I'm estimating "stickiness" causes most people to not seriously consider other job offers.
“ while local conditions are very important, large enterprises are generally able to capture more of this value because they can treat turnover as a statistic, and institute more or less non-negotiable policies to manage it against compensation expense. ”
This seems a bit hand-wavey, but is at least an interesting and plausible hypothesis. It seems much better than the simplistic hypothesis presented in the post, that we can just use wealth as a proxy for bargaining power.
3. Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, (2010) found that emotional well-being rises with income up to an annual income of about $75,000 in the United States, after which additional income does not lead to greater happiness.
Daniel Kahneman, Matthew Killingsworth and Barbara Mellers, (2023) was an adversarial collaboration which overturned their prior result. Happiness only stops increasing with log income at 75-90k for the bottom 20% of the population in terms of happiness, the 80% of people have a linear relationship between happiness and log(income).
Thanks, I wanted to comment on that but couldnt find the reference.
IIRC, the difference between the two results depends on the questions. It turns out happiness and unhappiness are not inversely correlated, and if you test for unhappiness, it stop going down at a certain point. But happiness continues to increase.
Edit: Also, while it wasn't statistically significant, if you eyeball the graphs, there is a slight upward bend for happy people, so that more income may increase happiness at a slightly above linear rate.
Where money starts to have diminishing returns probably depends a lot on context. What does it take to be happy in NYC? If NYC is the only place you can get a good job, it's irrelevant that you can be happy on 75k in Kansas.
Moreover, I bet a lot of the question varies with "does it take one spouse or two to make that income" or "how secure is that income" or "how many kids do you have" or "did you inherent anything or have elderly parents to support."
I knew a guy that was pretty happy on a $50k a year job with the state government, but because his parents had bought him a $500k house for cash, he had no mortgage, and he had no kids.
Isn't the quickly diminishing marginal happiness of income premised upon selfish, consumerist choices, with prosocial, altruistic choices continuing to provide substantial happiness increase? People seeking happiness should still want more money in order to support what they personally evaluate to be the best altruistic causes.
Sort of a random aside, but this got me thinking: Most of the literature out there on the medical industry is forgettable. There seems to be no organization in the books that are written on the topic at least with respect to what degree and what forms of care are effected by what factors (ie they might say that limiting the number of doctors has a cost associated but is this born more in hospitals and to what degree ect?). Often those who write on the topic spend a curious amount of effort citing anecdotal sources, and the often ignore important aspects of our broken healthcare industry. They focus on how insurance is broken for instance, but fail to explain in any meaningful way why hospitals overcharge for surgeries, which account for around a third of all medical care costs (I say they overcharged because vet medicine is often cheaper for the same procedures and posses added complexity of multiple species). Something that clearly health savings accounts are not going to protect families from, but insurance expenditures would still be unnecessarily high on even if we make insurance, insurance again. Anyways I feel like either a Caplan reader in the spirit of the post or even better a Caplan book that addresses the issues from start to finish in a succinct numerical manner would be awesome (obviously adding his gratis is not great flair in sections on socialized medicine).
>Further, do private charities not face the same problems where their aid is used by people afraid of losing it
An advantage of private charities, is that they are generally not means-tested. Since recipients don't cross a threshold at which point they no longer qualify for aid, they are not disincentivized from earning additional income - although the aid may make them *less* incentivized to earn additional income.
Additionally, charity often takes the form of food or other sorts of non-fungible aid that cannot replace an income like money.
Donating to extremely poor people outside the USA mostly obviates this issue, though, as they are much further from being to comfortably live off the support.
Notable with private charity, though, is that no one is being coerced into it. If someone thinks that a given charity is bad, or private charities in general, he is free to not donate to them. The fact that private charities could have potential pitfalls, therefore, does not necessitate a taxation based welfare system.
> 4. Building on that, I have an objection to your arguments against Scott Alexander on the bargaining power of workers vs. employers: diminishing marginal utility. Businesses and employers are richer than their employees the vast majority of the time. It seems like employers can afford to not have a worker more than a worker can afford to not have a job because employers have a larger financial safety net. Given that, how do employers not have more bargaining power over their employees?
This is a nice one. There are two stories here: things tend to balance, often in surprising ways (equilibrium) vs. power dynamics (disequilibrium). I lean more towards equilibrium stories, where the tighter the fist is squeezed, the more the clay extrudes between the fingers.
Employees face existential risk: can I put food on the table for my family? Employers face painful restructuring: can I subordinate my equity holders to my debt holders? Surely, you get my thrust.
Nonetheless, angles exist in both directions. Employees can exit the industry successfully while employers cannot. The relentless treadmill continues whether the employer likes it or not.
2. and 5. 2. "Helping the poor" should not "only" be effective - i.e. actually help the poor (compared to less state-help), it should also be reasonably efficient: If a poor guy gets a 300$ room and 300$ food, that should not take 3.000$ of taxes others paid. My teen-daughter got into some trouble (after divorce, and mom did not let her have those tattoos) - she ended up with a 2 room apt and enough pocket money provided by our city-admin. Which costed the admin around 3500€ a month. Could have put her on a constant world-cruise with that (ALDI offered one: 6 months at 19k - now it's 30k).
5. I consider a list of 30 books to get the "basics" of anything a bit: off-turning. Put first a "honey-trap" list of max. 3. I would suggest just one: "Capitalism and Freedom". - (If it's just posts this changes)
I also like the reading chart idea!
“bargaining power of workers vs. employers: diminishing marginal utility. Businesses and employers are richer than their employees the vast majority of the time. It seems like employers can afford to not have a worker more than a worker can afford to not have a job because employers have a larger financial safety net. Given that, how do employers not have more bargaining power over their employees?”
Doesn’t the workers' bargaining power depend more on their alternative opportunities with other employers? Or are you saying that employers can collude explicitly or find a Schelling point that prevents them from competing for workers?
Who is richer seems irrelevant. I could be very rich, but have no bargaining power at all, or very poor but have an advantageous position, depending on the specific transaction. E.g., Bill Gates doesn’t have an advantage over other pork producers, unless his ability to wait counts as a significant advantage over producers with urgent need for cash flow. His ability to borrow could be an advantage, but that doesn’t seem to apply in the labor market.
What is bargaining power? It is the ability to walk away from a negotiation. The amount of money in the bank is at best only loosely related. I might have billions in the bank, but still face an urgent crisis that means I must negotiate or take a loss. Just because I can survive a loss doesn’t mean I like taking losses. And if I am on the verge of bankruptcy, I could still have bargaining power in a specific circumstance, if I have plenty of reasonably attractive alternatives.
Government policy seems related to the plausible sources of any bargaining power imbalance. E.g., one of the most significant costs of switching employers is the need to switch health plans. So workers that would find it hard to change insurers are incentivized not to change employers.
"Doesn’t the workers' bargaining power depend more on their alternative opportunities with other employers?"
On one level, I think this is somewhat true. BUT -- in practice, I do think employers have certain advantages that show up in the negotiations.
1. The way most requests for a raise go is the employer telling you "No." If you're currently underpaid, most of the time the only way you can really correct that is by switching companies. For a lot of people, that's not really a good option. For example, my wife's core skills are only relevant to one organization in our town. If she wanted to work for anyone else, she would probably take a pay cut because her experience wouldn't be as relevant. She can't realistically move towns because we're married with kids and I'm the primary breadwinner. Even if there were more organizations, what if no one were hiring for her specific role?
I think most people who don't live in big cities, and don't have freedom to move cities, face constraints like this in the real world.
2. Suppose none of that's an issue -- you have a new job offer in hand from your employer's competitor, located conveniently about the same distance from your house. An offer which, by the way, you had to work hard to get; probably interviewed at several places, which meant creating excuses to get away from work a number of times, running the risk that your employer found out and just decided to fire you. This other job seems pretty good, and there's a 10% or 20% pay bump, which is what you think you're worth.
But is it worth it? You're not sure how you'll like working at this other company. And maybe you'll be screwed with a lower end-of-year bonus than what they suggested was the typical range, or something like that. Maybe it turns out their health insurance isn't as good as your current one, due to some detail in the fine print. Maybe the job is less secure and that company fires lots of people for minor reasons, and you at least know your current company doesn't do that. Or it's just that there's always a certain insecurity associated with starting a new job and getting thrust into the new firm's corporate politics (this happened to my own father, out-politicked and swiftly fired from a new job that seemed good on paper).
There are two asymmetries here: one in information, and one in downside risk. Your employer knows within a pretty narrow range what the downside is if they have to replace you. And unless you're a truly critical employee, it's not that big a deal. Even if you're 4x as valuable as they thought you were, probably most of the stress falls on your peer colleagues, maybe some on your boss, but your boss's boss won't ever even notice.
But for an individual, maybe the new job is terrible, and you get fired or pushed out, and now you're unemployed, which is a major increase in stress and could cascade down to other major life consequences.
So...looking at all that, if you're at all risk-averse (and most people are, especially people who already hold down ordinary jobs) you probably don't switch jobs for a 10-20% increase in pay. You probably need more like a 30-50% increase. Which gives employers a lot of wiggle room to underpay people.
>If you're currently underpaid, most of the time the only way you can really correct that is by switching companies. For a lot of people, that's not really a good option
Then by definition, you aren't being underpaid. The fact that in some other context, your labor would earn greater compensation, doesn't mean that its worth is always the same. Just as a good could have different values in different contexts. E.g. in a shortage, the value of goods increases.
> This other job seems pretty good, and there's a 10% or 20% pay bump, which is what you think you're worth.
But is it worth it? You're not sure how you'll like working at this other company. And maybe you'll be screwed with a lower end-of-year bonus than what they suggested was the typical range, or something like that. Maybe...
It sounds like besides for the salary, employers offer employees something of very great value - such great value, that employees attach a high premium to it - the comfort of certainty.
The employer has the "upper hand," since the employee has such a good deal, they can't walk away. If the workplace were a toxic work environment, for example, the employee would risk less by going to work elsewhere.
Is an employer, then, exploiting employees by being a reliably comfortable place to work, such that they run a risk by moving elsewhere?
Take a look at my second response to DavesNotHere in which I try to frame this more systematically and address some of what you're saying.
“If you're currently underpaid, most of the time the only way you can really correct that is by switching companies. For a lot of people, that's not really a good option.”
I agree. But that is the mechanism I discussed, externally determined bargaining power, not bargaining power determined by relative wealth.
“). There are two asymmetries here: one in information, and one in downside risk. Your employer knows within a pretty narrow range what the downside is if they have to replace you. And unless you're a truly critical employee, it's not that big a deal. “
I think that might over state it. Turnover is a significant cost for employers, they don’t like it. But even if you are right, that still does not depend on the mechanism described in the post, the relative wealth of the negotiators. Factors in the local economy generally certainly have an effect here, as well as government policies that tend to make jobs stickier. That is just a totally different mechanism than what was discussed in the post. I do not hold that there is no asymmetry, just that the wrong cause was stated.
On my point #1, I suppose that's fair.
On point #2:
Also partly fair. But I think the asymmetry I'm describing hits employees of large businesses more so than small ones.
A business absolutely wants to manage turnover. The negotiation here is between two surpluses:
1. Employer's Surplus, i.e. the surplus value the business generates from you, a known quantity, staying instead of leaving. (Your Value + Costs of Turnover - Expected Value of Alternative Employee).
2. Worker's Surplus, i.e., the surplus value the worker receives from not having to find another job (Value of Current Job + Personal Cost of Switching Jobs - Value of Alternative Job).
As long as both of these numbers are positive, the worker will stay at his current job. If Employer's Surplus is negative, he is fired; if Worker's Surplus is negative, he quits and takes another job.
Now, there is a range of acceptable wage agreements (in MBA school we call this the ZOPA -- Zone of Possible Agreements) in which both these numbers are positive; the size of the ZOPA, (which could be measured in dollars), is equal to the sum of the two surpluses. The negotiation is about determining who captures more of that ZOPA.
I'll argue that, while local conditions are very important, large enterprises are generally able to capture more of this value because they can treat turnover as a statistic, and institute more or less non-negotiable policies to manage it against compensation expense.
Small businesses can't really do this, because each individual employee is much more consequential, especially your best employees, and you have more downside risk: one key departure could potentially destroy your business (especially if it represents a key employee starting his own company or partnering with your key competitor). The proprietor is forced to be open to negotiation in this circumstance and in that negotiation is more likely to be willing to part with a larger portion of the surplus this employee is generating. Maybe he makes him a partner.
One problem with this idea is that we might expect it to imply that employees of large enterprises are paid noticeably less than those at small businesses, but I don't think this is the case. However, I would explain that in this way: large enterprises are generally much more profitable on a per-employee basis than small businesses. Which means that all three variables that go into what I'm calling Employer's Surplus are generally going to be higher for them in absolute dollar terms, and the net number usually works out to being higher as well.
In other words, it's easier to negotiate with a small business to take more of your surplus value from your employer, but there's just less of that surplus to go around.
The main way for labor to take more surplus from large enterprises is unionization. The union wage premium in the US is estimated to be around 10-20%. Which is also around the threshold where I'm estimating "stickiness" causes most people to not seriously consider other job offers.
“ while local conditions are very important, large enterprises are generally able to capture more of this value because they can treat turnover as a statistic, and institute more or less non-negotiable policies to manage it against compensation expense. ”
This seems a bit hand-wavey, but is at least an interesting and plausible hypothesis. It seems much better than the simplistic hypothesis presented in the post, that we can just use wealth as a proxy for bargaining power.
The linked tweet doesn't exist.
3. Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, (2010) found that emotional well-being rises with income up to an annual income of about $75,000 in the United States, after which additional income does not lead to greater happiness.
Daniel Kahneman, Matthew Killingsworth and Barbara Mellers, (2023) was an adversarial collaboration which overturned their prior result. Happiness only stops increasing with log income at 75-90k for the bottom 20% of the population in terms of happiness, the 80% of people have a linear relationship between happiness and log(income).
Thanks, I wanted to comment on that but couldnt find the reference.
IIRC, the difference between the two results depends on the questions. It turns out happiness and unhappiness are not inversely correlated, and if you test for unhappiness, it stop going down at a certain point. But happiness continues to increase.
Edit: Also, while it wasn't statistically significant, if you eyeball the graphs, there is a slight upward bend for happy people, so that more income may increase happiness at a slightly above linear rate.
Where money starts to have diminishing returns probably depends a lot on context. What does it take to be happy in NYC? If NYC is the only place you can get a good job, it's irrelevant that you can be happy on 75k in Kansas.
Moreover, I bet a lot of the question varies with "does it take one spouse or two to make that income" or "how secure is that income" or "how many kids do you have" or "did you inherent anything or have elderly parents to support."
I knew a guy that was pretty happy on a $50k a year job with the state government, but because his parents had bought him a $500k house for cash, he had no mortgage, and he had no kids.
Sure, it seems possible that rather than log(income), happiness scales with log(income/cost of living)
Or possibly log(wealth) or log(wealth/cost of living).
Either would have a strong overlap with income, but would probably be better.
Just include return on capital in income
> welfare helps the poor
Like breaking somebody's legs and then giving him a wheelchair.
Isn't the quickly diminishing marginal happiness of income premised upon selfish, consumerist choices, with prosocial, altruistic choices continuing to provide substantial happiness increase? People seeking happiness should still want more money in order to support what they personally evaluate to be the best altruistic causes.
Sort of a random aside, but this got me thinking: Most of the literature out there on the medical industry is forgettable. There seems to be no organization in the books that are written on the topic at least with respect to what degree and what forms of care are effected by what factors (ie they might say that limiting the number of doctors has a cost associated but is this born more in hospitals and to what degree ect?). Often those who write on the topic spend a curious amount of effort citing anecdotal sources, and the often ignore important aspects of our broken healthcare industry. They focus on how insurance is broken for instance, but fail to explain in any meaningful way why hospitals overcharge for surgeries, which account for around a third of all medical care costs (I say they overcharged because vet medicine is often cheaper for the same procedures and posses added complexity of multiple species). Something that clearly health savings accounts are not going to protect families from, but insurance expenditures would still be unnecessarily high on even if we make insurance, insurance again. Anyways I feel like either a Caplan reader in the spirit of the post or even better a Caplan book that addresses the issues from start to finish in a succinct numerical manner would be awesome (obviously adding his gratis is not great flair in sections on socialized medicine).
>Further, do private charities not face the same problems where their aid is used by people afraid of losing it
An advantage of private charities, is that they are generally not means-tested. Since recipients don't cross a threshold at which point they no longer qualify for aid, they are not disincentivized from earning additional income - although the aid may make them *less* incentivized to earn additional income.
Additionally, charity often takes the form of food or other sorts of non-fungible aid that cannot replace an income like money.
Donating to extremely poor people outside the USA mostly obviates this issue, though, as they are much further from being to comfortably live off the support.
Notable with private charity, though, is that no one is being coerced into it. If someone thinks that a given charity is bad, or private charities in general, he is free to not donate to them. The fact that private charities could have potential pitfalls, therefore, does not necessitate a taxation based welfare system.
> 4. Building on that, I have an objection to your arguments against Scott Alexander on the bargaining power of workers vs. employers: diminishing marginal utility. Businesses and employers are richer than their employees the vast majority of the time. It seems like employers can afford to not have a worker more than a worker can afford to not have a job because employers have a larger financial safety net. Given that, how do employers not have more bargaining power over their employees?
This is a nice one. There are two stories here: things tend to balance, often in surprising ways (equilibrium) vs. power dynamics (disequilibrium). I lean more towards equilibrium stories, where the tighter the fist is squeezed, the more the clay extrudes between the fingers.
Employees face existential risk: can I put food on the table for my family? Employers face painful restructuring: can I subordinate my equity holders to my debt holders? Surely, you get my thrust.
Nonetheless, angles exist in both directions. Employees can exit the industry successfully while employers cannot. The relentless treadmill continues whether the employer likes it or not.
2. and 5. 2. "Helping the poor" should not "only" be effective - i.e. actually help the poor (compared to less state-help), it should also be reasonably efficient: If a poor guy gets a 300$ room and 300$ food, that should not take 3.000$ of taxes others paid. My teen-daughter got into some trouble (after divorce, and mom did not let her have those tattoos) - she ended up with a 2 room apt and enough pocket money provided by our city-admin. Which costed the admin around 3500€ a month. Could have put her on a constant world-cruise with that (ALDI offered one: 6 months at 19k - now it's 30k).
5. I consider a list of 30 books to get the "basics" of anything a bit: off-turning. Put first a "honey-trap" list of max. 3. I would suggest just one: "Capitalism and Freedom". - (If it's just posts this changes)