How is it that we have 8 billion people on Earth, and yet it seems like almost all businesses and services are short-staffed?

Question

How is it that we have 8 billion people on Earth, and yet it seems like almost all businesses and services are short-staffed?

In: 11

Answer 1

Because most of the societies on earth are running on a capitalistic foundation.
The philosophy of capitalism is to give the business owner an incentive to increase efficiency of their business by letting the business owner keep the profit. And to decrease the profit by allowing a free market where all businesses strive for lower price items to beat the competition.
The idea lies in the prices being as cheap as possible for the consumer as the market will regulate itself and thereby bankrupt all “bad” business-owners.
The problem with this is that the model only takes into consideration the monetary profits of any business, thereby if they can reduce quality (without the consumer noticing too much) or if they can drive down wages or skip on safety regulations or any other way that a business costs money but doesn’t inherently make back that money by itself, the owners (or managers) will be incentivised to cut those costs. That means that any business that treats their employees well (by benefits or higher wages) will lose profit and eventually declaire bankrupsy.

So how does this connect with the businesses being short staffed?

Well the businesses that do survive are usually the businesses that pay minimum wage. However when minimum wage is lower than the lowest required income to survive in that area, the plebs don’t want to work, because they can’t survive on that job. This means its more profitable to steal/look for a higher paying job (even if it will go out of business) or simply make their own ways to meet their monthy demands (e.g homelessness and social wellfare).

I tried to not include any political standpoint in this text. But personally I think capitalsm is a fundamentally flawed idea that builds on enslaving the masses. If a country wants to run efficiently, then the state should run the big corporations to make sure that the monopoly it creates isn’t taken advantage off. And if it wants to open a free market. Then that market still needs to be regulated to not have chains or multiple location branches.