SMBC Comics Forum

Poor Peace Corps. Not all of them are quite that bad...

Well that's an easy fix: he just needs to hire one for himself!

A lump of labor fallacy? I expect better from you Weinerschmidt.

shatam wrote:A lump of labor fallacy? I expect better from you Weinerschmidt.

Lump of labor fallacy is at a macro level. This is a specific event. If they only needed one person for that job and another comes in to work for free, the original guy is losing his job.

Peace Corp volunteers don't replace workers in foreign countries, they supplement them. I taught for two years at a rural school in the Middle East. A large portion of my job was dedicated to training fellow teachers. My "salary" (i.e., basic living expenses) was paid by the U.S. government, not the local school or government, so no citizen of the host country was fired to make room for me.

Love the comic, though.

The problem is that in a capitalist system, the societal benefits of free labor are not fairly distributed. In the case at hand the employer is getting the full benefit. That resulted in part from Occasus's decision to approach the employer, rather than Stan, about volunteering his labor. Had he gone to work for Stan, Stan could have had a life of leisure while keeping his salary. Or he could have embarked on a new career risk free.

The fair result is somewhere between the two extremes, but the system has no way to fairly allocate the savings.

Parcival wrote:The problem is that in a capitalist system, the societal benefits of free labor are not fairly distributed. In the case at hand the employer is getting the full benefit. That resulted in part from Occasus's decision to approach the employer, rather than Stan, about volunteering his labor. Had he gone to work for Stan, Stan could have had a life of leisure while keeping his salary. Or he could have embarked on a new career risk free.

The fair result is somewhere between the two extremes, but the system has no way to fairly allocate the savings.

I'm no economist, but it seems this would only be a problem in a developed country with excess skilled labor that was unemployed or underpaid. Not in a poorly developed country that lacked a strong education system and a sufficient pool of skilled labor. As Parcival said, he was training other teachers. Probably because there was not enough people skilled enough to train those teachers. Once he has completed his job of training teachers and they can go on to train others, he won't be needed. I'm sure there are instance where groups like the peace corps displaces domestic workers, but it the cost is probably far less than the overall benefit.