Casino Gulag Experiment - Americans Will Work for 25 Cents an Hour

[stockholmer]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/06/22/americans-will-work-for-25-cents-an-hour.html

snip

To find out this country’s real minimum wage—the market-proven low that U.S. workers will accept for an hour’s work—The Daily Beast designed an experiment. Over several weeks, we used Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace for freelance work operated by Amazon.com, to post simple, hour-long jobs to see how much or how little we’d need to pay workers.


Specifically, we offered to hire people who would listen to a one-hour recording of me reading snippets from old articles along with an excerpt from Nixon’s “Checkers” speech. The recording was sprinkled with repeated instances of unusual key words, such as “polyunsaturated” and “knuckleduster.” The proposition to our potential workers: Download the audio file, listen to the hour long recording and count the instances of a key word we specified, and get paid.


snip



That said, we were able to find tech-savvy Germans keen to work for $3 an hour. Workers in Pakistan and the Philippines who endured my voice for $2.50 and $2.25 an hour, respectively. And residents of industrialized giants like Australia ($2), the U.K. ($2), and Canada ($1.25) who would work for an hour and not even earn enough for a cup of coffee.


At a buck an hour each, India and Romania brought up the rear. And the cheapest of all labor markets? The United States of America, where we were able to hire three workers to do our job for a shockingly low figure: 25 cents an hour.


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for all the doubters out there, just look at the huge amount of hours spent online working at survey sites, Farmville, etc for enough Zynga to but a cheese sandwich via points accrued that can redeemed at a 7-11.

Max Keiser

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3Dw-i7ylV0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly2ZEKe1NtA

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+ Most Disturbing Presentation Ever: Our Tech Nightmare ("Skinner Box") DICE 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nka-_Mhp7f0

Big Brother, Video Game Psychology & Obedient Humans living inside Skinner Boxes. This was a presentation at the recent DICE 2010 Summit.

[saras]

1. You mean NONE of the workers was smart enough to speed up the recording?

In that case, they only DESERVE twentyfive cents an hour. I can hire rocks that are that smart, and doorknobs that are smarter.

Now admittedly, twentyfive cents for fifteen minutes of work isn't that good either, but...

[Octafish]

2. Dude!

That's some scary stuff, there.

Try getting a high-schooler to cut the lawn for $25 an hour and you'll get laughed at.

Big diff between virtual wages and real world accomplishments.

It'd be like a douchenozzle working a scam on the mopes from Wall Street versus a Detroit automaker building a coach for the masses.

The first is paid to move paper, the latter to move a person.

[Shagbark Hickory]

3. Whilst that is going on, the Germans devised a plan to automate listening to your recording, then ..

outsourcing the development to India to write the code. China gets ahold of it and copies it. The Eastern Europeans turn it into malware, and before you know it, there's an over saturation of "speech listeners" in the marketplace and everyone's working for less than ever before. That seems to be how it always goes down.

[stockholmer]

4. brilliant!!!

:toast: