A minor meta comment; Good titles really do matter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=103834
Unintended consequences: What do a deaf woman and an endangered woodpecker have in common?
11–17 of 17 posts
Re: Unintended consequences: What do a deaf woman and an endangered woodpecker have in common?
#12A minor meta comment; Good titles really do matter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=103834
Indeed. I have been on the losing side of alternate-title later submissions more than a few times. However, I think I did search for "unintended" before posting this, and that wouldn't have found your post...
Re: Unintended consequences: What do a deaf woman and an endangered woodpecker have in common?
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the case of minimum wage, it does. I thought it was a good example. http://blog.russnelson.com/economics/minimum-wage.html
I disagree that it is that clear cut. As a recent counter-example to the blog, view the UK's introduction of a relatively high minimum wage in 1998 which, despite above-inflation increases over several years, have caused little-to-no problems. Incidentally, the UK had it's highest employment rate in 2007 according to National Statistics Online ( http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=12 ). By the blog's reaso…
It's not clear cut, mainly due to a lack of useful data. I don't know much about the labor market in the UK (your link only discusses employment/unemployment in 2007, not the effects of minimum wage in 1998), but I'll discuss the US.
In the US, only 1-2% of workers make minimum wage. If a minimum wage law drove 50% of them out of work over 2 years, it would increase unemployment by only 0.25-0.5%/year. And 50% is a huge; in reality, far fewer than 50% of minimum wage workers will be driven out of the market.
The effects on minimum wage also don't last much beyond a few years, since the minimum wage is not indexed to market wage for low skill jobs (or even to inflation, which is not the same thing). So in a few years, the minimum wage drops below market wage and becomes irrelevant.
This effect is sped up by companies raising prices (since costs rise across the industry, this doesn't cause a loss of market share). This drives up prices, causing inflation, which again reduces the effect of minimum wage.
Minimum wage is mainly just a a propaganda tool for politicians. That's why it's not indexed to inflation: if it were, they couldn't get on TV and say "I care about America's poorest workers" every few years. That's also why minimum wage is kept low; if they pushed it above market wage for the bottom 1-2%, the harmful effects might be large enough to be visible (even if they are questionable, this is not a risk a politician wants to take).
Re: Unintended consequences: What do a deaf woman and an endangered woodpecker have in common?
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree that it is that clear cut. As a recent counter-example to the blog, view the UK's introduction of a relatively high minimum wage in 1998 which, despite above-inflation increases over several years, have caused little-to-no problems. Incidentally, the UK had it's highest employment rate in 2007 according to National Statistics Online ( http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=12 ). By the blog's reaso…
It's not clear cut, mainly due to a lack of useful data. I don't know much about the labor market in the UK (your link only discusses employment/unemployment in 2007, not the effects of minimum wage in 1998), but I'll discuss the US. In the US, only 1-2% of workers make minimum wage. If a minimum wage law drove 50% of them out of work over 2 years, it would increase unemployment by only 0.25-0.5%/year. And 50% is a h…
Well said. +1. I think Russ's point was that if minimum wage actually was raised high enough by the well-meaners that they thought it would institute social change, it would backfire in a most comical and epic way. Imagine if the minimum wage were set to 100/hour tomorrow...
Instead, politicians just wait till election season then realign the letter of the law to more or less match the current market value and then proclaim what a friend to the poor they've been from the doorway of their gulfstream.
Re: Unintended consequences: What do a deaf woman and an endangered woodpecker have in common?
#15I enjoyed this piece, now whenever I find a loophole in a law that I can exploit for my own benefit I can blame the law! I'm not a bad person, it's a bad law! Along with the invisible hand of Adam Smith, I was basically bitchslapped into maximizing my profit at the cost of the needy, the disabled, and those damn woodpeckers. Won't someone feel bad for poor (rich) little (rotund) old me?
Re: Unintended consequences: What do a deaf woman and an endangered woodpecker have in common?
#16A minor meta comment; Good titles really do matter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=103834
I like your title better. I can already name a large number of things that a deaf woman and an endangered woodpecker have in common.
I think people vote up long, uninformative titles like this one because they secretly dread the prospect of reading about "second order" anything, but not about woodpeckers or deaf people (or cats or people being hit in the groin with a football).
Re: Unintended consequences: What do a deaf woman and an endangered woodpecker have in common?
#17A minor meta comment; Good titles really do matter: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=103834
Ah, and now I understand why there even can be multiple submissions: I guess because of the various random parameters some websites attach (session ids or whatever), the duplicate detection mechanism of news.yc doesn't work.
Makes me wonder if there could be a way to assign a unique id to every website. I guess at least for news feeds it already exists, but not every submission has a news feed.