Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 376 posts

Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky

#291

Post by mbfg »

Evolved wrote: post #194

It seems like with regards to restaurants, this would only mostly apply to fast-food restaurants. Raising the minimum wage doesn't really appear to have an effect on servers given that the majority of their pay is from tips and they are effectively legally paid less than minimum wage anyway. Furthermore, it isn't supposed to be a living wage. You're not supposed to be a single mother of 3 supporting yourself working…

So your thinking is that people will start making $15/hr and say to themselves, wow, i'm living in paradise! Really?

Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky

#292

Post by JoeAltmaier »

pharke wrote: post #290
hjhgjtyhdf wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's funny because the "slaves" in America right now enjoy a higher standard of living than virtually every king and queen before our generation.

How is this not patently false? If you take someone living below the poverty line, earning minimum wage, renting their meager apartment, eating highly processed carbs and pseudo-meat, in debt to their bank and payday loan sharks, and under constant threat of homelessness brought on by unexpected illness or economic downturn, how is this situation in any way superior to a king or queen as they existed before "our gene…

I think that image of monarchs comes from the movies? The famous inventory of Charlemagne's estate includes 2 cups, one chair and a towel. Their food back then was bad meat and oatmeal, no matter who you were.

Indeed, just the existence of cheap antibiotics are likely to make the most humble of today's citizens live decades longer than anyone from the past.

Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky

#293

Post by yummyfajitas »

crdoconnor wrote: post #258
yummyfajitas wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do TPP and other trade deals which allow Chinese people to compete economically with Americans destroy jobs? I'm assuming, of course, that Chinese are people too.(I've never been there but I've met a few of them. They didn't seem that different from me.) Out of curiosity, did ending Jim Crow (allowing blacks to compete economically with whites) also destroy jobs? Can we create prosperity by making up arbitrary di…

>How do TPP and other trade deals which allow Chinese people to compete economically with Americans destroy jobs? By moving factories which previously employed Americans to countries where they don't, leaving those Americans unemployed. All of that cheap stuff you buy at Walmart that was made by Americans pre-1990 isn't now all made by robots. >Out of curiosity, did ending Jim Crow (allowing blacks to compete economi…

By moving factories which previously employed Americans to countries where they don't, leaving those Americans unemployed.

Assuming you are right that those Americans remain unemployed, you are completely ignoring the newly employed Chinese people. Do they count for nothing? Not even 3/5?

Out of curiosity, since your calculus is explicitly putting zero value on Chinese people, why would you care about Chinese slaves?

Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky

#294

Post by LunaSea »

reirob wrote: post #245
LunaSea wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you finance a basic income when a majority of your population has no job and thus no taxable income ?

Make new taxes on automation, robots, AI, Internet business?

Companies already pay taxes and even with automation their revenue will dwindle when their consumer base will shrink due to automation.

Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky

#295

Post by yummyfajitas »

vacri wrote: post #220
yummyfajitas wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there's actually nothing useful for some people to do (they can't find a job that supports them) then we should stop thinking of employment as a requirement for survival. They could fix our crumbling infrastructure, provide child care for working women, in-home care for our elderly, reduce overcrowding by making prisons larger, build community gardens, or a hundred other popular left wing causes. The claim that we…

> They could fix our crumbling infrastructure... reduce overcrowding by making prisons larger Unskilled people make crappy engineers and construction workers. > provide child care These days, child care workers need a lot of paperwork and a bit of training. Not to mention that you kind've have to be good with kids; it's not really a job just anyone can do. > in-home care for our elderly And this is in the same bucket…

Unskilled people make crappy engineers and construction workers.

We did this and it worked. I believe some elements of training were provided.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_Conservation_Corps

But suppose you are right - there are no unemployed people out there capable of fixing our crumbling infrastructure. Suppose we were to just throw money at the problem via ordinary government spending. How would the work actually get done, i.e. who would do it?

Forcing people into a caring role makes for bad carers.

No one is forced into anything. You do work and you get money, same as any other job. In any case, the folks who make bad carers can do other things, e.g. pick up trash in the park or work as janitors in government buildings.

Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky

#296

Post by LunaSea »

aninhumer wrote: post #278
LunaSea wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you enact basic income when a majority of your population doesn't have an income and thus can't pay the taxes that finance that exact basic income?

The taxes are paid by the people who now own the entire productive economy.

These people would never have enough money especially since the companies they control will have a much smaller consumer base due to higher and higher unemployment rates, a consequence of automation.

Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky

#297

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Evolved wrote: post #194

It seems like with regards to restaurants, this would only mostly apply to fast-food restaurants. Raising the minimum wage doesn't really appear to have an effect on servers given that the majority of their pay is from tips and they are effectively legally paid less than minimum wage anyway. Furthermore, it isn't supposed to be a living wage. You're not supposed to be a single mother of 3 supporting yourself working…

That is an old dead horse. What job folks are 'supposed' to have according to middle-class morality is irrelevant. Today only about one minimum-wage worker in 10 are teens. A third are over 35. They haven't had a raise in 7 years. We're talking 25 million people who can't pay basic bills.

And we're not going to make them into 25 million more engineers or programmers or anything else really. There aren't enough jobs in the entire rest of the economy for these folks to fill.

It isn't going to get better by itself. Now Carl's wants to automate the counter. Banks are automating, expected to reduce head count by 30%. These things happen across the industry, those folks aren't earning minimum wage, they're out of a job.

Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky

#298

Post by yummyfajitas »

zanny wrote: post #285
yummyfajitas wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have labor gluts at all. In the US working mothers struggle to find child care for their children, houses go uncleaned, and productive people drive themselves to work. That's a situation of labor scarcity, not a labor glut.

If you offered sufficiently high wages to do those jobs, you would find plenty of people willing to do them. A labor glut does not necessitate me being able to ask for someone to mow my lawn for one cent and having someone volunteer. You have a labor glut when the availability of living wage work declines below the working population who need to earn such a living.

That's fine - the point is that people aren't obsolete and work is available. People are just unwilling to do the work.

That's not an argument in favor of a basic income - a basic income just increases the incentives for laziness and makes the labor scarcity worse. (10% or so in the Canadian experiments.)

Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky

#299

Post by turar »

rtpg wrote: post #198
tmptmp wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Marxists and communists have tried doing that thing many times and have failed spectacularly. Business based market economy is the only (till now) successful and socially most beneficial type of society that has ever existed. I upvoted the OP because he/she/it (it may be a bot) has put this thing in clear words.

Marxists and communists have tried this without also sticking to democracy... The well known failings could just as well be due to the massize amount of corruption that came from the strong bases of power. We also had "real" market economies (no trust busting or the like) in the early 20th and it was shitty for a huge part of the population History is the biggest argument against all economic systems

Not to mention capitalist countries working very hard to undermine marxists and communists by pretty much any means possible.

Re: Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky

#300

Post by turar »

IndianAstronaut wrote: post #189
mbfg wrote: post #56

I'm all for raising the minimum wage, temporarily it may help people for several years. The truth is the automation wave is coming quickly regardless of what people are paid. And it's not for just minimum wage jobs. Think about jobs like truck driver where there's probably several million people who count this as their profession in the US. In 10-20 years, that number will probably approach 0. There's a nasty new wor…

>There's a nasty new world order coming where a vast majority of jobs will be gone Want to know the biggest job killer in history? The tractor. Farm employment in the developed world went from 70% to 2%. We have been through this before. We can generate new jobs.

> We can generate new jobs.

Yes, we can. http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/

Post reply on HN