Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because of the "there would be nobody left doing low-skilled work" part. Once there is a scarcity of people who are willing to do this work, the price will automatically rise. When it does, people will either be highly paid to do these unpleasant tasks, or (more righteously IMHO) these tasks will be done by robots. The problem is that anyone can clean toilets. Its unpleasant, hard work, but requires no training. Ther…
Once there is a scarcity of people who are willing to do this work, the price will automatically rise. This presupposes that there is enough high-skilled work available and that all low-skilled workers are capable of obtaining higher qualifications. The later one is certainly not true and the former one seems at least questionable. And every time the demand in a high-skilled professions drops, those workers end up in…
Unfortunately, supply and demand confounds this with alacrity. Things that are plentiful are cheap, even if we wish otherwise. We can make rules to "fix" it but it's so difficult and expensive I'm not even sure it's a break even proposition. It does feel good to try.
>Empirically this does not seem to work, otherwise we would see a narrowing gap...
The gap is irrelevant. It's the lifting that counts. The gap only becomes a problem when the top doesn't get farther ahead by moving up, they get farther ahead by pushing others down (often while their absolute material wealth actually declines).