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What harm do minimum wages do?

economist.com

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Re: What harm do minimum wages do?

#391

Post by bhupy »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #29

Look i get that USA has a lot of billionaires and the GDP per capita looks great for the USA but I want US citizens to please take a look at median wealth per adult and see how far you have to scroll down to find the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... This is a great way to rule out outliers. My home country Australia has 3X the median wealth per adult of the USA. This is similar to…

On an article about wages (not wealth), did you consider looking at median income per adult?

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

Re: What harm do minimum wages do?

#392

Post by heylook »

macspoofing wrote: post #364
danenania wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, many minimum wage opponents focus on the scenario where someone is worth e.g. $14/hr to a business, and rightly point out that this person won't be hired with a $15/hr min wage. BUT without a minimum wage, someone worth $50/hr can be paid $5/hr if anyone can do the job. It strikes me that this situation is far more common than the first scenario, and minimum wage opponents tend to ignore it in their arguments.…

The only arguments for minimum wage that I've ever seen, are those that claim that under certain conditions minimum wage may not be noticeably detrimental. What you never see is the minimum wage actually make a lick of difference to any metric that matters (like unemployment rate, or poverty rates, or income rates, or whatever else). Never. And I'm serious about this. Have you ever seen a region that adopted minimum…

> Never. And I'm serious about this.

You know that we have search engines, right?

https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20180622.107025/...

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=267875

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3381978

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3520915

Re: What harm do minimum wages do?

#393

Post by karpierz »

WalterBright wrote: post #297
brokensegue wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ec101 often assumes perfect competition. google defines that as. >the situation prevailing in a market in which buyers and sellers are so numerous and well informed that all elements of monopoly are absent and the market price of a commodity is beyond the control of individual buyers and sellers. so everyone has equal leverage (zero).

A lot of people seem to think that free markets require perfect information and perfect competition. These requirements are not remotely necessary for free markets to work and work well.

What are the requirements for a free market to work well? And how do you define working well?

Re: What harm do minimum wages do?

#395

Post by Qub3d »

qeternity wrote: post #372
kennywinker wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the trick. If choice has been eliminated, i.e. walmart has replaced your local shop, you can no longer vote with your dollar - pressuring the companies (via "calling-out") to give you options becomes the only choice available. That said, there are a ton of areas where we still have choice. In those cases, people do need to become more aware of the impact of their purchasing decisions - but in those cases I agr…

> Here's the trick. If choice has been eliminated, i.e. walmart has replaced your local shop, you can no longer vote with your dollar - pressuring the companies (via "calling-out") to give you options becomes the only choice available. Aside from actual monopolies (utilities, etc) what is one example of having no choice? Whenever I hear this argument, it’s not that there’s no choice, it’s that there’s no cheap, conve…

Take a look into how Dollar General is actively displacing and destroying local grocery opportunities in small towns: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-12-20/when-the-...

Re: What harm do minimum wages do?

#396

Post by leetcrew »

dylz wrote: post #236
kenhwang wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's one thing to be unfair when the government is footing the bill, like basic income or tax brackets. It's a good incentive to balance out rising cost of living. It's another when it's small businesses footing the bill. There's a very painful lag time between being required to pay employees more and when employees have more spending power. Typically all that happens is local business don't have the finances to cove…

I don't have an opinion on this in either direction, but i'm curious: how do you define a small business, and do inefficient/wasteful small businesses get selectively 'bailed out' compared to national ones? Why should small businesses not have to foot the bill while large ones do? Just because they are small, they don't have to be competitive or efficient - do not-profitable hobby businesses get propped up for no rea…

locally owned businesses are arguably better for a community because the owner is more likely to recirculate their profits back through the local economy. the profits from a walmart location are ultimately captured by the shareholders, who may be disproportionately concentrated in some far-away place. of course, this can be outweighed if the large corporation serves the community much more efficiently than the smaller competition.

subjectively, I find it a lot more pleasant to deal with local businesses. on the rare occasion I go to starbucks, I grab my coffee and leave immediately, but I would be happy to spend a few hours reading in any of the nearby independent coffee shops.

Re: What harm do minimum wages do?

#397

Post by bhupy »

lokar wrote: post #287

The anti-min-wage / free market argument ignores a key fact: as a society we have decided we won't let people starve to death. So, if someone can't make ends meet, we will (via taxes) support them, at least to some extent. This support factors into the wage negotiation, allowing the employer to force a lower wage (absent a state imposed min). Absent state sate welfare style support many low wage (min and sub-min) job…

This argument ignores that the anti-min-wage argument isn't monolithic.

The other argument is that a minimum wage can usually (though not always) result in higher prices because employers just pass on the cost of higher wages to the buyer (especially in competitive markets), and that this is a regressive way to guarantee a minimum standard of living.

The strongest anti-min-wage argument is that a UBI/EITC is the better way to guarantee a minimum money floor because it's paid for by progressive taxation, while allowing the market to find the lowest possible cost for goods/services/labor. It also gives workers negotiating leverage by enabling them to choose not to work somewhere without fear of starving to death.

Re: What harm do minimum wages do?

#398

Post by umvi »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #29

Look i get that USA has a lot of billionaires and the GDP per capita looks great for the USA but I want US citizens to please take a look at median wealth per adult and see how far you have to scroll down to find the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... This is a great way to rule out outliers. My home country Australia has 3X the median wealth per adult of the USA. This is similar to…

Does that take into account cost of living?

In America you can buy a gallon of milk for $1.50 at Walmart. In Australia (after some brief googling[0]) it's more like $4.50. Same with gas, video games, you name it, a lot of things seem to cost 2-4x more in Australia.

[0] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?cou...

Re: What harm do minimum wages do?

#399

Post by scatters »

kennywinker wrote: post #221
cynicalkane wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumption is the income and wealth that you end up using. Measuring wellbeing by consumption is the standard economic perspective, since it describes how much of society's goods and services one ends up using. More simply, if you save then spend, wealth-based measures will rate you as better off than a person with higher income who just spends. That doesn't make sense.

This is confusing. If you save, you have more wealth. If you have more wealth, you are more resilient to hardships (economic, health, etc.) - a population of people with large savings accounts and low debt seems obviously better than a population that makes a ton of money but lives close to the wire or carries large debts

Resilience is unnecessary in countries with a safety net. Are individuals in those countries who make the rational decision to save less somehow worse off than those who have to carry a large savings buffer to guard against misfortune?

Re: What harm do minimum wages do?

#400

Post by dragonwriter »

bhupy wrote: post #397
lokar wrote: post #287

The anti-min-wage / free market argument ignores a key fact: as a society we have decided we won't let people starve to death. So, if someone can't make ends meet, we will (via taxes) support them, at least to some extent. This support factors into the wage negotiation, allowing the employer to force a lower wage (absent a state imposed min). Absent state sate welfare style support many low wage (min and sub-min) job…

This argument ignores that the anti-min-wage argument isn't monolithic. The other argument is that a minimum wage can usually (though not always) result in higher prices because employers just pass on the cost of higher wages to the buyer (especially in competitive markets), and that this is a regressive way to guarantee a minimum standard of living. The strongest anti-min-wage argument is that a UBI/EITC is the bett…

> The strongest anti-min-wage argument is that a UBI/EITC is the better way to guarantee a minimum money floor

EITC doesn't guarantee a minimum anything since, as the name suggests, you need earned income to get it and you get more of it with more earned income, to a certain point.

It's true that NIT, which is equivalent to UBI, was the inspiration for EITC, but EITC is a NIT through a carnival funhouse mirror.

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