591–600 of 776 posts
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Sure, different countries have different living standards. That's the point. "Living wage" is an undefined, ever changing concept. Populist to the core.
What a strange argument; you can most certainly quantify living wage for a specific region by looking at the prices in said region.
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A free market does not mean that both sides want something with equal desire. I need food to survive much more than Krogers needs my business to survive. This does not mean that grocery sales are not a free market. A free market means that the supply and demand of goods rely on price signals rather than a centralized planner. Labour is absolutely a free market. As wages in one particular area increase, people respond…
>A free market means that the supply and demand of goods rely on price signals rather than a centralized planner. That's one definition but it's not one of the more common ones. It also begs the question what counts as a centralized planner. Does Boeing count if it sets the price of jet planes that only it and Airbus sell? What about when Singapore fixes the price of medical care even though anybody who wants can cro…
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...
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>> Textbooks state that, in the absence of a minimum wage, a worker is paid his “marginal product of labour”, which means the value of what he produces. This sentence is just wrong. First of all a rational actor will not intentionally pay a worker the value of their production; you get no profit. Textbooks actually say that a worker will be paid no more than the marginal product of labor, and if labor is in short sup…
Is that how CAPM works?
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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?
Your own money can be used for whatever you want and no need to beg and justify before a government employee.
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To the OP's credit, I think there's a difference between "a company can continue without filling a specific role for a very long time, while a worker must find a job quickly" and "a company can continue without any employees for a very long time" which seems to be more consistent with your lockdown example. The OP's position is IMO wrong in that (rational) employers aren't incentivized to wait for the absolute lowest…
Every job that pays more than minimum wage is evidence that workers do have negotiating power.
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…
> But i believe we should start doing this for US companies as well. We can "call out" whatever you want. People vote with their dollar. Target, Walmart, cheap resellers on AliExpress/Amazon are "winning" every day because the most important thing most consumers care about is rock bottom price. I don't think "calling out" will do much other than virtue signal.
Many can only afford to shop at those places, or they're the only stores that provides certain classes of necessities within the travel time constraints imposed by their work (multiple minimum wage jobs) and home schedule (they often are obligated to bear the burdens of assisting disabled, elderly, or young members of family or social groups).
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What a strange argument; you can most certainly quantify living wage for a specific region by looking at the prices in said region.
It's not only the prices but the specifics of what "livable" means. For some it just means the essentials, to others it includes luxuries.
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> 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
Let me summarize what you did here: 1) You had a conclusion in your mind that minimum wage is beneficial. 2) You googled with terms that match your conclusion. 3) You cherry-picked the studies that match your conclusion. 4) The studies all point to either mixed outcomes or minor effects - with no attempt to even establish a causal effects (some of those are downright silly. Like tying minimum wage policy to rising wa…
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>> Textbooks state that, in the absence of a minimum wage, a worker is paid his “marginal product of labour”, which means the value of what he produces. This sentence is just wrong. First of all a rational actor will not intentionally pay a worker the value of their production; you get no profit. Textbooks actually say that a worker will be paid no more than the marginal product of labor, and if labor is in short sup…
> you get no profit. Marginal value of production is almost always lower than average value, because of diminishing returns. Profits are made on the average value. A Marxist take in this is that labour should be paid on the average value of production, and labour should get all the profits.