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If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

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Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#211

Post by pmiller2 »

missedthecue wrote: post #201
cryptoz wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wages have stagnated. Your graphs aren't really relevant to this question; so what if per capita disposable income has increased? That doesn't say anything at all about wages of people in America. Here is a more complete picture, with words and discussion and multiple graphs too: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

My graph also shows median income, and it clearly shows it has not stagnated, but risen, and not by any small amount.

Now, overlay that with a graph of productivity over time. Observe that productivity growth has greatly exceeded wage growth. Speculate on where the gains due to productivity have gone, if they’re not being shared with workers.

There’s a story to tell here, but you’re not showing it.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#212

Post by pydry »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #130
pydry wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No politician is going to get elected on a platform of higher rents and lower wages Have you noticed how little the media focuses on the actual platforms of most politicians and focuses on the spectacle and drama of politics instead? That distraction serve a purpose (for the owners of said media). Also, a platform of higher rents and lower wages will usually be called "lower taxes" and "freedom from onerous regulati…

What. Lowering taxes doesn't lower wages. Higher rents are caused by regulations, not freedom from regulations. You have to ask permission for something as simple as building places to live.

No, it raises rents. California rents can be traced back to prop 13, for instance.

Prop 13 wasn't run on a platform of raising rents, was it?

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#213

Post by pmiller2 »

cryptoz wrote: post #208
missedthecue wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My graph also shows median income, and it clearly shows it has not stagnated, but risen, and not by any small amount.

Median income has nothing to do with real wage stagnation.

It is real median income being shown, but that doesn’t show the full picture. For one thing, we need the definition of "disposable income" that's being used here.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#214

Post by pydry »

rayiner wrote: post #152
pydry wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No politician is going to get elected on a platform of higher rents and lower wages Have you noticed how little the media focuses on the actual platforms of most politicians and focuses on the spectacle and drama of politics instead? That distraction serve a purpose (for the owners of said media). Also, a platform of higher rents and lower wages will usually be called "lower taxes" and "freedom from onerous regulati…

If you can find an NYT article in the last two years using AEI as the source of a story I’ll buy you a nice bottle of whiskey. The media will systematically ignore sources like AEI, that use actual numbers, in favor of soundbites like the one in this Common Dreams article.

the media ignores them does it? https://www.cnbc.com/video/2020/05/26/capitalism-coronavirus...

i would be mildly surprised if "liberal" CNBC had even one person from common dreams on.

i'm not gonna dig through the new york times for examples where they cited somebody from AEI coz it's paywalled but it wouldn't surprise me if they, like CNBC do, routinely.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#215

Post by slg »

missedthecue wrote: post #179

And if they had kept up since 1949, minimum wage would be $4.22 an hour. Two can play the game of cherrypicking troughs and peaks. Additionally, average productivity is not minimum wage productivity. They are separate statistics, and the bulk of the efficiency gains have not been made at the burger flipper level, but at higher levels, where there have been huge gains in pay. The productivity gains in engineering and…

>Someone stocking shelves in 2020 is about productive as someone stocking shelves in 1968.

This is not completely fair. There are countless innovations that have allowed these low skill jobs to have an increase in efficiency and productivity.

One example, when I was a teen and worked retail I remember we would all have to spend hours going around the store counting every product on the shelves in order to do our routine inventory checks because there was no other reasonable way to track that information. Now many stores have intelligent inventory tracking that requires little to no work from employees. The end result is that these employees are more efficient, stores need less workers, and stores can carry less inventory. Why isn't the benefit of that efficiency passed on to those employees who are now more efficient? How is that any different than a software developer receiving a higher salary because they are more efficient due to computers being more powerful?

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#216

Post by comeonseriously »

dpix wrote: post #209
comeonseriously wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems awfully dangerous to think that we should pay people less because otherwise things would be expensive. You're assuming that's why I was asking.

Am I agreeing with you then? You didn't make your position very clear. I'm just stating what I think about wage inequality and class gaps. If you're asking for an actual number of the price of a Cheeseburger and a Shake? I don't know, but it may be a number that's ultimately better for society?

I was asking a simple question. There are people here who know economics better than I, so I wanted to know what would happen. People just assumed I don't want others to have a good life when that's so far from the truth.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#217

Post by 908B64B197 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #137
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #40

There's a lot of reasons for this but one of the largest is the near invisible (to me) structural shift from direct hire to contractors for jobs at the lower end of the wage/salary spectrum. There is a fantastic long form article that articulates this better than I can at: https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenn... The portion relevant to this discussion: "Thirty years ago, she says, you could wa…

Another really great illustration of exactly this subject was this article comparing janitors at Kodak in the 1980s with janitors at Apple (but not employed by Apple) today: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/tale-of-two-ja... > Yet the biggest difference between their two experiences is in the opportunities they created. A manager learned that Evans was taking computer classes while she was working as a j…

There's an other issue here: Evans bootstrapped herself by getting a (relevant) degree.

The spreadsheet story is nice, but even having these skills back in the 80's was way less common than today. The article should also have looked at how much tuition was relative to the cost of living/salary Evans was making, and if Ramos could afford it today.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#218

Post by chordalkeyboard »

lilactown wrote: post #118
leetcrew wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If tech helps me build 10x the number of widgets, should all of that surplus value only be captured by the technology owners? idk about the owners specifically, but I think it's fair that the lion's share of the gains go to the people who made it happen. in this example at least, the widget maker didn't do anything to increase their productivity.

Someone else elsewhere made this point: the widget makers are not generally capable of increasing their own productivity because they don't have access to the capital required. This method of organizing labor and value which disallows workers' to gain anything from increases in their own output keeps them from ever being able to participate in it, leading to alienation from their jobs and living in a perpetual cycle…

Thats why they invented the joint stock company. Individuals invest their surplus wages in a joint venture in order to gain access to capital that costs too much for any one of them to afford.

They also capture these gains because the increased productivity of the company results in more products of greater value on the market. In short, they benefit as consumers.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#219

Post by jahaja »

dantheman wrote: post #196
jahaja wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me think of this passage by Bertrand Russell wrt. increases in efficiency and working hours: "The War showed conclusively that by the scientific organization of production it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If at the end of the War the scientific organization which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and…

Those displaced (50% in the example above) can go and provide services in another area... Why should only the pin producers get 4 hour weeks. What about those have to toil in the field for 8 hours a day to produce food? What happens is that those 4 can go do something else; now in reality that something else is often not as good as what they were doing before or else they would have already been doing it. But people…

> Those displaced (50% in the example above) can go and provide services in another area... Why should only the pin producers get 4 hour weeks. What about those have to toil in the field for 8 hours a day to produce food?

So for the sake of fairness, no one should get to work less hours?

It's pretty clear that Russell's sentiment is that this should be expanded to society as a whole.

Re: If pay had kept pace with productivity gains, minimum wage would be $24 an hour

#220

Post by adkadskhj »

WalterBright wrote: post #199
missedthecue wrote: post #179

And if they had kept up since 1949, minimum wage would be $4.22 an hour. Two can play the game of cherrypicking troughs and peaks. Additionally, average productivity is not minimum wage productivity. They are separate statistics, and the bulk of the efficiency gains have not been made at the burger flipper level, but at higher levels, where there have been huge gains in pay. The productivity gains in engineering and…

Also, "total compensation" is the correct thing to compare with, not "wage". Total compensation includes the value of benefits and the (so-called) employer contribution to taxes. Total compensation can be up to 40% more than salary.

Wouldn't that be relative, too? Eg if "total wage"'s point was to show lost benefits, the cost in the implied benefits would be relative to what those benefits relieve you from.

Which is to say, insurance these days might be worth vastly more than it was in 1968, since Healthcare costs have skyrocketed for the uninsured.

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