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

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

commondreams.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 451 posts

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

#341

Post by andrewjl »

jonkho wrote: post #339
andrewjl wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why were American firms not able to use their advantage to compete against the upstarts? This comment reads to me as implying American companies are uncompetitive compared foreign firms and are doomed to lose simply by being subject to competitive forces. What are these other companies doing that we are not? What can we do to make ourselves more competitive such that each employee has enough productive capacity to ea…

From the macroeconomic perspective, since the US dollar had reserve status and unlimited foreign demand, it just becomes more efficient to print and export dollar bills and import real goods than to actually exert physical labor to produce goods to export and balance trade. Once this realization sets in, the optimal game theory outcome is to reorganize the economy around this structure of print-and-export-dollars deb…

That's true. The US dollar reserve status is a contingent factor however.

How do we maintain it? An obvious factor is our military capacity. That means defense spending. Under a capitalist system that also requires a competitive commercial defense sector and also a strong economy capable of sustaining such a sector via tax revenue.

Most tax revenue comes from individuals. In an era of mobile capital, corporate taxation is sub-optimal. So the economy's health is linked to the prosperity of individuals, in aggregate. Prosperity can come from competition, but the most durable forms of prosperity are tied to increasing productivity.

Continuing on this first principles trajectory should lead to a stable structure. It's not one that is dominated by "print-and-export-dollars"-style industries.

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

#342

Post by barry-cotter »

virmundi wrote: post #335
mgolawala wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing, Healthcare and Education. Those three have eaten up a larger and larger chunk of people's paychecks over the years. In regards to the cost of housing, I came across an adage a while back that has stuck with me, "Housing can either be affordable, or a great investment, not both". I think the real solution is a change in policy for housing to no longer be treated as a great investment. Not that I have high hop…

What would that look like? Would you disallow non-occupant ownership?

Build housing and keep on building until prices stop rising.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-af...

> Like so many other global first-world cities, Tokyo is experiencing explosive population growth, increasing by 1.6 million people since 2000. And unlike practically every U.S. city, it has almost no empty land. So it has responded through vertical growth, tearing down old structures and replacing them with high rises at a pace light-years ahead of anywhere in modern America. As FT’s Tokyo bureau chief Robin Harding wrote in the article, the city had 142,417 housing starts in 2014, which was “more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).” Compare this, also, with the roughly 20,000 new residential units approved annually in New York City, the 23,500 units started in Los Angeles County, and the measly 5,000 homes constructed in 2015 throughout the entire Bay Area. > This has stabilized Tokyo’s housing prices, wrote Harding, and has kept them far lower than in many U.S. cities.

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

#343

Post by roenxi »

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…

You might have your finger on something, but that explanation as written doesn't make much sense. If workers don't have the market power to prevent being reclassified as contractors, they certainly don't have enough market power to lobby for real wage increases.

The structural shift to contractors is part of a broad trend after 1970 suggesting American labour isn't, economically speaking, a growth engine.

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

#344

Post by barry-cotter »

Traster wrote: post #270
charlesu wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wages have little to do with productivity and everything to do with bargaining power. CEOs are paid well because we expect them to be and they can demand it, irrespective of their actual contributions to the success of the company. But for some reason only the worker must justify his pay.

This is self-fulfilling. There is a claim that CEOs are well paid because they're in high demand. The truth is that it's actually difficult to find someone who will work for minimum wage in a In-n-Out burger in San Jose. It's easy to find a dozen qualified candidates for CEO - hell, half of them are CEOs at similar smaller companies and the other half are CxOs/SVPs at the company you're hiring for. The myth is that y…

> The myth is that you need some massive salary to attract the best, whereas what actually happens is you hire who you would've hired anyway, but you pay them a massive premium.

Microsoft’s market capitalization has more than doubled during Satya Nadella’s tenure as CEO. When Steve Ballmet quit as CEO the market cap jumped over $100 million. That kind of difference is why companies pay extremely well for top CEO talent. Management is a skill, some people are really great at managing large, complex, profitable organizations and they’re worth a lot of money.

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

#345

Post by ashtonkem »

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…

And there’s no career advancement for contractors. Thirty years ago the best and brightest at the hotel might get a chance to get promoted to manager, which would give them a better wage and even more skills. As a contractor this is practically impossible, both because your actual company never observes you and has very few management positions to get promoted to, and because the hotel probably can’t hire you without breaching their contract with the staffing agency.

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

#346

Post by DeonPenny »

Why would pay keep up with productivity gains when the productivity of the labor purchased by a wage hasnt kept up with productivity gains.

Businesses run on actual formulas. So if a mcdonald resturant doesn't make the the 100x% growth because the wages didn't create 100x% growth in each store revenue and wages went up 100x% how does it make sense to run most any small business in america

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

#347

Post by ashtonkem »

rightbyte wrote: post #291
martin_bech wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im from Denmark, none of the money is derived from oil.

Denmark is selfsufficient in oil production. It helps ... but so is the US.

Thanks to fracking, the US is actually a marginal net exporter of oil, depending on the average price of oil (traditional wells can squeeze out frackers with their lower production cost)

As you said, oil helps, but it’s not determinative. Norway is interesting in that they’ve used their oil money very wisely, but it seems pretty clear that other policies are necessary in order to ensure that economic prosperity is well distributed.

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

#348

Post by ashtonkem »

andrewjl wrote: post #337
rmason wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these comparisons miss one thing: after WWII America had a monopoly. We had destroyed our competitors factories in Asia as well as in Europe. It took a while for them to build back and be truly competitive outside their home countries. Here in Michigan we had a front row seat to this happening with manufacturing. Everything peaked in 1973 and has been on a slow decline ever since. Sure there have been booms but t…

Why were American firms not able to use their advantage to compete against the upstarts? This comment reads to me as implying American companies are uncompetitive compared foreign firms and are doomed to lose simply by being subject to competitive forces. What are these other companies doing that we are not? What can we do to make ourselves more competitive such that each employee has enough productive capacity to ea…

Arguably American firms have been incredibly competitive since the 1970s; its American labor that hasn’t been.

And/or the fruits of globalism have not been fairly shared. Depending on whom you ask.

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

#349

Post by DeonPenny »

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…

Not to mention the minimum wage was randomly picked by a govt worker. Who says the wage picked at any given time would be the best minimum wage and would have negative consequence like other minimum wage increases.

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

#350

Post by nroets »

dcolkitt wrote: post #142
ardy42 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't contradict the actual article, whose full title is: > If Worker Pay Had Kept Pace With Productivity Gains Since 1968, Today's Minimum Wage Would Be $24 an Hour It looks like when it was shortened one of its most important words were dropped.

That makes more sense. But keep in mind that only 2.3% of hourly workers make minimum wage.[1] It's not really fair to compare productivity (a mean) or even median output to wages at the second percentile. It's an interesting question in its own right. Do the very lowest paid people in the economy have it better or worse than 50 years ago. I don't know the full answer to that question, but I do know that in 1968 abou…

When I was in the US, I saw someone offering free phones to the unemployed (Obama phone). Food stamps being used. FEMA given new houses to people left homeless by hurricane Michael.

I even met people whose diet consisted mainly of expired food. They had to fish it out of dumpsters, which wasn't nice. But they had free food!

Post reply on HN