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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

#421

Post by slg »

deathanatos wrote: post #303
slg wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am confused on why you don't consider that 2nd paragraph as an answer to the 1st. "Did SWE experience more growth, or did it grow proportionally?" It "grows by ~74%, and all other occupations by ~57%". So yes, SWE expeirenced more growth. By measuring the percentage change you are scaling the salaries to each other.

That's an outcome that I was only able to derive after giving the graph the benefit of the doubt, eyeballing some of the numeric data, and doing some calculations in IPython. But it isn't a result that I feel one can accurately derive from the visualization presented by the graph. (If both had increased by 50%, the shape of the graph would be very similar.) It is not a contradiction to say the presentation doesn't he…

Fair enough, I guess I just think about things a little differently. I didn't feel the need to do any calculations. You can just eyeball it and see one went from roughly $600 to $900 and that is obviously a 50% increase and one went from a little above $1000 to a little above $1800 and that is obviously around a 80% increase. Those are all nice and easy to process numbers even if they aren't exact. There is a big enough gap in the results to be confident that whatever margin of error existed in my estimates it is clear that the developer salaries grew at a faster rate.

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

#422

Post by slg »

marcusverus wrote: post #414
confidantlake wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that it is somewhat arbitrary who captures the value, and it is not always clear who produces the value. Say a grocery store is stocking at twice the rate they did 40 years ago because they have an app. Is the guy who wrote the app responsible for all the increased productivity? Not really, writing the app was fairly trivial compared to inventing the transistor, the operating system, and the programming l…

I propose a thought experiment. Assume the app was developed in the past five years. Replay the last five years twice, with different circumstances: Once without the shelf stocker, and once without the programmer. In one case, the increased productivity still appears, in the other, it does not. It seems to me that the person who is required for the addition of the increased productivity caused the increased productiv…

If you remove the individual programmer or the individual shelf stocker nothing will change. The company will just get someone else to do the job. If you remove all programmers the shelves will be stocked at a slower rate. If you remove all shelf stockers, the entire system falls apart and no shelves are stocked.

It certainly seems like the shelf stockers are more important to this process than the programmers. They still provide value without the programmers but the programmers are entirely dependent on the shelf stockers to provide value.

Why do the programmers therefore get to claim the entire surplus in productivity if they are dependent on the shelf stockers for that productivity boost to actually materialize?

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

#423

Post by monocasa »

bhupy wrote: post #409
monocasa wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not for all goods & services... Yes, some sub indices have gone up, others have gone down. That doesn't change the fact that _overall_ the CPI has gone up over time. Wages have been having an inverse relationship with prices overall. This is not a case of "prices are cheaper so the wages are less too". > The only way to prove that “market forces do not reduce prices” I'm not sure why you're putting in quotes someth…

> Yes, some sub indices have gone up, others have gone down. That doesn't change the fact that _overall_ the CPI has gone up over time. Wages have been having an inverse relationship with prices overall. This is not a case of "prices are cheaper so the wages are less too". First of all, wages have not universally been in an inverse relationship with price. For example, the median wage has gone up, in real terms, no m…

> First of all, wages have not universally been in an inverse relationship with price....

First off, don't cite unsourced one-off tweets if you want to be taken seriously.

Secondly, yes, wages have gone up... since WWII. This entire discussion has been about the stagnation of median wages since the late 70s.

> But that presupposes that all goods & services are delivered purely through unfettered markets, which is not the case.

In no case are we talking about unfettered markets, so that has no bearing here. We're talking about the regulatory env of today contrasted with a UBI which is far from unfettered markets.

> No matter what, the employer never pays that living wage....

Continuing to follow that logic nobody pays for anything. "Employers don't really pay for labor" is an incredibly hot take I wasn't expecting to defend against today. If a business transitions from unprofitable to profitable by slashing wages, and sticks that profit in the bank, where did that money come from?

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

#424

Post by pas »

Junk_Collector wrote: post #260
Ductapemaster wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really awful thing from that story (Planet Money did a great recent episode on the ProPublica coverage) is that they are able to get away with this through Arbitration clauses. By way of their contracts, they strongarm their contractors into dealing with any "misclassification" issues (eg. exerting too much control over a contractor) individually, silently, and outside of court. Contractors have no ability to sue…

Arbitration is actually very expensive for the company but generally they can rely on the fact that most people will not utilize it for a variety of reasons. If people large scale started taking companies like this to claims it could quickly become more expensive than class action lawsuits trying to arbitrate each individual claim. If you feel strongly against arbitration clauses, activism to get people to use them i…

Why is it expensive? Compared to what?

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

#425

Post by pas »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #234
Ductapemaster wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really awful thing from that story (Planet Money did a great recent episode on the ProPublica coverage) is that they are able to get away with this through Arbitration clauses. By way of their contracts, they strongarm their contractors into dealing with any "misclassification" issues (eg. exerting too much control over a contractor) individually, silently, and outside of court. Contractors have no ability to sue…

> is that they are able to get away with this through Arbitration clauses. The root cause is the demand for that type of labor is dwarfed by supply for type of labor, and the long lasting solution would be to provide those people with better options.

Yep, because middle-income jobs are disappearing - due to automation and scale: https://economics.mit.edu/files/11563

Plus again scale shifts profits away from labor: https://economics.mit.edu/files/12979

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

#426

Post by qeternity »

sixstrings wrote: post #56
qeternity wrote: post #49

This is so horribly flawed. Productivity improvements have been concentrated at the high end, and those that have occurred in low skilled jobs have been almost entirely due to technology, not to labor efficiency. Technology gains have always disproportionately been captured by the providers of capital over the providers of labor (given they are the ones who invest in said technology).

That view is even more flawed, since everyone who pays taxes is an investor of technology. Most breakthroughs in tech happen at universities. It’s not private equity that funds tech, but taxes. So the beneficiaries of tech breakthroughs should be... everyone.

University research hasn't been majority funded by taxes in decades. The amount of private money funding public research is enormous.

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

#427

Post by pas »

geodel wrote: post #368
martin_bech wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi from Scandinavia, we dont have a monopoly on anything, and no actual minimum wage, yet people make about $20+ at the lowest paying jobs, enjoy 5 weeks paid vacation, free healthcare and cheap childcare..

Wouldn't it be great if you let in a million people from countries where people make lot less than $20. It would be fastest way to raise standard for those people

Sweden and Germany did just that.

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

#428

Post by andrewjl »

hannasanarion wrote: post #415
andrewjl wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Trickle down economics" did not cause that, a massive regulatory complex that protects incumbent monopolies did. An extensive rollback of regulatory complexity or a small business safe harbor exemption from everything but the critical health & safety pieces along with a Henry George land tax would solve our impasse. These are, sadly, not very popular policies. The most durable way to build middle class wealth is ent…

There are a lot of reasons small businesses are dead, and regulation is not one of them. The US regulatory structure is extremely friendly to small businesses. Small businesses are rare because the government has abdicated its antitrust responsibilities, ignoring companies that use anticompetitive practices like labor violations and price fixing that lock competitors out of the market. Small businesses are also rare…

> and regulation is not one of them.

> Small businesses are also rare because of zoning codes and infrastructure policies that promote the use of cars

Zoning codes and infrastructure policies are a form of regulation.

> government has abdicated its antitrust responsibilities

I agree with this part. A minimal regulatory regime along with a strong antitrust regime is pretty much ideal IMO.

> The US regulatory structure is extremely friendly to small businesses.

You can also see the quantity of regulations on this tracker. [1] I don't think you can describe this amount of regulatory complexity as "friendly" to small businesses.

[1] https://www.quantgov.org/federal-us-tracker

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

#429

Post by SamReidHughes »

pydry wrote: post #420
xyzzyz wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As bad as Prop 13 is for California, it's silly to put the whole blame on high rents on it. It's enough to note that rents are high in NYC, Boston, DC, and Seattle, and none of these places have Prop 13. If you can have skyrocketing rents without Prop 13, why would you think that it's Proposition 13 that's bearing the whole blame in California?

I wasn't putting the whole blame on it. I was citing it as one example. And, Boston, NY, etc. rents are NOT as high as San Fran.

San Fran also has rent control, good weather, and high income jobs.

But while Prop 13 also affects politics around new construction, it's a far reach to use its long term effects on voter behavior to associate general concepts of lower taxes and less regulation with higher rents or lower wages.

Notably, it's a law that taxes people unequally.

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

#430

Post by austinjp »

WalterBright wrote: post #403
austinjp wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Today, I ship all over the world via the internet for $0, have no stock, no scrap, no middlemen, get paid instantly, ship instantly, and the transaction cost is 1% for paypal and 3% for credit cards. This all true, and empowering for those who have the relevant know-how and opportunities. However, these apparent efficiencies are built on the back of the factors that GP points out. Empowerment for some relies on str…

> the relevant know-how and opportunities I've seen many guides to doing this in the form of blogs. This is not hard information to come by.

What separates the haves from the have-nots? It's not blogs.
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