71–80 of 252 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poverty metrics were improving.
These two seem at odds, are we defining poverty in such a way that it's decoupled from the expected living standard of the age?
Alternative title: "events of 2020 case poverty rate to regress to 2017/2018 levels" Frankly I'm surprised the effect was so small considering that the industries hit hardest by covid employ a heck of a lot of people who are near the poverty line to begin with. I would expect all those people to be pushed to the other side of the line resulting in a much more dramatic increase in the poverty rate.
>Frankly I'm surprised the effect was so small It's not over yet! And won't be for a long time. There are a lot of people just scrapping by right now. All it will take is one big financial hit to knock them down into true poverty.
Alternative title: "events of 2020 case poverty rate to regress to 2017/2018 levels" Frankly I'm surprised the effect was so small considering that the industries hit hardest by covid employ a heck of a lot of people who are near the poverty line to begin with. I would expect all those people to be pushed to the other side of the line resulting in a much more dramatic increase in the poverty rate.
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This only holds true for places where there's no room to increase the staffing budget. There are some industries where it might have an effect, restaurants/coffee shops in particular. But I wouldn't expect mass produced goods/foodstuffs to increase much if at all, simply because of how efficiently the labour is utilised. There are also be potential productivity gains from having workers in a more financially stable p…
> This only holds true for places where there's no room to increase the staffing budget. Amazon. Enjoy your monoculture.
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Agreed, the reason minimum wage is bad policy and unethical is that you're making it illegal to pay someone below a certain threshold, which stated differently is making it illegal for a sufficiently unskilled worker to get any job. But I don't see how minimum wage could be inflationary, but if it were it certainly wouldn't be enough to "wipe out savings" - that requires hyperinflation.
If you made a minimum wage that was significantly above the prevailing wage I'd expect to see inflation in a economy like the US. My wager would be that dollars that are currently chasing returns in the stock market may shift to wages resulting in those same dollars now trying to buy consumer goods rather than stock. We might not call that inflation in the economy generally as after all stocks would "deflate" during…
OK ... but if the money supply stays the same, then all you're doing is just shifting the demand curves from one set of products (stocks) to another (TVs?). Put anther way, some things will go up, and some things will go down because spending habits changed. This happens now. It's not inflation just because the price of roses goes up in February.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed, the reason minimum wage is bad policy and unethical is that you're making it illegal to pay someone below a certain threshold, which stated differently is making it illegal for a sufficiently unskilled worker to get any job. But I don't see how minimum wage could be inflationary, but if it were it certainly wouldn't be enough to "wipe out savings" - that requires hyperinflation.
If you made a minimum wage that was significantly above the prevailing wage I'd expect to see inflation in a economy like the US. My wager would be that dollars that are currently chasing returns in the stock market may shift to wages resulting in those same dollars now trying to buy consumer goods rather than stock. We might not call that inflation in the economy generally as after all stocks would "deflate" during…
Since 2009 people on the Internet have been prophesizing about massive inflation and inflation has been extremely low.
Maybe they will one day be right, but like the boy who cried wolf nobody should be listening to warnings about inflation from people on the internet, as a class they don't have any idea what they are talking about.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poverty metrics were improving.
These two seem at odds, are we defining poverty in such a way that it's decoupled from the expected living standard of the age?
What is bad is extreme inequality where a lot of people are in poverty. I think most people would agree that poverty is a bad thing that we should try to reduce.
It's quite possible for poverty to decrease and inequality to increase at the same time. The old "a rising tide lifts all boats" analogy. It just means everyone is doing better but the wealthy are seeing more relative gains. If the whole pie is growing, it's easy to see how everyone could get more pie even if it's not distributed equally.
edit If you disagree please state why. Drive by downvotes do not convince me that I'm mistaken, they just lower my opinion of the average HN user.
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Minimum wage just forces some ppl to do more productive stuff. It will take away some jobs but you probably dont want such jobs in developed country. It's just better to allow more part-time work IMO. I would like some opinion of Dutch ppl on their part time work law, which seems interesting to me.
You want those jobs, but you don't want people to make careers out of those jobs. Someone in high school should be working those jobs, someone supporting a family or trying to build a career shouldn't be! Not sure how to solve this issue though... Age-based minimum wage? Something else?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Poverty metrics were improving.
These two seem at odds, are we defining poverty in such a way that it's decoupled from the expected living standard of the age?
The danger on one side is falling into a sort of hedonic treadmill issue where the poverty level defines a standard of living that is so generous that it ceases to be a measurement of hardship. The danger on the other side is fixing the poverty level at some static level that doesn't take into consideration inflation and other changes to the environment that people actually live their lives in.
The poverty rate is an awful metric. It simply counts the number of people who earn below a certain income. So people dipping $1 below the line are counted the same as those dipping $10,000 below the line. So, poverty-rate alleviation measures can be implemented simply by focusing on the top end of those under the limit - of course, this doesn't help much. What we should really worry about is the poverty gap - the am…
> What we should really worry about is the poverty gap - the amount of income people need to get people above the poverty line. Is that not showing an increase right now too? I mean, I don't disagree that serious analysis needs more info than a single number. But... what's the policy distinction here that you're trying to argue? There's no mystery to the current situation: people are out of work due to the pandemic a…
If they are all making $10 below the limit then you can evenly distribute the money and reduce the gap by 10% while keeping the poverty rate the same. Or you can give all of the money to only 10% of the population and reduce the poverty rate by 10% while the gap remains the same.