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Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

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Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#221

Post by donw »

belgian_guy wrote: post #214
donw wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What kind of technology enabled wealth gap in feudal society? In short: Weapons. On the pre-gunpowder battlefield, the mounted, armored knight was roughly equivalent to the modern light tank. It is incredibly hard to take out an armored knight with the kind of weapons or tools which would have been available to peasants or serfs, so it doesn't take that many knights to keep enough peasants in-line to build a very w…

Following this reasoning, why didn't the enlightenment occur in asia, which had earlier access to gunpowder? Iirc the ottoman empire had portable guns before the west. And china had fire lances way before that.

Because the Enlightenment was a complex social phenomenon with multiple prerequisites...?

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#222

Post by downandout »

mstipetic wrote: post #76
downandout wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxpayers not only recovered everything from the 2008 bailouts, they actually earned a $15.3 billion profit. How is that “socializing their biggest failures”? From [1]: Early estimates for the total cost of the bailout to the government were as much as $700 billion, however TARP recovered funds totalling $441.7 billion from $426.4 billion invested, earning a $15.3 billion profit or an annualized rate of return of 0.6…

It’s easy to make a profit when everyone is strapped for cash and you have an infinite supply

Perhaps, but the point was that these banks in no way “socialized their biggest failures”.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#223

Post by imtringued »

anonytrary wrote: post #81

In the extreme case, what if the minimum wage was $500000000 dollars. That would not work, and it would create a society where everything is done under the table. Now, keep halving that value and ask at what point do people no longer feel required to do things under the table in order to make a basic living (sans criminals). It's not obvious what the right number is. On the other extreme, if the minimum wage was $0,…

>At some point in the next millennium, all work will be creative work and the concept of a minimum wage probably won't even make sense anymore.

That would require us to stop our biological urges to reproduce endlessly. No matter how much technological advancement you have, if the population grows faster than technological progress you're not going to have the necessary surplus for an utopia.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#224

Post by downandout »

imtringued wrote: post #211
downandout wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government is not a hedge fund. It has no expertise in running businesses. Had they done what your are suggesting, the markets wouldn’t have reacted the way they did, the companies would have gone bankrupt under government mismanagement, the economy would have continued to crater, and not $1 of the money would have been recovered. It turns out that the architects of this bailout were very smart about the way they…

The government isn't supposed to run the company. It's supposed to get an ownership stake to compensate for the risk it takes on. The bank would just issue additional non voting shares and sell those to the government as a punishment for the share holders of the banks and teach them a lesson to not put their money into mismanaged companies.

They wouldn’t have taken non-voting shares if this were the stance they were taking. When the government owns a controlling interest in a private company, investors will shy away from it. Even if the government doesn’t run the day-to-day operations, they can replace management at-will with people who will obey commands based upon political interests of the ruling party. That is an unacceptable risk to many investors. Ultimately, if they own it, they run it.

The point is that the outcome would not have been the same, because investors would not have treated the companies the same.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#225

Post by imtringued »

drewrv wrote: post #15
strictnein wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. And how it turned out is that very, very few people earn minimum wage. In 1979 it was 13.4% In 2017 it was 2.3% In 2017, 1% of workers aged 25 or older earned minimum wage. 8% of working teenagers do. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2017/home.htm

Somebody earning pennies more than minimum wage would be excluded from this analysis, despite the fact that they’re earning poverty wages and would benefit from an increase to the minimum wage. > the Congressional Budget Office released its analysis of the Raise the Wage Act of 2021, reporting that increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour would affect 17 million workers who are currently making below that.…

>, despite the fact that they’re earning poverty wages and would benefit from an increase to the minimum wage.

It could lose them their job, or not. You don't know that. Nobody knows that. That's why if you must raise the minimum wage, you do it slowly, step by step.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#226

Post by imtringued »

dbspin wrote: post #54
strictnein wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. And how it turned out is that very, very few people earn minimum wage. In 1979 it was 13.4% In 2017 it was 2.3% In 2017, 1% of workers aged 25 or older earned minimum wage. 8% of working teenagers do. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2017/home.htm

You realise your point is moot right? The economic arguments against the minimum wage rely on the idea that it's a necessity to underpay for business to function. The less people underpaid, the less strong the argument for having to ensure a low or no minimum wage.

The economic arguments against minimum wage are that you are not underpaying the employees in the first place. If the only job these people can do pays minimum wage then that is how it is. If they could do better jobs they wouldn't get paid minimum wage. Therefore the minimum wage either does nothing and is purely cosmetic or when it does something it prevents the labor market from functioning properly.

It's like rent control. It's just a tool for politicians to deflect blame and shift the problem elsewhere for the benefit of their own careers.

Meanwhile a job guarantee would actually solve the problem by putting a salary floor but since everyone is asking for a minimum wage increase it is not going to happen.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#227

Post by imtringued »

xupybd wrote: post #14

NZ just raised our min wage to $20 an hour. I work at least 50 hours a week. A teenager at MacDonalds now earns a good fraction of my income if they work the same hours. Despite my 4 year degree, near decade of experience and the responsibility's that I hold.

Yes, it's time to get a new job.

That's the funny part about the minimum wage. The psychological effect causes people to seek better jobs, but that is about it.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#228

Post by imtringued »

kristopolous wrote: post #165
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know what university is like in New Zealand. I live here and went to university not long ago. The fact that your debt is interest free is nice, but it's still debt. Whether you would like to admit it or not, higher education is at least partially an economic decision.

Sure. As it currently exists But I refuse to be confined by the structures intentionally legislated by decades of Austrian economic policy to try to convince me that there is no alternative. The debt could be erased, for example, if someone chooses a position of high societal ROI, such as say, an urban planner. Reward people if a need of society is satisfied. Things can trivially be reshaped to encourage what we want…

Considering the low yield on treasury bonds it would be foolish to not invest that money into higher education. After all, if you just let it sit there it is going nowhere. It's neither going to employ people today, nor ensure that workers of the future are highly qualified.

The fact that you mentioned Austrian economics is actually quite relevant here. All economic theories are ideologically driven because there is no meaning of life. There is no objective metric to optimize for. Austrian economics' goal is the minimum possible economy. Inflation driven ideologies have the maximum possible economy as their goal. We get to choose what we want for ourselves and we definitively should use that power.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#229

Post by imtringued »

akvadrako wrote: post #146
Tade0 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But robots don't actually replace these workers. In the case of McDonald's the kiosks only generated more throughput, actually adding work, so all the staff assigned to taking orders was put into other work. Meanwhile self-checkout, while actually reducing throughput somewhat, made it possible for the workers to take on other tasks in the store - of which there are many.

There isnt that many jobs in a grocery store that need many people. Stocking shelves and cleaning mostly. Once those are automated there will be a lot less jobs.

There is this robot called Marty whose reason for existence I still have to discover. I thought it was a roomba style robot but with a camera for navigation. Turns out it does nothing except make the messes it reports to staff even worse.

Re: Min wage would be $44 / hour if it had grown at same rate as Wall Street bonuses

#230

Post by krapp »

imtringued wrote: post #229
akvadrako wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isnt that many jobs in a grocery store that need many people. Stocking shelves and cleaning mostly. Once those are automated there will be a lot less jobs.

There is this robot called Marty whose reason for existence I still have to discover. I thought it was a roomba style robot but with a camera for navigation. Turns out it does nothing except make the messes it reports to staff even worse.

According to a Twitter post I can no longer track down, those robots exist primarily to shield stores from lawsuits over spillage.
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