Having been born in a developing countries and went to US for university and work sometime there, I can say that US minimum salary and the other related perks are already significantly way better of most of emerging countries.
Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
141–150 of 632 posts
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And you think immigrants are responsible for this? Entirely? No. Partially? Yes. Most notably immigration has a huge impact on housing and the ever increasing demand for it. This alone is responsible for much of the fall in living standards.
> Most notably immigration has a huge impact on housing and the ever increasing demand for it. Do you have any evidence at all for this claim or is this just something you made up out of thin air? I mean, no offense, but I remember when Brexiters were claiming the same [1] earlier this year and it was quickly proven to be nonsense. Maybe you can do a better job? [1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/13/hou…
I need a citation for "more people == more housing demand"?
I really don't care what academics say about the cause because they're divorced from reality. The reality is that as a single, well payed software developer with no kids I'm now on the downward slope of paying off the mortgage of my small studio apartment. My father at the same age had 2 kids, a stay at home wife and was on the downward slope of paying off their 4 bedroom house with a huge yard and a pool, all on a minimum wage job.
Yet economists keep telling us how much richer this generation is.
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
The suppression of dialogue surrounding immigration far exceeds downvotes in scope and severity. In fact, the suggestion that tosser00001's main point had anything to do with silly internet points is a minimization/redirection tactic that is itself a more important instance of the very thing being complained about.
> The suppression of dialogue surrounding immigration far exceeds downvotes in scope and severity. The problem with the anti-immigrant zealots is they never provide any evidence for their paranoid fantasies about immigrants increasing unemployment or supressing wages. People who actually study the economic impact of immigration in the West have generally concluded it has insignificant impact or improves the economy.…
As an example, I posted the following a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17384668 ):
"Private business was just one of several examples I gave to illustrate principles which hold across a wide range of scales of human organization.
It is straightforward to verify that they don't stop holding at nation-scale. A good place to start is Lee Kuan Yew, who's both one of the only leaders in history to preside over the entire transition from Third World to First World for millions of people, and an architect of what's currently the most open immigration policy among Chinese-majority states. Singapore is a multicultural place whose government is widely acknowledged to have one of the best technocratic track records in the world, and they spent considerable effort on trying to get immigration policy right, iterating through alternatives while deliberately taking a popularity hit; what were their conclusions?
Or what are the odds, under your stated worldview, that two of the closest things to actual open borders existing in 2018 are (i) the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, which lets almost anyone stay as long as they can support themselves ...but ranges from 74 to 81 degrees N latitude, and (ii) the United Arab Emirates, which has more than five times as many expats as actual citizens, the largest number from India ...but ruthlessly maintains a two-tiered society, where even people who were born in the UAE and have lived there their entire lives are exceedingly unlikely to be granted citizenship unless they are Arab?
Contrary to claims that nothing like open borders has ever been tried, the existence of cases like this make it abundantly clear that this area of policy space has already been subject to substantial exploration. And every surviving result has an obvious and unusual force that does something similar to what traditional immigration controls accomplish in most countries, such as Svalbard's -40C winters. This is, to put it mildly, not a likely result if traditional immigration controls no longer have a useful function."
It may not be the final word on this subject. But it certainly points out several relevant, usually-neglected pieces of evidence. What did I get from my conversation partner as a reward? A downvote and no further response, of course; they weren't actually interested in truth or dialogue. The more I see this, the more strongly I advise everyone else to prepare to do whatever is necessary for self-defense against these people.
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#144>American productivity has increased by 77 percent, while hourly pay has grown by only 12 percent Yes but where has this happened. I suspect it's happened through automation. Meaning that the productivity gains might not be per employee and might not easily translate into the pockets of workers.
Or, perhaps, David Graeber wrote in his book «Bullshit Jobs» that at least a part of the gains inflates the bullshit part of businesses, i. e. more bullshit managers are employed. Of course this means that the hourly pay would rise. I don't know.
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#145I broke out of poverty. Why can't they do it too? It was a simple thing for me, a combination of studying hard, focusing on my future and the death of my father. You see, my parents were both fishermen. It's a grueling, painful job that can destroy your body as you age leaving you with back problems and forcing you to retire early. It also paid poorly and had a lot of risks. Which unfortunately for us, resulted in th…
* Hard work
* Smart decisions (your mother deciding to go after the other and putting the money off)
* Luck (pro-bono lawyer, and your father's death in some sense)
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can actually hold for immigration to some degree. For example, while not exactly doubling, the entry of women into the workforce after WWII had a similar effect of massively increasing the the supply of labour. You would think that two income earners in a household would increase the economy enough that wages would need to rise due to a subsequent shortage of labor... but it did not. Wages, in real terms, have lar…
> Wages, in real terms, have largely lost purchasing power to the point where it takes two incomes to have the same (or less) purchasing power than one income did prior to WWII. I don't think that is true. Even if you exclude management jobs, hourly wages have remained roughly steady in real terms since the 1960's: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-... There are also longitudinal effects at…
Both of these things are pretty important - college education can be life altering in terms of career trajectory, and owning a house is an entry point into the wealth ladder and also simply an escape from rent. In real terms, the cost of these has runaway over the past 20-30 years and so people's access to two crucial things that aid social mobility (wealth/housing and education) have been eroding over the years. But apparently because our money can still buy a basket of goods we should be satisfied that our lives haven't gotten any worse.
For me, and I'm pretty sure it's quite complex and I am guilty of Dunning Kruger wrt politics and economics, I simply cannot understand how inflation can get away without finding a way of placing these in the basket of goods used to calculate inflation.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-property-poll/u-s-hou...
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're ignoring the demand side. Immigrants also increase demand. For everything.
Imagine an extremely simplified model where all immigrants to a city are experienced taxi drivers. There's more demand for goods, but probably only a small uptick in demand for taxis. The supply of available taxi drivers has gone way up however.
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#148Interest rate targeting uses an unemployment buffer to keep wages and therefore prices under control. Poverty for those in work is entirely part of the plan. To fix the poverty problem you need to fix the structural viewpoint and return to the Beveridge condition - everybody must have an alternative living wage job offer available to them so that job competition works properly in favour of people. There must always be more jobs available than people that want them, not slightly fewer.
But that then runs into what Kalecki called "The Political Aspects of Full Employment" - a recommended read if you haven't already: https://mronline.org/2010/05/22/political-aspects-of-full-em...
Truly a 'wicked problem' - tied up with the concept of power
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s more complicated than that though. In Denmark where I live, we have trouble staffing certain industry jobs. Jobs like gutting, freezing and packing fish or general slaughter houses. It used to be that these were low paying jobs, packed with immigrants. Since you need a social security number to work, and we’re rather good at finding people who cheat the system, illegal immigration workers isn’t really a thing in…
Your story is very confusing. If (legal) immigrant workers were willing to work for a lower pay (because of the low-pay loopholes) why wouldn't they be willing to work now for a higher pay?
Re: Americans Want to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not
#150Wage growth would help, but for some reason, these articles never even mention immigration. The scale of immigration both legal and illegal I believe has the greatest impact on the lowest sectors of society. The lack of discussion on the impact so many potential new workers is having on wage growth leads one to think they believe labor cost is the one thing immune to the law of supply and demand.