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MIT Living Wage Calculator

livingwage.mit.edu

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Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#61

Post by overgard »

prepend wrote: post #10

I don’t think this is very accurate. In my county the “living wage” is $26.50 for a single adult with no children. Many young people I know live on much less than this. This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable. For example, transportation costs are $9000/year and housing is $20000/year. Thes…

Hard disagree on this. $26.50 sounds like a nightmare 10 years ago, let alone now. There's a lot of places in the US where having a car is essentially mandatory (actually, most places). If you can't afford a car, that limits where you can live to mostly urban areas, which then pushes the housing cost up.. and by the way, housing costs are always going up, and no, you won't be able to invest in a home, you've been priced out by developers and speculators.

Not to mention you need to be able to save money for unemployment and rainy days..

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#62

Post by NewJazz »

cm2012 wrote: post #51
prepend wrote: post #10

I don’t think this is very accurate. In my county the “living wage” is $26.50 for a single adult with no children. Many young people I know live on much less than this. This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable. For example, transportation costs are $9000/year and housing is $20000/year. Thes…

Edit: Deleted for dumb math

Your 130k number is >2x what it should be. Recalculate.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#63

Post by JamesBarney »

0sdi wrote: post #24

Someone is siphoning your value. It's quite obvious when you track the productivity, or ask questions about how did your great-grandpa survive at all without machines. Just stating the obvious, don't mind me.

They lived in a house or apt with a third the sqft/person that was far more likely to catch fire and didn't have AC.

If they had a car they most likely shared it. It was far less safe, didn't have AC, guzzled gas and polluted.

Never ate out and spent a third of earnings on cheap grocery store staples.

College and healthcare was much cheaper, and they got a lot less of it.

We're benefiting greatly from the increase in productivity. We just view our great-grandfather luxuries as our necessities.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#64

Post by pyrale »

prepend wrote: post #10

I don’t think this is very accurate. In my county the “living wage” is $26.50 for a single adult with no children. Many young people I know live on much less than this. This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable. For example, transportation costs are $9000/year and housing is $20000/year. Thes…

> This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.”

An appartment and a car aren't exactly luxury goods. Cars are often needed to work, and well, having a roof over your head is usually required for a decent living.

Sure, if you fancy living in a cardboard box located next to your work, your living standards are going to be much easier to attain.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#65

Post by cwillu »

bumby wrote: post #36

Anecdotally, I found some of the costs like food and food to be inflated. When I looked at the methodology, some is based on consumer surveys so it may be more reflective of over-consumption. In other words, it prices in what people want or what they’re used to, not what they need. The counterpoint is that maybe some wealthy countries should be pricing in a higher quality of life, but the “living wage” then becomes a…

Yes, that's what makes it a living wage instead of a poverty wage, let alone a starvation wage.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#66

Post by Traster »

I fell out of love with the living wage when the UK government bumped minimum wage and called it living wage. The government kept on getting raked over the coals by charities who claimed that people working minimum wage were in poverty and so our govenrment bumped the minimum wage by a bit and then announced it as "This is the new NATIONAL LIVING WAGE". Which is just perfect politics. You're the government, so you can just take a term. Trump can brand the Gulf of America, and the UK Tories can just redefine the living wage. Now those charities are stuffed because any time they talk about a living wage everyone gets confused, it cuts the legs out of the conversation.

The core of the problem is that you basically have to have someone define what is an acceptable standard of living. Sharing a flat? Nah, the MIT trained economist thinks that's for the poverty people so that is defined as below living wage. Walk to work? No. You need atleast $10k a year on travel otherwise you're a bus wanker.

A huge amount of this is value judgements on what is an acceptable standard of living from people who benefit from immense privilege but will never experience the thing they're studying.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#67

Post by NewJazz »

Larrikin wrote: post #60
bumby wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I’ve eat pretty well, and my household food costs are almost half what the calculator shows. Similar for vehicle costs etc. After looking at the method, I think the calculator probably has some bias towards “what society has convinced us we need”. To a certain extent that is a relative and subjective perception problem, and one exacerbated when you live in a society with a lot of consumer debt.

What does eating pretty well mean to you? Maybe you don't even if you think you do? We don't know without your budget or a receipt from your typical grocery run

Also some folks are just smaller than others.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#68

Post by bobro »

cwillu wrote: post #49
prepend wrote: post #10

I don’t think this is very accurate. In my county the “living wage” is $26.50 for a single adult with no children. Many young people I know live on much less than this. This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable. For example, transportation costs are $9000/year and housing is $20000/year. Thes…

You're confusing poverty with living.

Having a roommate and an annual transportation budget under $9000 probably isn’t the right demarcation line for poverty.

Re: MIT Living Wage Calculator

#69

Post by racl101 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #27
ninalanyon wrote: post #6

2080 hours per year! That's 52 weeks of 40 hours per week. It's also inhuman. Here in Norway we have five weeks of holiday plus various public holidays and only 37.5 hours per week adding up to about 1700 hours per year.

Urban workers in China do 3,744 hours per year; farmers do 2400 hours Norwegian workers do 1,418 hours per year, one of the lowest in the world

3744 hours. Dayum!

Just going off basic numbers:

- 3744/52/5 = 14.4 hour day if they work 5 days a week

- 3744/52/6 = 12 hrs if they work 6 days a week

- 3744/52/7 = 10.3 hrs if they work 7 days a week.

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