601–610 of 786 posts
OK, well let's look at the stimulus effects in the US. We have a real world example of a short term experiment like UBI. It shook up the labor market and now you've got worker shortages. People aren't working unless they have to. Everyone has to offer more money. I'm.happy about all this BTW. But it certainly goes against the claim in this article.
Nothing like UBI since it was combined with paying people not to work.
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>And the pay would obviously go up. Maybe. Many jobs can be automated, but it was cheaper to just hire minimum wage people to do a job. If the pay required to find people got to be too high, automation would happen more rapidly.
If a job doesn't need doing, why waste a human's labor on it? Though that said, I remember not too long ago a lot of people saying "oh if minimum wage goes over $15 we'll just automate the jobs" and now the McDonalds by my house is offering $23/hr for entry level work and robots are nowhere to be seen.
It’s all happening in Asia and we outsource our manufacturing to them. This won’t end well for America.
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If you make human labor more expensive, those jobs get replaced by machines. (see in broad lines eg. US North (machines) vs South (slavery) in first half of 19th century)
Or they just cease to be done , and the business that rely on their labour shutter, reducing access to the goods/services that the produced. If we were to increase the minimum wage 10x, what do you think would change about the economy? Do you think goods that are heavily labour-reliant would still cost what they do today? Any change like this will have an impact, it's just a matter of degree.
If you increase the minimum wage by 10x, well... quite some low wage work wouldn't actually cost 10x a single person's wage to automate. Depending on the nature of the good or service, the price might go up a bit at first to recover development costs, and later it might go down drastically once those costs are recovered.
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If you make human labor more expensive, those jobs get replaced by machines. (see in broad lines eg. US North (machines) vs South (slavery) in first half of 19th century)
Or they just cease to be done , and the business that rely on their labour shutter, reducing access to the goods/services that the produced. If we were to increase the minimum wage 10x, what do you think would change about the economy? Do you think goods that are heavily labour-reliant would still cost what they do today? Any change like this will have an impact, it's just a matter of degree.
If we increased the minimum wage 10x and somehow that policy was binding, there would be a whole lot of involuntary unemployment, workers' overall income would plummet and we would have a deep economic depression. But there's nothing that suggests such effects from an economically viable UBI. Such an UBI would barely be enough for subsistence, possibly not even that, so people would still choose to work if only to acquire some disposable income. For every single thing that 'ceased to be done' because of increased expenses, there would be growing employment in some other, higher-productivity sector.
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Depends on the factory and what you're doing there. Last time I worked in a factory I was debugging printer-eating robots, shooting high powered lasers at things, and blowing stuff around with blasts of compressed air. (And I got to program all those things). You haven't really debugged things until your tests involve forklifts and 10t cranes. O:-)
I wish, this was more about working several summers near a large, hot furnace with no AC.
Fortunately people are working to make that kind of thing less necessary (though it can't be eliminated completely of course; someone still needs to watch and maintain the machines).
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Or they just cease to be done , and the business that rely on their labour shutter, reducing access to the goods/services that the produced. If we were to increase the minimum wage 10x, what do you think would change about the economy? Do you think goods that are heavily labour-reliant would still cost what they do today? Any change like this will have an impact, it's just a matter of degree.
> If we were to increase the minimum wage 10x, what do you think would change about the economy? If we increased the minimum wage 10x and somehow that policy was binding, there would be a whole lot of involuntary unemployment, workers' overall income would plummet and we would have a deep economic depression. But there's nothing that suggests such effects from an economically viable UBI. Such an UBI would barely be e…
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There's no competing with UBI. People with jobs still get UBI. That's what the "U" part means: Universal. Pay for waiters and labourers, like pay for everyone else, is on top of UBI. There's no particular reason it would have to rise by 2x or 3x—unless the industry is categorically unwilling or unable to ensure that their workers are treated well enough that they just don't see it as being worthwhile for less.
I'm arguing that there are many industries that would not survive workers having an alternative that provides for their basic needs, or would be transformed into niche, artisanal goods/services that would be out of reach of ordinary people.
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> If we were to increase the minimum wage 10x, what do you think would change about the economy? If we increased the minimum wage 10x and somehow that policy was binding, there would be a whole lot of involuntary unemployment, workers' overall income would plummet and we would have a deep economic depression. But there's nothing that suggests such effects from an economically viable UBI. Such an UBI would barely be e…
Didn't Henry Ford actually do something like this for his own workers? He paid a much higher wage than his competitors, on the argument that his own workers should be able to afford the factory's products.
(In fact, I would argue that high-paying manufacturing jobs have always required some degree of skill, even when this kind of manufacturing work was especially common in the West.)
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Of course. Printing money inflates its supply. And increasing the demand for products (by providing easy money) without increasing the supply of products (and actually decreasing it by restricting work) will lead to higher prices. It is economics 101 and it was tested by many countries eg Germany before the WW or more recently Venezuela.
Sorry, yes, printing money leads to inflation. I was asking for evidence that "We already have a big inflation problem that is directly related to policies that rain money on those not working." is the source of a large portion of inflation instead of the multitude of other reasons that money is printed. Of the recent $4 trillion coronavirus payout, only about a fifth of that went to workers or their families[1], and…
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Didn't Henry Ford actually do something like this for his own workers? He paid a much higher wage than his competitors, on the argument that his own workers should be able to afford the factory's products.
He paid high wages because he was in fact offering highly-skilled work for his time, a bit like Elon Musk is doing today. The "our workers should be able to afford the product" thing was a clever meme/bit of marketing. (In fact, I would argue that high-paying manufacturing jobs have always required some degree of skill, even when this kind of manufacturing work was especially common in the West.)