Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not only the prices but the specifics of what "livable" means. For some it just means the essentials, to others it includes luxuries.
No, it's defined fairly clearly.
Where can I see the definition?
What harm do minimum wages do?
761–770 of 776 posts
Re: What harm do minimum wages do?
#762Earlier quoted context omitted.
The customers of McDonalds are other poor people. The margins are already slim. If you raise prices to cover the minimum wage those poor customers won't eat at McDonalds.
If you raise the minimum wage those poor people won't be as poor. And since the labor is only a fraction of the cost of the burger the poor people come out ahead. The danger is inflation, but honestly we're in bigger danger of deflation these days.
Labor is most of the cost of the burger, whether it’s the labor to sell it, the labor to cook it, the labor to transport it, the labor to butcher/harvest it, the labor to tend to it prior to butcher/harvest, etc. And the expense of ALL of that labor will inevitably increase causing the price of goods to increase causing the price of labor to increase and so on...
Re: What harm do minimum wages do?
#763Earlier quoted context omitted.
The selection of a CEO absolutely contributes to the benefit or detriment of revenue.
But not in a way that scales linearly with CEO pay.
Yet, I have stock in companies whose stock massively increased after a new CEO. The stock never rose above a certain point for years, until the new CEO made it drastically rise. The workers seemingly did nothing different, yet the CEO made tweaks here and there and crafted communications in specific ways.
A good CEO is absolutely invaluable.
Re: What harm do minimum wages do?
#764Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because it is better than nothing doesn't mean that it is right. My point still stands: If you can't pay a living wage, don't have a business where you need to hire other people.
Or you could could have such a business and allow people to decide whether they want to work there or not.
Jobs don't work like that, though. To be able to pass up work is a luxury - the employer really has the upper hand. This is doubly so at low wages: No Food & no shelter unless you work isn't a free choice. Doubly so when the bits of safety net available require work in many cases - if they truly exist at all. (been years, but Indiana had zero cash help for single folks without kids. I guess adults could just go die on the street). Wage slavery sucks.
Now, if there were a real safety net - UBI, or something else that gives enough to live a normal life and afford a computer, internet, food, shelter, and reasonable hobbies - well, then, we can reconsider. Until we have choice with viable options - including not working for exploitative employers - then we might be able to do such things.
Re: What harm do minimum wages do?
#765Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair point. Animals eat each other, and that process is pretty cruel at times. Do animals have a mental concept of cruelty though? Of guilt? I suspect most don't. That does not make their actions less cruel, but it reduces the blame perhaps. We humans know exactly what's going on. Wr do it anyway. We keep animals in horrible conditions. And we know it. Yet we keep doing it. We treat each other horribly. We have reall…
> Do animals have a mental concept of cruelty though? Of guilt? I suspect most don't. What if a human, or groups of humans, don't feel any guilt or don't believe what they're doing is cruel? I don't think that would help you sleep better... Also, at least some animals are, in fact, capable of complex emotions. Pigs, apparently, can feel empathy: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/animal-emotions/2015... It shoul…
Sure, if animals would be like humans, they would behave like humans. But that's not an argument to excuse what humans are doing.
If I was just like some serial killer, then I'd also behave like a serial killer. Does that mean the other serial killer should not get punished? No. It just means that I should be pun8ished too if I was like them.
But I'm not really arguing humans-vs-animals. I'm arguing against world-is-dark-humans-are-light. It's the world that's light and humans who make it dark, for other humans. With exceptions of course.
Cancer is a bad example. It doesn't have an agenda. It's just a side effect of some mutation or such. Sure we can consider it dark. But compared to humans who actually have an agenda, i.e., they choose to be dark, that's a different ballpark.
Re: What harm do minimum wages do?
#766> Textbooks state that, in the absence of a minimum wage, a worker is paid his “marginal product of labour”, which means the value of what he produces. > Just as a monopolist can set prices higher than would be the case in a competitive market, a monopsonist can set prices artificially lower. A lot of economic arguments forget these ideas. The labor market is not a free market: companies have more power in negotiatio…
> The only way to counter that push is by giving more power to the worker, and in low-skilled fields with lots of available workers, you need to do that through regulations and subsidies.
The only way? You don't think unions can give more power to the worker?
Re: What harm do minimum wages do?
#767> Firms do not know how much each worker contributes to their revenues.
THIS. So obnoxious when free-market dogmatists make arguments based on that bullshit assumption.
Re: What harm do minimum wages do?
#768Earlier quoted context omitted.
But not in a way that scales linearly with CEO pay.
Yet, I have stock in companies whose stock massively increased after a new CEO. The stock never rose above a certain point for years, until the new CEO made it drastically rise. The workers seemingly did nothing different, yet the CEO made tweaks here and there and crafted communications in specific ways. A good CEO is absolutely invaluable.
Stock price ≠ productivity
Re: What harm do minimum wages do?
#769Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a faulty argument. Value to an individual is very different to value to a market. Value in this sense is the aggregate of the individual values to all of the buyers and all of the sellers. Price and value only match when supply and demand are at equilibrium.
What aggregate do you use? Mean? Median? Mode? Second moment? Wealth-weighted average? Buying-likelihood weighted average? How do you avoid Simpson's paradoxes?
You make a good point, but obviously different datasets and scenarios require different methods, and the detail of any approach is less important than starting out with valid assumptions.
Re: What harm do minimum wages do?
#770Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet, I have stock in companies whose stock massively increased after a new CEO. The stock never rose above a certain point for years, until the new CEO made it drastically rise. The workers seemingly did nothing different, yet the CEO made tweaks here and there and crafted communications in specific ways. A good CEO is absolutely invaluable.
Stock price ≠ productivity
Stock price = company value of a publicly traded company.
A CEO differs from a General Manager.
"A chief executive officer (CEO) is the highest-ranking executive in a company, whose primary responsibilities include making major corporate decisions, managing the overall operations and resources of a company, acting as the main point of communication between the board of directors (the board) and corporate operations and being the public face of the company. A CEO is elected by the board and its shareholders." ~ https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/ceo.asp
"A general manager (GM) is in charge of part or all of a company's operations, including generating revenue and controlling costs." ~ https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/general-manager.asp