Comment by throwaway34241 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway34241 | Hacker News Reader

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> The best way to help poor people is to lower the minimum wage so they can get jobs.

Raising the minimum wage can have a negative effect on jobs, but unless it's hard to find minimum wage jobs right now, I don't see what lowering the minimum wage will achieve. Also there's labor force participation to consider - if unskilled jobs are too low paying, some people at the margins will choose not to participate (for example, by living with their parents).

> Subsidizing the poor increases consumption which is bad not only for the first order effect (throwing away money)... but also for the little thought of second order effect: it incentivizes people to build businesses that cater to consumption that was in the first place unsustainable.

> Our government should invest the majority of capital in basic research, healthcare, education and infrastructure

Consumption funded by debt may be bad, but I wouldn't suggest that consumption (in other words, having a consumer-driven economy) is throwing away money. Many goods that people spend their own money on (consumer electronics, cars, clothing, etc) have competitive markets with reasonable prices and/or steady improvements. On the contrary to throwing away money, it seems pretty efficient at delivering utility. Especially when compared to recent trends in healthcare, education, and infrastructure.

I agree with some of the other comments that productivity determines the long-run living standards of a country, and that consumption is not investment and it may be a bad idea to finance it with debt. But I don't think the answer is to reduce people's ability to consume goods & services, but rather to enable doing it in a sustainable way.

The decreases in price for these consumer goods you mention came largely as a result of globalization and offshoring of production. Our economy went upmarket towards services which were largely meant to facilitate this consumption (eg advertising and mass media). The American public became lazy, conditioned to consume and entitled.

The modern American consumer is only in debt because debt is so easy to obtain, not because his wages are too low to survive.

Visit Latin America or Asia where there throngs of people much happier and healthier on far less. The welfare state makes the familial structure unnecessary in America — I won’t comment on this. But it is a third order effect even more deeply troubling than the economic ones I highlighted earlier.

Electronics manufacturing has been outsourced for a long time, but the prices still fall (and labor is not getting any cheaper in China). Both electronics and cars are designed in the US and many cars are made here. I'll give that clothing is mostly about outsourcing.

I can agree maybe broadly that there are social trends in the US that are contributing to people being unhappy, but I don't think lowering the minimum wage will put that particular cat back in that particular bag. And besides, is it really minimum wage workers, of all people, who are lazy and entitled? Most minimum wage jobs are not particularly pleasant and you just have to do the work and put up with it, and you aren't showered with free food, high salaries and other perks. Do other countries where entry-level workers have it better have more social problems?

I suppose maybe they are entitled compared to some third-world countries. What does that make a tech worker then? We complain about the free food not infrequently.

I think attempting to blanket punish people who are willing to work but don't have valuable skills in the global labor market, will only backfire politically, and probably deservedly so.

I agree it is too late to enact things like a lower minimum wage — the damage is already done.

The real problem came from cheap consumer credit... everything in our economy is built around the existence of such credit. Consumers are conditioned and targeted to consume and borrow. Full stop.

Same thing happened with education — 4 years of productive time were siphoned towards college degrees that didn’t mean much.

This is the gutting of the middle class... not fiscal conservatism.

The student loan thing (and the cost inflation) is definitely part of it.

I'd also point to globalization and technological changes - unskilled labor is less valuable when there's more supply from automation and outsourcing. And technology has enabled more consolidation even on the nation level - it's now easier for one company to service the entire market; think Amazon vs local shops, or Uber vs local taxi companies. Better communication and transport joins many local markets into one big market and creates fewer, bigger winners.

Land use policies probably have something to do with it too. Historically in the US people have moved from place to place for economic opportunities as new industries developed. But doing new urban development is more difficult than it used to be and supply is added very slowly. The areas with the most global companies and economic opportunities are mostly a handful of cities, but the cost has become prohibitive for new entrants that aren't skilled professionals (despite there being plenty of regular jobs available with higher wages). And of course the people already living there get squeezed too.

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