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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

I'm old enough to remember this conversation happening three times, and wise enough to know that this conversation happens every ten years or so probably since the first wage was paid in currency instead of goods.

A certain pay rate creates supply. Conditions make it hard to switch jobs. And every year you ever so slowly reduce the effective pay to those employees and they slowly give up little luxuries to make ends meet. And when demand outstrips supply, you raise the minimum wage, pulling in a new group of people.

If you're paranoid or cynical, you might call this class warfare instead of unintended consequences.

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I'm cynical. I think it's frankly worse than that. When we talk about economic and market forces, we don't talk about "greed" as a major economic force. We know it's the creation of capitalism, but economists seem to do everything in their power to ignore it. Standard economic models breaks down when people are powerful enough to create their own supply/demand curves.

We've had the term "working poor" for a while. I suspect that we'll have "working homeless" in the decades to come.

> I suspect that we'll have "working homeless" in the decades to come.

In the UK several BBC documentaries have covered exactly this phenomenon. I don't doubt it is already more common in the US then you suspect.

> I suspect that we'll have "working homeless" in the decades to come.

"A 2010 longitudinal study of homeless men conducted in Birmingham, Alabama, found that most earned an average of ninety dollars per week while working an average of thirty hours per week[192]"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_S...

"Employees at Amazon's base in Dunfermline, Fife, were apparently so worried they’d lose their jobs if they were late they decided to sleep rough in the woods nearby."

https://metro.co.uk/2016/12/10/desperate-amazon-workers-forc...

And it's highly disturbing to me that people will defend these situations on this site. An alarming amount of HN commenters seem to believe that the cost of labor is a function of the money created by the labor. In other words, a job will only pay $X/hr because it creates $Y/hr in revenue where Y > X + some margin. They pretend that if Y goes up, then it brings X up and if X is low, then it means Y MUST be low as well. It has nothing to do with the greed of shareholders.

This line of thinking is what leads to managers firing the entire IT team because they don't generate revenue, and then panicking when the email server crashes.

The more logical claim reads more like "employers will logically try not to employ unprofitable labor", meaning that the wage paid to a worker will generally be no higher than the variable profit enabled by that worker.

Certainly, but that's nothing more than a truism.

Yet proponents of raising the minimum wage seem to disregard this truism when it comes to the case of workers who for whatever reason can only create variable profit at a rate between the old and new minimum wage.

These workers can easily be moved from “profitable to employ” to “unprofitable to employ” by the increase in minimum wage, either entirely or by cutting those hours which would become unprofitable.

I think the truism really is this:

In a micro sense: each company will try to reduce labor costs as much as possible, since costs are the enemy of profit.

But when we look at the macro situation then: employees are much of the demand curve. Less income means less demand.

This is the reason for much of the talk about UBI and job automation.

The working homeless already exist Los Angeles/California. There are more than a few employed people, with kids, living in their cars.

https://www.kqed.org/news/11690325/thousands-of-californians... https://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-economicall...

But that's LA/California right? Thousands is not millions, and California is not the US.

Working poor != working homeless

I don't understand why you're being downvoted (a comment which itself is likely to solicit downvotes). No serious discussion about the advantages or disadvantages of capitalism can be had without considering the role and utility of greed.

While not exactly homeless, employed people not being able to afford their own house is the norm instead of the exception in the majority of the world.

In the "East" and Middle East, many employed young adults live with their parents instead of moving out, even after getting married. In the UAE for example, many expats live in crammed conditions with as many as 6 people in a single room! and sharing a single bathroom.

Employment == Your Own House is largely a first world expectation.

UAE is not a poor country. They choose to provide for native citizens, not for expatriates. That's on them.

"The wealth gap between rich and poor in the UAE is one of the worst in the world, largely due to the amount of welfare and protection afforded to native Emiratis and the amount of neglect towards migrant workers."

https://borgenproject.org/top-10-facts-about-poverty-in-the-...

You are correct and that is true.

I come from Morocco. There, until recent times, most left the family house to go buy their first home, after their first real job. "Renter" was an insult because you had to be really poor to have to rent. Now that speculation and foreign investment is flooding the housing markets and land prices have literally went up 3000x in some cities, it's changing. It's not a first world dream, it's a problem that's rising everywhere around the world.

Thanks for the different perspective. I guess Moroccans are/were relatively more prosperous than other Middle-Eastern nations.

I strongly suspect that greed is much older than capitalism.

Capitalism is literally allowing greed to run wild and almost completely unchecked. It's the driving force behind greed being such a force in 2019.

Let me rephrase that last sentence for what you are meaning it as "If you call this class warfare instead of unintended consequences, in my opinion, you are being paranoid or cynical."

Neither "paranoid" nor "cynical" are absolute terms to base your argument on.

I picked my phrasing carefully.

As the old saying goes, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you."

Actively plotting this outcome? That's a movie plot, sure. But negligence - even willful negligence - and microaggression? We know this happens all the time.

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