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Comment by cartercole | Hacker News Reader

The minimum wage should be 0 - sincerely any good economist

That's a common trope, but there have been studies indicating that minimum wage doesn't have a significant effect on unemployment. [0] [1]

Assuming that's accurate, then shouldn't we mandate that these corporations pay their workers a livable wage? If they don't pay the workers a livable wage, guess who does? The taxpayers, in the form of food stamps, welfare, and increased prison population. I really don't see why the American public should be forced to subsidize Walmart (or any large megacorporation) just because they won't pay their employees enough.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#cite_note-104 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#cite_note-105

EDIT: Before anyone says it, I know forcing Walmart to pay more to their workers would increase the prices of their goods; that's still almost certainly cheaper than increasing welfare.

Assuming that's accurate, we should set the minimum wage to infinity.

I don't think anyone is suggesting we set the minimum wage to be particularly high, just enough to have a reasonable living wage. In the case of the linked studies, it was an increase of somewhere around 20-30%.

I figure you made your comment to demonstrate that the reasoning doesn't work on the extremes, but that only really works as a rebuttle if someone were seriously suggesting something extreme.

The US minimum wage is now $7.25. Raising this to $15.00 is an increase of 107%.

It's also common sense

Economists can't run experiments like other scientists. In a way, they are more like historians.

In my opinion, almost all of the actual past raises to minimum wage have been on the small side, and have not significantly affected unemployment. You're right about that.

But if my opinion is true, then there's a huge leap with no scientific basis to saying "therefore this specific large increase in minimum wage will not raise unemployment."

Unfortunately, there aren't any scientific studies of increasing the US minimum wage by 100% because it has not been done multiple times in the past. So no one really knows what would happen if we did it now.

Economists aren't scientists, which is important to remember. "Artists" is a better term, especially for the fellows at GMU.

The problem though is that a lot of goods sold are essentially optional and may not be able to withstand the price increase. Like I said upthread, this would act as a fitness check on businesses and weed out a lot of employers.

These would have ripple effects up the chain. Malls and retail real estate are empty as it is, for one; any fewer and we legitimately might see problems.

... who would never work for 0 themselves, even though their own work arguably provides little tangible value.

Exactly. People won't work for less than their worth. So a minimum wage doesn't accomplish much except set a price floor that excludes low value add workers from the economy.

You clearly never have been poor

If you were starving and I offered you a job washing dishes for $2/hour, would you take it to be able to afford some rice+beans tonight or would you rather not eat tonight? You're worth more than $2/hour.

We need minimum wage laws to protect people from being crunched by capitalists exploiting labor market inefficiencies.

> You're worth more than $2/hour.

Says who?

In this scenario let's presume the laborer has valuable welding skills but the only factory in town closed. They need to move somewhere else to use their skills but that takes time. In the meantime they need to eat and so they take a job washing dishes.

Inefficiencies in the labor market happen all the time. A minimum wage is one way to protect desperate people from being unfairly exploited.

It was a parameter stipulated in a hypothetical example.

> People won't work for less than their worth.

That's beyond absurd, showing no understanding at all about human nature whatsoever. I have billions of counterexamples for you. I cannot think of anyone I know who hasn't done this at some time in their life. Working for less than one's worth is, in fact, what the majority of the human race is doing. Working for one's worth or for more than one's worth is what is rare and almost nonexistent.

> People won't work for less than their worth.

People do it all the time. When their basic needs (food, health, shelter) aren't being met, they'll take whatever work they can. It doesn't mean they're getting their true worth out of that work, it just means they're getting screwed by their employers who are taking advantage of their need to pay them less than they would otherwise.

The minimum wage should be livable - sincerely any good person

> The minimum wage should be livable - sincerely any good person

Also unemployment should never happen, and if we simply declare how the economy should works, it will magically reorganize itself in a way that makes it so, and which doesn't do serious harm to anybody, and doesn't cripple our futures. And you are a monster for daring to entertain the notion that achieving goodness in the world is any more complicated than this, and you deserve to be shunned and hated.

Livable to what extent? You should be able to afford food (what quality of food? do good people also believe everybody deserves to eat filet mignon/comparable on occasion?), transportation (which in some cases means car + gas + maintenance + insurance) + housing (what kind of housing? rent a room in a low cost area? have your own single family home?) + family (should you be encouraged to have 3 children aka mouths to feed if you are low income)?

I don't know if I've been brainwashed growing up by fake news but... isn't the idea "work hard for a living", not "do the minimum and be rewarded?" (aka minimum wage)

Work hard for a living, even though it's minimum wage, knowing it's enough to support a life and family? Wasn't that the case 50 years ago? Too much to ask for today, I guess

Do you really think minimum wage always corresponds to minimum effort?

No. I know that there are a few barriers keeping people near the "minimum worth" level:

1. education

2. language

3. physical/mental inability

What are some other ones?

Ready availability of competing labor.

Minimum wage jobs are frequently difficult and labor-intensive, but the individual workers are replaceable. The idea that pay rate and effort required are perfectly linked is what I'm contesting.

You are right. I was wrong to link "hard work" and "pay". I should have linked "skilled work" and "pay".

Don't people work hard to become more skilled though?

That takes another scarce resource, time.

(And frequently money.)

> "do the minimum and be rewarded?"

In my experience, the lower you are paid, the harder you are worked. Cooks, janitors, sanitation workers, mail(wo)men and amazon delivery workers, waiters, teachers, mechanics, construction workers, etc. all work longer hours in more emotionally and/or physically taxing jobs, with worse pay and work environments than any dentist, accountant, lawyer, CEO, sales person, or software engineer that I have ever met.

Wages are inversely correlated with how hard you actually have to work, perversely

> Wages are inversely correlated with how hard you actually have to work, perversely

You are right.

Why are cooks + janitors paid so little? Because that's their worth to the economy. A ton of people are willing to do that job because it is an "easy skill" with a low barrier of entry.

How do we get unskilled labor on STEM paths? I totally understand unequal opportunity not allowing everybody the same options, but at what point do we say "people aren't created equally, most cooks/janitors wouldn't be great engineers for reasons X, Y, Z"

Are the reasons because they never had the chance, or is it genetic?

This is a completely separate discussion. I originally refuted your (completely asinine) quip about people who "do the minimum and be rewarded".

The rest of your comment is social-darwinistic horseshit based on nothing but prejudice and ignorance. Good day.

I was poking at the fact that a lot of people want to give $8/hr workers $15/hr minimum wage.

What does that mean for all of the $12/hr workers now? What about the $16-$17/hr workers? Do they get raises too?

Do we just flat out raise all wages 50% overnight?

Society values X jobs at $8/hr. Bleeding hearts value them at $15/hr. Where's the middle ground?

Please don't be a sealion. It doesn't make for productive discussion. Disagreement is one thing, but aggressively peppering people with questions until they get annoyed with you is not conducive to mutual understanding.

http://wondermark.com/1k62/

Well, people _should_ never get cancer or any other debilitating disease, but just because we want something to be real doesn't mean it is.

But why tie it to a wage, instead of something like UBI?

Any good economist would point to the economic inefficiencies created on the whole market by the externalities of the human suffering this would cause.

it might as well be - "gig" work is not bound by min wage laws.

ask an instacart worker how that's worked out for them.

lol the minimum / livable wage is just another joke in lawmaking with vast loopholes.

Might be viable if tied to a generous UBI.

There are a lot of functioning countries with a minimum wage of 0 (e.g. Sweden).

Sweden has unions which negotiate minimum wages for everyone in their industry. So yes, nationally there is no minimum wage, but in practice, almost everyone is covered by a minimum wage.

Considering that almost 70% of people in Sweden are part of a union* compared to about 10% in the USA, scrapping federal/state minimum wages in America would be catastrophic, at least in the short term.

*and those that aren't will still benefit from union set minimum wages

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