If the minimum wage is set too high to plant grapes for example, grapes will not be grown.
$15/h too high to flip burgers? Ok, I guess we don’t need fast food. Oh wait. Except it somehow doesn’t put the corps out of business.
Now, you could make Flippy the robot illegal, and maybe x number of businesses would eat the cost of the more expensive workers. But something else will suffer as a result, and I would argue it would involve price, efficiency, quality, and compliance...
If burger flipping robot is more productive than human, we should replace all humans with such robots.
That's certainly has been true, but I don't think it's absolutely always going to be true.
Further, what we've seen is that primarily low skill high wage jobs have been replaced with high skill jobs. This is evidenced by the fact that you simply can't make a good living off a high school degree.
Based off this
https://www.careerprofiles.info/careers-largest-employment.h...
How many of those jobs are in danger of being automated?
Cashiers,
food preparation,
freight,
Customer service representatives (I know, you're thinking no way, but a lot of effort is going into AI chatbots to cut down on CS requirements).What happens to the millions when those jobs are slowly eroded away? It's easy to cheat and say "Something else will probably come up" but I simply don't think that will continue to happen in the next 10->20 years.
There's only so much productivity we can utilize. What happens when we've saturated? Unemployment.
I don't think any nation is really well equipped at this point to handle large portions of their workforce being automated away.
Sure, the standard of living will go up for everyone with jobs. However, that will be less and less of the population as time goes on.
This is why programs like UBI and universal healthcare are important. Without them, things are going to be pretty bleak for a lot of people (even with them, and a constant population growth, things won't look good).
There's only so much productivity we can utilize _at a given price point_. It's possible wages could fall instead, although there's definitely a floor to that.
That's one of the interesting implications of UBI; it would theoretically make it easier to find free or close to free labor. I still don't think it would be plentiful, but I would guess there will be an uptick in the number of people like amateur astronomers who will sit and watch the sky at night for free.
Working 40 hours a week is not a natural law, peasants in the Middle Age worked less hours annually than us today. Reducing work hours would also have a positive environmental effect.
Otherwise, I wholly agree with your diagnosis of the situation.
Because either that reduces total wages for everyone, or it makes more people permanently unemployable by raising the cost floor per unit of labor value.
Also, you can't reduce working hours for everyone, only the currently employed, and in practice reliably only the near-full-time-employed-on-hourly-wages.
> The risk of UBI is that rent-seekers might just engulf this guaranteed income by raising their prices
Not really, since UBI funded by progressive tax increases compresses post-policy incomes rather than raising them uniformly. You'd need ironclad market segmentation that survives income distribution compression to “capture” any groups increase in post-policy income, and if you have that, you can just take all of that groups income anyway, which is a problem that needs addressed independently of whether UBI is adopted.
Making fast food isn't a job "meant for humans", it's a job humans perform for the legal minimum of pay. The moment fast food chains can replace humans with Flippy without a PR backlash they will do so without hesitation.
I like the idea of humans not having to do trivial work.
But I am concerned as to whether as a society we'll transition to "more leisure without reduction of living standards" or "higher competition to make ends meet, with the 'failures' being cast aside".
So far it is the latter.
I think back to my minimum wage job working as a grounds keeper at a golf course. To the uninformed, it seems like a perfect space to deploy a roomba with knives and never hire a groundskeeper again. I can tell you that this high tech course would sooner burst into flames than maintain playable conditions for a golf season. For a groundskeeper, the generalized routine is the same, cut the same greens and teeboxes every morning with a shotgun start and the fairways and rough every other day or so, but how you cut those sections changes by the day, even by the minute over the course of a dynamic weather event. What angle you cut, how high or low the cutting surface should be, whether or not the grass is slightly slippery that day and would require more focus with the mower to maintain a straight line, how the grass was cut yesterday and the day before are all variables that an experienced greensmower accounts for subconsciously and instantly. Then you might have a drought which changes how the grass should be cut, or a rain storm which might require a lot of emergency drainage work to keep irrigation equipment functional or to preserve the playing surface before you could even begin regular cutting, which would be with extreme care given the rain soaked earth (you might even opt to roll rather than cut).
A comprehensive automated solution for many jobs is exceedingly complex and highly custom, which could really add up in pricier engineer-man-hours and service contracts, versus having your own maintenance shop hidden on the course and hiring a low skilled crew to operate that equipment. It's so much easier to tell a human to cut grass than to spend 100x the man hours maintaining an automated solution that continually captures all the variability of that dynamic job.
Maybe you can help them by getting them food at lower prices. Just a thought.
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.
And minimum wage prices those unable to produce that much in value out of any job whatsoever.