Yes, the study would have been more useful if they examined whether or not minimum wage could afford any two-bedroom, not the average two-bedroom.
It's the mixing of minimum wages and average rents that is misleading. We need to look at minimum wages compared to minimum rents, not average rents.
Making the numbers more right doesn’t make the reality any less cruel, and more accurate numbers don’t seem to help persuade anyone to care. So it’s legitimate to say “could be better!”, but that’s often viewed as important relative to the issue itself: people can’t afford a home in America.
As, per that definition, wages are now not normally distributed anymore it (statistically) does not even make sense to talk about average (i.e. mean) wages anymore.
More anecdotally: I recently looked up mean and median wages in Germany. And what I found is that the median netto income (per employer) does not really differ from the netto income per household. I guess that means that the average German household only has one person working (while the other is probably taking care of potential kids).
...and that's how you end up with polarization with media. Neutral/objective reporting gets dropped because it "seem to help persuade anyone to care". It's replaced with misleading reporting optimized for shock value which gets a pass from one side because it fits in with their narrative, but is rejected by the other because of how biased it is.
The current title is misleading as it's not true that minimum wage cannot afford renting at all. They can, for example, afford cheaper-than-average two bedroom apartments.
It's just arguing about the misleading title...
There are another 3000 hunter-gatherers who have hoarded 90% of the resources. If we split up the resources more equally we could support everyone easily.
We have more empty houses than homeless in the US. We should be able to guarantee food, water, and shelter to every citizen, even if we don’t necessarily guarantee it’s in a place someone desires.
We aren’t productive enough as a society to be able to give everyone pleasure constantly but we are certainly productive enough to guarantee basic physical needs for survival
How many people experiencing houselessness are you willing to ship off to rural Nebraska where they know nobody, have no support system, no supportive services, and probably are grossly unfamiliar with the local culture?
Is your answer "all of them"? Perhaps with some qualifier about how they'll receive food, water, and free transportation to this location?
You're absolutely right. Our society is unquestionably wealthy enough to provide for the basic needs of all. You are experiencing a beautiful blossoming of genuine human compassion. It's just perhaps possible that this might be a chance to think more precisely about how to translate that into policy.
We're not shuffling people around for the sake of getting them out of the area. we're shuffling people around so they can move to an area that has a better job market relative to local rents. This is supposed to address the "they can't move to find a better job because they can't afford the cost of moving" objection a few comments up.
>We have more empty houses than homeless in the US.
A sibling comment has addressed this so I won't go into this further.
>We aren’t productive enough as a society to be able to give everyone pleasure constantly but we are certainly productive enough to guarantee basic physical needs for survival
Because it's a political problem (ie. NIMBY), not a economic one.
The solution clearly involves building sufficient housing and/or raising the minimum wage.