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Comment by xibalba | Hacker News Reader

Takano and other well meaning legislators reveal they have zero clue how economies work or how wealth is created. It is fairly terrifying that these sorts have become so influential.

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Based on vast capital accumulation to a small cohort [1], I believe they do know how wealth is being created. They're simply improving quality of life for the people doing the actual work. Conversely, its terrifying (at least to me) that there are people who endorse the dystopian status quo.

[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2020/december/has-weal...

What worries me is that the stagnant wages have been caused by globalization making our labor relatively unattractive compared to the rest of the world. This will only make our labor more unattractive, accelerating the loss of our dwindling manufacturing base.

This exactly. The U.S. economy doesn’t exist in a competition-free vacuum. This “solution” would hurt those at the left side of the income/wealth distribution the most, but would hurt all of the U.S. to some degree.

Or they have looked at charts like this, understand why the US is to the right but have no reason to think (and plenty of domestic research on per-working-hour productivity to support) that the factors that create the overall trend line apply to the US:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/productivity-vs-annual-ho...

It is far more terrifying that some believe you can make simple adjustments to complex systems with no unintended consequences.

Can you explain your idea further? Perhaps with data about the percentage of economic value which is the direct product of hours worked which cannot be worked by other people? Link it to some attempt at an argument that, despite high profits and the disparities we've seen between worker pay and productivity, companies are simultaneously at 100% utilization with no slack capacity and cannot possibly afford to hire additional workers?

The burden of proof is very much on your side champ

The proposed legislation describes its anticipated benefits and, since it's a law, exactly what it will do. It's totally reasonable to question that but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone to explain what exactly they are claiming is wrong. Those were some sweeping claims being tossed around — it'd be really important to be able to back any of them up if you expect anyone to engage with them.

> how economies work or how wealth is created

Could you point me to your preferred sources for this info?

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