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Comment by virgildotcodes | Hacker News Reader

The whole point of raising the minimum wage is to erode the gap between the poor and the rest of society.

Raising minimum wage while leaving other wages untouched accomplishes that.

I don’t think that when considering the lives of the poor and the middle class/wealthy, that we should prioritize the needs of the middle class and wealthy. It seems clear that the needs of the poor are much greater, the suffering much more intense, and that some sacrifices by the rest of society to address those needs and reduce that suffering are the right thing to do.

Now whether it’s possible to raise minimum wage without all other wages and inflation rising in response is a different question. I do wonder what the effect of a minimum wage that tracked inflation would be?

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>The whole point of raising the minimum wage is to erode the gap between the poor and the rest of society.

If that was the goal, then increasing taxes on richer people and giving cash to poorer people would be what happens. Aka, universal basic income.

The actual goal is for a politician to be able to say they are helping poorer people, while minimizing the need for tax increases, which also probably aligns with many voters’ goals too (since many voters like to think they are not part of the poor who would be helped, but rather part of the rich who would have to make a sacrifice).

The same situation plays out for higher education (loans instead of simply paying for the schooling) and fossil fuel and plastics pollution (doing everything except increasing taxes fossil fuels).

I mean, I do think that is the genuine goal for most proponents of raising the minimum wage.

As far as I know, as a general trend, politicians pushing to raise the minimum wage tend to also push for raising taxes on the wealthy and greater investment in social programs, especially those targeting the poor.

On the flip side, politicians I'm aware of that push back against minimum wage increases tend to also be against any tax hikes on the wealthy, and as a bonus they generally work to erode funding for social safety nets.

I'm not aware of many politicians being for raising minimum wage but against increasing taxes on the rich, or at least that not being just a minority of those involved in the debate.

Either way my take on it is that we should just look to what seems to work empirically. For my money that's the Nordic countries, which have an effective (due to very strong unions) high minimum wage, along with high taxes and strong investment in social programs.

That said, maybe you're right and UBI accomplishes the majority of what we're going for more directly. I definitely think it will be a necessity soon either way.

> As far as I know, as a general trend, politicians pushing to raise the minimum wage tend to also push for raising taxes on the wealthy and greater investment in social programs, especially those targeting the poor.

>On the flip side, politicians I'm aware of that push back against minimum wage increases tend to also be against any tax hikes on the wealthy, and as a bonus they generally work to erode funding for social safety nets.

Yes, in the absence of a UBI, a minimum wage will have to do, and I do appreciate the politicians that can at least make that happen. I did not intend to crucify individual politicians per se, but rather the voting public’s priorities, which clearly make half measures with undesirable side effects such as minimum wage (and higher education loans and “recycling”, etc) the only politically palatable option.

Unfortunately, a lot of these require consensus on the federal level and are not possible on the state level, so the compromises are quite heavy.

> Raising minimum wage while leaving other wages untouched accomplishes that.

Not sure I see how that is going to get a lot of support. A number of years ago when the talk was $15/hr, a friend of mine was livid whenever talking about it. She just finished a nursing degree (while working full time) and was starting her first job as an RN around $15/hr. And now the support staff, who didnt need more than a HS education was going to make as much as, or more than, her and not have the student loan burden on top of it? Her and I disagree on most social issues, but I can see how that would not be popular enough to be adapted. It had nothing to do with wanting to keep others poor and everything to do with -feeling- like everything she worked so hard for (to improve her own situation) meant nothing. Of course, over the years as nursing pay increased so did the support staff or maybe the other way around. I dont presume to know the causing factors. I know that my friend isnt upset that the support staff is paid a living wage now, but I also know her pay ladder (and nursing in general) increased as well.

I mean, whether the goal is to keep other people down or just to retain the feeling of having worked hard to climb in the social hierarchy, the end result is the same, no?

I think it's kind of sad that this is such a common response, whether it be in this case or in the case of people who paid for college being upset that college may become free for the next generation.

Definitely one of humanity's flaws, we shouldn't so eagerly defend that others must suffer for us to feel exceptional, but I take your point that it's a part of our psychology nonetheless and probably a factor in why real change on reducing the divide between the rich and the poor is so rare to see.

Sure, if we want to philosophize about it, and I agree with it - but that's not going to help people get $25/hr. It needs a practical solution, forcing it when so many people will feel slighted wont help. What use would the hospital be if all the support staff got $25/hr and the medical staff walked out because the support staff is getting paid more than they are, but without the very real and legal responsibilities the medical staff have? This compounds on the other meta aspects of having worked hard to get there, student loans, etc. If I paid customer service agents more than the programmers working on a product, I soon would have a very stale product with really good customer support. And soon after, no product at all.

Its not that one side wants the other to suffer or stay poor/oppressed so they can feel exceptional. They dont want to feel their entire struggle and outsized contribution was for nothing. The other people dont factor in at all - they are trying to feed their family first (humans are gonna human). Why bother being a nurse and doing all that night school if they could just be support staff and get paid the same without the responsibility + extra loans? We are not even talking about the real rich vs poor here, so even thou the idea is to close the rich/poor gap - the solution of not raising adjacent workers pay to get it done, does nothing to solve it and only introduces obstacles to the real goal.

I think discussions like minimum wage end up talking past each other (as happened with my friend and I over many talks). It is desperate for a divergent solution. I dont have one that doesnt involve completely rebuilding every social/societal construct from it's foundation. Basically pointless and not something thats going to happen. But I am sure someone smarter than me can find a 3rd way without adding bugs/negative effects to other branches

> being upset that college may become free for the next generation

Some of us are less upset that it might become free and more upset that our tax dollars are being used to fund useless degrees for people who looked down on STEM their whole lives. I'm happy to support free STEM degrees from quality schools.

May be the point, but is grossly unrealistic.

Wages trade value of work for currency (as a convenient abstraction from barter). If the work is not of mandated value, the employment evaporates as employers find other means of getting the work done.

Notice the proliferation of kiosk and app based ordering replacing live clerks, retail shift from brick-and-mortar to robot-augmented warehoused shipping, etc. Notice the flight of workers from expensive urban centers when "work from home" finally became a thing, moving to lower cost areas where higher minimum wages are less necessary (and thus supporting workforce leads to lower local cost of living).

Private employers are not in the business of supplying wages above their worth. If compelled, they will find whatever means possible to circumvent such compulsion.

> erode the gap between the poor and the rest of society.

Why just erode it then? Why not just jump to the end state then and completely eliminate it by demanding that everybody get the same wage?

That makes no sense.

Wage market pricing mechanisms are still important for a proper allocation of labor; however, at the ends the market rewards get distorted (aka you get more money the closer you sit to the money printer - software, finance and such are examples of that). What we want to fix is that distortion - and redistribute income that gets misallocated via the Cantillon effect for the good of the general public.

Raising the minimum wage will actually funnel more money to the top, just like inflation does. The truth is that when you cut people out of the market you will replace people with machines and concentrate wealth in the hands of the machine owners. Eventually, there won’t be enough buyers, and the system collapses or people will find other work and prices will be lower due to automation and the only change is zero drudgery with a neo-feudal nightmare of a society.

> The truth is that when you cut people out of the market you will replace people with machines and concentrate wealth in the hands of the machine owners.

Is it not economically rational to replace people with machines and concentrate wealth in the hands of the machine owners regardless of minimum wage policy?

Like, the Luddites didn't get mad during an increase in minimum wage - there was no minimum wage at the time, at all! It would be about a hundred years until England established one. They got mad during an increase in industrialization and mechanization. Marx didn't talk about ownership of the means of production, i.e., machines and who owns them, during an increase in minimum wage. This has been happening for centuries, and from a quick look around this very forum, there seems like no sign of automation slowing down or even settling at some baseline level of expense where $X/hour workers are worth paying but $Y/hour are not for any $X > 0.

There are only two long-term sustainable ways to solve this problem (and it is a problem!). One is to hope for, and work towards, technological improvements where each stage just brings more work to be done. There were more serious fears of computer programmers automating themselves out of a job a few decades ago than there were last year when GitHub Copilot was released, and that's certainly not because Copilot is unimpressive. We're just confident there's plenty more code to write and plenty more problems to solve. The other is to hope for and work towards a world where technological progress means we are post-scarcity and we can afford to pay people the same inflation-adjusted daily wages for increasingly small amounts of labor and eventually none at all.

Any plan that says that we need to maintain a low minimum wage for the sake of keeping workers employed is one that very soon will end up compromising that low value all the way to $0/hour.

> Is it not economically rational to replace people with machines and concentrate wealth in the hands of the machine owners regardless of minimum wage policy?

No. Automating a person's job away makes sense only if the cost to automate is equivalent to or less than the cost of a person, and also if the automaton does work of equal value or higher value. Otherwise, it is not worth it. There are also situations in which a automaton is never the correct answer. For example, a barista: the culture of a coffeehouse is such that a human is preferred. This is likewise true for a pub, and myriad other situations. The only way that these jobs get automated is if the economics of them becomes otherwise impossible.

But automation gets more efficient over time. Twenty years ago, an automaton that could drive you around city streets required a whole university research lab and barely worked. Today, it's very realistically possible. Twenty years from now, it's hard to imagine it being more expensive than a taxi driver. Twenty years ago, we had drip coffee makers and early Keurig machines. Today, we have latte art printers. Twenty years from now, vending machines that produce Instagram-worthy iced lattes with whipped cream and caramel drizzles will likely be commonplace.

If your minimum wage plan is taking automation into account, your plan would have to be to slowly lower minimum wage over time so that, as robots get more efficient, humans are always paid a little less than them. That would be a coherent policy - for a few years. But eventually that leaves you with a minimum wage under a penny. What's your plan then?

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