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Comment by eldritch_4ier | Hacker News Reader

Maybe semantics (but then again I think a ton of leftwing phrases are just semantics and overloading words), but how do 40% of New Yorkers continue to be alive if not at a "living wage"?

I think this is actually important in one key respect: if you want to solve a problem, you have to be clear about what it is or you're going to run into issues. "People don't have a living wage" sounds dire, until you realize by living wage they mean something significantly different and now I don't take you seriously (because its clear you just tried to manipulate me). Just say "people deserve better wages and aren't getting them". It's not as dire or manipulative, but I can definitely get behind that nonetheless.

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There's a kind of language creep throughout all of these discussions. When people are no longer hungry, we start talking about the "food insecure" in the same terms. Nobody ever seems to notice that we went from "hungry" to "food insecure" or even what "food insecure" is supposed to mean (although I'm sure it has some academic definition). What I do know is that when I was briefly on food stamps my food budget doubled and I wasn't ever anywhere near going hungry on the prior budget, so it's really hard to know what I'm supposed to take away from these designations.

It's a hard problem. The flip side is, there's gotta be a way to talk about problems that exist today even if they're less severe than the ones in the past. When we talk about "medical malpractice" today, the bad treatment is typically much better than what you would have gotten 100 years ago, but I don't think that proves it's a bad term.

It’s politics. The term was synthetically created to push a political agenda. The term was chosen to be as emotionally-charged as possible: “How can you be against paying people a Living Wage?”

We can and should talk about problems like this, but I hate that it is being done in such a nakedly political and disingenuous way.

What better term would you propose? I've seen "decent wage", "honest wage", and "fair wage", but they all have similar issues. I'm not sure there's any term that wouldn't become emotionally charged when used for the phenomenon of "some people are paid a lot less than I think they ought to be".

While the term "fair wage" is obviously something that's more "arguable" (e.g. what's fair?) it seems to me a less loaded phrase than "living wage," the alternative to which, on its face, seems to imply death.

There is actually a fairly firm definition of food insecurity. I have some links in this post [1]

It is based on survey data with set questions. Answering yes to any of the following can categorize you as food insecure

A parent lost weight (for any reason)

Adult(s) cut size or skipped meals in 3 or more months of the year

Relied on few kinds of low-cost food to feed child(ren)

If Elon Musk skips breakfast to lose weight and succeeds, his family qualifies as food insecure.

This is why you see very different summary statistics. 1 in 5 children suffer food insecurity versus 0.9% of children have gone hungry at lest once in the last year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31277978

I think I actually made a comment to this effect recently (although perhaps not on HN? Can't recall now). I think your idea of phrase overloading is an interesting one; often it seems that words lose their severity / intended effect, so new words are adopted. To the point of a sibling comment, homeless has now become "unhoused," to infer a different connotation or slight nuance over what is traditionally or stereotypically thought of the homeless population, perhaps. "Dire" and "manipulative" drive attention, and that is indeed the goal for better (to drive change) or worse (to profit from attention).

What usually happens is that someone else supports you, like a family member or welfare.

A living wage isn't what's just enough to stay alive, it includes what's required for a satisfying life (my words, not part of any definition).

If you look in the source data from the article, expenses are broken down into categories like food, child care, housing, etc. There are also categories for "civic" and "other", which together can account for 20-30% of expenses.

It's hard to have a meaningful discussion about this from a click-baity headline without diving into the details.

It’s the same thing with “homeless,” the propaganda driven branding is actually harming finding a solution by causing confusion. See, also, “abolish the police.”

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