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Comment by cs702 | Hacker News Reader

The "obvious" solution, raising wages, would add fuel to the engines of inflation.

No one who understands what out-of-control inflation is like wants that.

Central banks, in particular, don't want that.

By that logic, do you think we should be lowering the minimum wage to help reduce inflation? Or has the minimum wage miraculously remained at the exact right level without adjustment for the last 15 years despite its volatility in real terms?

In most places in the US, it's too low to make a difference.

The minimum wage should be lowered or dispensed with due to its deleterious effects on those most marginalized on the fringes of the modern economy, not due to any effect on inflation.

> The minimum wage should be lowered or dispensed with due to its deleterious effects on those most marginalized on the fringes of the modern economy, not due to any effect on inflation.

That's just free-market dogma. People already can't support themselves on minimum wage, and it's not going to do anyone (besides exploitative employers) any good to have them paid even less.

I lived in Northern Virginia most of my life until after college moving to Oregon. Virginia infamously stuck to a 7.25 wage until the last two or 3 years. I thought it was the worst and I worked a job for one month getting paid that.

But now that I’m in Oregon I’ve noticed small businesses can’t compete with corporations here at all on price. It’s honestly crazy how much worse it is to get food at a small business. It’s definitely partially because of the overhead high minimum wage creates.

Only small businesses that I see who can compete are entirely within a family so they probably have family members helping out without expecting $22 an hour or whatever it is here.

Point is minimum wage laws aren’t black and white.

> and it's not going to do anyone (besides exploitative employers) any good to have them paid even less

I disagree, on the basis that a poorly-paid job is better than no job at all in the long run for the employee.

A price floor causes a surplus, in this case of labor, meaning unemployed people; the people for whom the economic value of their labor is less than the minimum wage. You can call this free-market dogma if you'd like, but it's a well-established phenomenon.

The second-order effect is that those unemployed people become less and less employable over time, since they lose out on the experience, skill-learning, and relationship-building that they would have gotten on the job, poorly-paid though it may have been. They become further less competitive than the lucky ones who made the cut above minimum wage and were employed, and runs the risk of being a permanently unemployable underclass.

Countries like Norway and Singapore do quite well with no legally-mandated minimum wage.

1.5% of US workers make minimum wage, who probably have much less to spend. So I don’t think it’s the same token of logic at all

I'd personally consider overriding local single family zoning and allowing denser building the "obvious" solution. Seems like California is slowly moving in that direction.

Good point. You're right. NIMBYism stands in the way, but I agree it's the more "obvious" solution.

This gets repeated often but it's not as if housing is the only expensive part of living in a big city, and increasing density will only make those other factors MORE expensive, not less, even though it reduces (slightly, temporarily) the price of housing.

California with 10% more houses is not 10% cheaper. It is slightly more expensive.

10% more people in bay area will create 10% more demand for services sector (many of which employ low wage workers) and will drive wage growth for services sector

What gets more expensive with increasing density? Seems like most things are cheaper with more density, because (compared to less density but equal population) there's less area that needs to be covered by roads, water mains, fire stations, transit service, etc.

..and you'll use 10% more electricity and 10% more water and 10% more fire/rescue calls and so on. You'll need 10% more buses. Your airport will be 10% busier. You will have 10% more people eating at restaurants...

And installing a water main in a rural area is a lot cheaper than installing one in downtown NYC... and your water main needs to be bigger now too.

But I said to keep population equal. Take two million people, and put a million in a city as dense as Manhattan (74,780.7/sq mi), and the other million in a city as dense as Jacksonville, Florida (1,270.73/sq mi). So New Manhattan would be 13 square miles, and New Jacksonville would be 787 square miles. It seems obvious to me that most things in New Manhattan would be more efficient and cheaper. You'd need fewer police officers to have the same patrol density. You'd have a couple larger fire stations instead of numerous smaller ones. You'd have far less utility and road infrastructure to maintain. Everyone would spend less time traveling places, because everything's so close together, and fewer people would feel like they had to purchase a personal vehicle, which means fewer and smaller parking lots to pave. You have to make other tradeoffs for this bonus, of course, and many find those tradeoffs unacceptable, which is fine. But it seems like efficiency is density's greatest strength, to me.

Police officers scale as calls scale. There's some minimum threshold based on space, but if you have 50 calls at once then you need 50-70 officers. And your manhattan officer doesn't have the option of "let the angry dude kick rocks in a farm field until he gets bored and arrest him". Every fleeing perp becomes a danger to _hundreds_ of other people. Every fired pistol round has a high chance of hitting a bystander. CS gas cylinders are right out.

Same for fire, except now you have a new problem. When a house in New Jacksonville burns, one option is to let it control burn. The home is a loss, but this is a safe and viable option.

You can't do that in our manhattan. The entire city will be on fire.

And fighting a fire on a one floor residential house is easy. Fighting a fire on a 40 floor condo structure is complicated and takes many, many more trucks - and now instead of one home being lost, we are looking at ten or more homes, even if we are successful.

Water distribution to a bunch of little houses is easy if sort of requiring some piping. Distributing to a 40 floor condo building is an expert task requiring a whole mess more of complexity.

these clear solution gets downvotes here -- some people say that local government is more difficult than large government precisely because of indignant individuals plus local power bases. A well-thought out density solution has been seriously investigated for decades, in difference tech contexts for hundreds of years. The American solution of suburbs with cars was founded on inexpensive private automobiles. The world is full of toxins to pay for it, but roughly zero people who benefit from it are ready to change, especially if they can claim someone else is giving orders.

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