The economy doubling in size helps most people even if the resulting wealth is unevenly distributed. Goods, services, technologies, jobs, etc are good.
More jobs are only good if they actually provide a living wage.
This is false if you spend even a few seconds thinking about it.
Not all jobs are intended to "live" off of. Most of your entry-level jobs were supposed to be for highschool and college kids working part time.
The problem is we have more and more people never graduating out of entry level positions, and today we have folks demanding those entry level positions support a comfortable lifestyle.
You're supposed to graduate out of entry level work after you acquire skills, training, and/or education. Why are people not "moving up" is the real problem...
This is some soft language hiding some bad assumptions.
"supposed to be" - what does this mean? because it's a lot more interesting...low skilled jobs, are probably what we're going to be talking about. However, it's not the 1950s anymore. eg Staffing a movie theater is not a part-time job (which you would know if you have ever worked one), even post-covid.
Targeting for graduates (or current students) is reserved for economies like college towns, historically. Those places have also experienced wages rising noticeably over, at least, the last 2 decades. Industrial and metropolitan areas don't have enough "school labor" to staff all the unskilled positions, regardless.
> Not all jobs are intended to "live" off of
If you have a fulltime job, the minimum wage is intended to allow you to survive^. The main issue is that places with fulltime positions open to unskilled labor, have living costs that outpace the minimum wage...all the way out to the most rural of US towns. The financial guidelines for employees from McDonalds, Wallmart, etc are telling.
^Claiming that jobs that pay minimum wage and only allow working 30 hours a week, aren't intended to "live" off of, is cherry picking exploitative employers. This is not compelling, nor the common case, so we can focus the discussion on the issues that the majority of the economy deal with.
This is the issue - the idea that minimum wage is supposed to be "livable" is a modern notion.
Unskilled labor probably shouldn't be livable. If someone can be trained to replace you in a few minutes (i.e. unskilled labor), then the truth is your labor is not worth a lot.
We need more people moving up into skilled labor. It's really hard to imagine someone working 30+ years at a job and not developing skills... yet that is what's happening more often today than ever before.
Highschool and College kids don't need a living wage. They need flexible hours, and schedules that fit their available time (night shift, swing shift, whatever...).
The only way for that to work is to have a slave population, because why should a living and breathing human being waste their time and their life with work that doesn't even sustain them? The concept of "unskilled labour" is a lie. Otherwise you could hire dead people from the graveyard.
> Highschool and College kids don't need a living wage.
Do you have any good arguments as to why you should be allowed to have a living wage?
Need? No. Would it be better for society? Maybe. This is not really something that people disagree with. Dispensing with the repetition will save the distraction.
> the idea that minimum wage is supposed to be "livable" is a modern notion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_wage - back to 1604, or earlier or later; what does it matter?
> Unskilled labor probably shouldn't be livable.
Why? Arguing the economic consequences are not a reasoning.
There will always be humans who are incapable of skilled labor (of any note) beyond newly educated students. eg The Calculator profession and other forms of industrial collapse as well as immigrants (legal or otherwise) and the disabled. It's not clear what you think is the obvious way to keep these people alive. Welfare/socialism or pretending they don't exist, relegating them to a slave class, or exile?
A notion that dates back centuries and one specifically enshrined in law in Australia, a G20 country, since 1902 (ish).
I dare say other G20 countries also support this notion (aside from any antiquated holdouts still clinging to non SI units).
That doesn’t sound right. To me it seems obvious the problem is these jobs used to provide more purchasing power than they do today. The increased grievance would be because of this drop in purchasing power, not because people are suddenly demanding a “comfortable” (<- loaded word) lifestyle out of the blue.
Did McDonalds used to be closed during weekdays when all their cooks and register staff were in school? I don't remember that.
Also, extremely uneven economic distributions tend to be bad for large segments of the population due to inherently limited resources like desirable beach front property as well as artificially limited resources like city apartments.
A rising tide obviously raises all ships, including the nation's poorest.
To create vast wealth generally requires vast resources, which requires vast amounts of people. Behemoths the size of Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Google, et al employ significant chunks of the population - and not just directly.
Trickle-down doesn't mean everyone will be a millionaire by doing nothing... instead, it means a ton of smaller companies are boosted while servicing larger companies, and so on - spreading wealth around in terms of employment and providing people with a living they can fairly earn.
To throw a wrench in that tired metaphor: a rising tide may raise all ships, but a fat lot of good that does to the poor, if it's only the well-of that can afford to buy a boat.
Even the poor do better when there's more jobs available, more job mobility, more housing, more stores, etc. All things that are created by wealthy companies and individuals.
Everyone, including our poorest, benefit from a growing economy.
We just have to examine our average poverty-level person, and compare them to poverty-level persons of other nations to understand this point.
Only if those jobs offer a livable wage. If instead they are McJobs that result in workers spending more than they earn (e.g. SNAP), then poor people are doing worse, and it's a net-negative on society.
Why are people stagnating instead of moving up? That's a really good question.
And most importantly, how do you account for the fact that in the U.S. there are about 53 million people in low wage jobs, but only about 33 million high school and college students? What are those other 20 million workers “supposed to” be?
If you are not "supposed" to earn a living wage, then the job should not exist. It's a simple matter of supply and demand: if you can't afford to pay your laborers a living wage, you have obviously failed as a company because you are unable to exist without slave labor.
> This misses the reason so-called McJobs don't pay a "living" wage.
Yes, this reason is called "profit". They pay so little because it is legal to do so, and people would rather work three jobs than see their kids starve.
> You're supposed to develop skills and move up in the working world.
If everyone moves up, who is going to do those jobs? And how exactly are you supposed to develop those skills if you have to work three jobs just to survive? There are only so many hours in a day, you know.
It's a difficult question to answer thoroughly, but there should be a few obvious factors. Most of the labor market is effectively priced out of acquiring higher valued skills/degrees that would improve their career. Their opportunities for advancement are laughable.
So, then, why is that?
Also parent: Why are people stagnating instead of moving up? It's a real puzzle.
No I'm not. I know exactly the point you were making. I'm disputing it.
The problem is the devil is in the details, and both the tired metaphor and your defense of it leave those details unspecified.
There is no good faith argument that exists to prove this incorrect.
> other economic articles, statistics, etc
Ah well, you're wrong. "other economic articles, statistics, etc" clearly do not support this.
I mean, "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." but lets bring the citations:
> trickle-down economics has never been advocated by any economist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Economi...
Did you know that?
I don’t mean to trivialize the complicated nature of the matter, with the effects of the world wars and globalization + many other factors, it is hard to separate things, but it really does not seem all that difficult to argue that trickle down economics is not better than what we were doing before and to do so in good faith.
Of course, the actual goal of trickle down economics was to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few and in that regard it is undeniably a success.
[0]: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
The nation's poorest are not provided with a fairly-earned living. They are working themselves to death while not even earning enough to survive, and they can't get any other job because those "smaller companies" have been killed by the behemoths outcompeting them by using exploitative labor practices.
Complete nonsense. You can look at the real-world effects.
Or the economists, who have done so and do not support it at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Economi...
The citations that you want are linked there. Are you seriously saying that the whole "Economics" section of the Wikipedia article on trickle-down economics is "not good faith"?
Trickle down is a failure at its stated aims. It does not work. It never worked, and now people have noticed.
> A rising tide obviously raises all ships
A metaphor proves nothing. I might as well say "when money is concerned, no it doesn't: it's every man for himself" and leave it at that.
Let me ask you one thing in addition: can you explain why "trickle-down" economics is superior to "trickle-up" economics: where the money goes directly to those poorest who need it, cutting out the middle-men; and then when they spend it until it inevitably trickles up to businesses and the more well-off?
How does does "trickle-down" economics compare to that?
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tax-cuts-rich-50-years-no-trick...
Oh how far we’ve come since the economy of the 1960s.
Palm oil is in everything in the US, in France there's a lot more lighter oils and butter.
Obesity is a side effect of having so much food that calories are cheap and plentiful. That’s why obesity rates are rising everywhere in the first world. It’s also something virtually unprecedented in human history.
Btw obesity is rising in Europe as well.
That decline is an anomaly. The majority of it is attributable to covid, and a significant minority attributable to fentanyl: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/...
I do agree that the "rising tide raises all boats" rhetoric is largely bunk. But I don't think that this one particular measure, taken at an anomalous time, is sound footing for a counterargument.