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Comment by throwaway199129 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway199129

This makes the assumption that all workers require a living wage. When I worked as a teenager and throughout college, I didn't need to make a living wage since I either lived with my parents or with roommates (admittedly funded by a combination of work and student loans). During that phase of my life, I didn't require a living wage. I just needed some extra money, and so I was willing to accept lower paying jobs that wouldn't necessarily support every expense. Someone who required a living wage couldn't have worked those jobs, but they were perfect for me, so I was glad they existed at the time.

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It doesn't matter if you require the living wage or not — there will always be people who don't strictly need it in any society. Just like there will be people on the beach who won't ever need a life guard. Everybody needing a thing is not a precondition for it making sense to exist.

If we want a society without exploitation the simple fix is to lift the minimum wage beyond any value that could be considered exploitation within the given context. Not being able to live off your full time job is certainly exploitation.

If you don't need that much e.g. because you have the luck of having your parents support, don't work the full job then. Easy. Less hours worked, more time to study.

We could establish UBI, and then we wouldn't need a minimum wage. We could decide as a society that we want everyone to have a baseline level of support, rather than doing it indirectly (and less effectively) by forcing the nonexistence of low-paying jobs.

Sure, that would also be a way to address the problem. Quite frankly I haven't read up on the UBI enough to give a qualified answer about it, but given the observation that many places appear to try it out we will probably have very conclusive data soon.

OpenResearch's recent UBI example didn't appear to be a resounding success. While people receiving the higher income appeared to have more interest in starting a business or continuing education, it didn't actually significantly translate to those getting accomplished.

Minimum wages are good on their own and do not appear to have downsides in practice. You don't need to "not need" them.

Basically think of it as banning wasting people's time by offering them really bad jobs. (This is the "search theory" explanation, but there's also the "monopsony theory" explanation, which is that they can increase employment!)

Of course, wage boards and sectoral bargaining systems are probably better since they're more flexible.

Minimum wages are not "good on their own"; they're a solution to a specific problem: making sure people can survive with at most a relatively reasonable amount of work, though they're currently failing at that goal. If we stop having that problem we stop needing a solution to it. Making it so people don't need to work to survive is strictly better.

And if people have a guaranteed level of support, then yes, there is a downside to saying "you're not allowed to exchange sub-self-supporting amounts of work for money". You don't need to ban wasting people's time; if people don't have to work to live, the uninteresting or unpleasant jobs will be having to raise pay to get people to work them, or figuring out how to automate them when previously it was cheaper to pay minimum wage.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of things people might want to do that aren't valued enough by society to pay even subsistence wages for. In a minimum wage world, those things either don't happen or they happen as side hobbies for people with other means of support. If you have UBI, you create the perverse situation of "I might do that for free because I don't have to work to live, but I can't take any money for it unless I can get someone to give me a lot of money for it".

> the uninteresting or unpleasant jobs will be having to raise pay to get people to work them

They do /eventually/, but because working takes time, working a bad job reduces the time you have available to find a better one, which has the effect of giving everyone less than ideal work situations. That's why it's called search theory.

With UBI, people don't have to worry as much about lining up the certainty of a better job before quitting a worse one, and people aren't likely to take those worse jobs in the first place unless offered substantially higher pay than they'd have settled for if they needed the job. That and other factors seem likely to make search theory around the minimum wage boundary much less of a problem with UBI.

>If you don't need that much e.g. because you have the luck of having your parents support, don't work the full job then. Easy. Less hours worked, more time to study.

What if you are a lonely oldster who'd love to slowly sweep away dust and cigarette butts in front of the local store for 5$ an hour. It doesn't seem obvious that outlawing this is good for society.

I mean, there are ways to go about this without being an employee. You can start an LLC and contract yourself out if you really want to. I'm just not sure keeping that option open as an employee is a net-positive given all the downsides for people who don't fall into such a narrow example.

If you find a person that is offended by earning too much I am pretty sure you'll find volunteers to help.

But next time add sarcasm tags if you making that point.

To the GP point, though, if it's unilaterally applied there may be unintentional consequences. Their example was working as a teenager; relatively high minimum wages may end up cutting most teenagers out of the workforce. If an employer has the choice between a 35 year old and a 15 year old for the same pay, they are generally going to hire the 35 y.o. That isn't to say minimum wage can't be raised for heads-of-households or some other administrative distinction, but a one-size-fits-all approach may cause a bunch of other issues.

> a one-size-fits-all approach may cause a bunch of other issues.

It may. Buy are those issues worse than the current issues?

I don't think so — especially if you are inclined to look at countries where the minimum wage is close to (or above) the living wage.

>are those issues worse than the current issues?

That's what I consider the correct way to think about this. So do you have thought on what metrics you'd use to measure the net effect?

One of the nagging facts that bothers me is that, even as we see increases in minimum wage, there seems to be certain segments of society (particularly young men) who are disproportionately dropping out of the labor pool.

> This makes the assumption that all workers require a living wage. When I worked as a teenager and throughout college, I didn't need to make a living wage

So you want a dying wage. How can a dying wage exist? Two ways:

1 - someone else is subsidising the business, I.e. parents are paying the rent/mortgage, and food of the teenager

2 - the person is literally slowly dying, living in a caravan or a tent as ‘working homeless’ unable to afford healthcare or racking up debt, and it’s only a matter of time until they literally kick the buckets and cease to function. Or they will become birdedfor the taxpayer, with food stamps and other kinds of aid.

A business needs to pay for its inputs, labour is one of them. The cost of labour is whatever is costs to take care of basic needs of a human, the exact number is debatable but it does exist.

If we are going to provide subsidies, why don’t we subsidise healthy food, or planting trees or solar panels for example, for both businesses and individuals? Why should my tax money subsidise cheap labour, often for corporation that avoid paying tax themselves?

> why don’t we subsidise healthy food, or planting trees or solar panels for example, for both businesses and individuals?

https://www.epa.gov/green-power-markets/summary-inflation-re...

And that's fine; the problem is that a lot of people don't have a choice, because there's not enough jobs at their level of education, their willingness to work, etc.

I'm thinking of a reddit post copied off facebook describing college or uni graduates in biology who could only get a job at Starbucks because there wasn't enough demand for their specialism.

so work part time

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