How can anyone justify paying a high school kid who works part time most of the year a living wage. Not every job is meant to be a “living wage”.
If they are working full time through the year, they likely aren't spending much time in school and whatever work they are doing should bring in enough money for them to not be homeless, starving, or unable to meet other basic needs like healthcare.
I'd further note that the government and it's taxpayers pay the toll regardless of whether or not we increase the minimum wage. We just end up paying the cost elsewhere in a way that's dollar for dollar a lot less efficient (policing, ER visits, homeless shelters, etc.)
Arguments aside, what do you feel would be an appropriate minimum wage for someone working a job in the US? What factors go into that number? In what situations does that number change?
Lets imagine that there is a job with parameters (including wages) where only high schoolers would take the job. Should that job be required to pay above the market wage to make it also attractive to independent adults? Then what job will the highshoolers have? If I've got to pay a full adult wage anyways, I'm probably not going to employ a highschooler.
It creates a deadweight loss. In this example are kids that would benefit from working, at low wages, from both the experience and income and they're left out. There would be useful work done that probably just doesn't get done, creating harms in the form of missing products and services.
Now sure, non-existence of a minimum wage would create other harms and losses so there is a balancing act-- but in the special case of students being discussed here those other costs don't apply. (and that's also why in practice there are minimum wage exceptions like the 'youth minimum wage program').
How you see this issue is likely governed by where on the spectrum between "human" and "labor" you see a person, admittedly. In this context, we're going through contortions to argue to pay people less by age "because we can."
There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!
Edit:
> There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!
I don't know what else to tell you my dude. McDonalds made $14B in profit last year. I can show you many examples where the economic resources surely exist based on the profits being made, in whatever industry or vertical you want to pick from, to pay people a living wage. I'm not saying no profits, I'm not cheering on communism. I'm simply arguing for the existing system to pay people enough to survive in comfort, regardless of age, with some combination of decreased profits and increased costs. If I can show you the economic value and wealth exists, and we still go through contortions to argue we cannot pay living wages to people (when the evidence is robust that we can), I can either come to the conclusion that someone has not built a robust mental model on all of the variables in play or they just don't think we should pay people enough to live. We're just arguing unnecessary economic system complexity (living wages for some, lower wages for teenagers even though a majority of minimum wage workers are not teenagers [2]) to paper over exploitation for some combination of consumer excess and shareholder returns. No attempt at dehumanizing is being made.
That's why I'm arguing with your presentation even though I don't oppose having a minimum wage. It's not just a question of lacking empathy for someone or living with dignity, because in those terms a minimum wage can have the opposite effect.
And dismissing contrasting views as unemphatic or suggesting that no one can be poorly paid with dignity detracts from having a useful conversation... it also says little about what the minimum wage should be. Certainly $1m/yr is more dignified than less! :P
Yes, minimum wages are unfortunate for those who don’t have sufficient skills to work at minimum wage. That’s why there are almost no more human order-takers at fast food restaurants. Kind of sucks for the kids — and poorer folks — who could have worked those jobs and used them as a springboard to something else.
California's $20 fast-food minimum wage improves pay at small cost to consumers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43806608 - April 2025
It'll be interesting to see if this effect turns out to be statistically signficant in time. ( https://reason.com/video/2024/12/19/no-californias-20-minimu... ).
And yes, it is a natural law that increasing the cost of something reduces its usage. That’s why we many governments tax alcohol and cigarettes. Raising the cost of labour means that less of it is bought.
Raising the cost of labour puts labourers out of work.
> Actual evidence shows that this narrative is largely wrong. A new review that I co-authored with Arindrajit Dube finds that most minimum wage studies find no job losses or only small disemployment effects. In other words, the vast majority of minimum wage research implies that minimum wage policies have unambiguously raised the total earnings of low-wage workers.
> This conclusion is strengthened by focusing on the studies that examine broad groups of low-wage workers or the overall workforce, not just narrow segments like teenagers. As the figure below shows, the median employment response is essentially zero among these more comprehensive studies, with 90% of these studies finding no or only small disemployment effects.
Most minimum wage studies have found little or no job loss - https://www.epi.org/blog/most-minimum-wage-studies-have-foun...
Own-Wage Elasticity: Quantifying the Impact of Minimum Wages on Employment - https://www.nber.org/papers/w32925 | https://doi.org/10.3386/w32925
Repository of underlying data for the claim: https://economic.github.io/owe/
That’s what you’d expect though if the studied minimum wage increases were too small to meaningfully impact the labor market, which mostly seems to be the case from randomly spot checking a few of the underlying studies.
For example roughly 0.15% of the workforce currently makes $7.25 an hour. McDonald’s in low cost of living areas starts out closer to $15.
So if you raise the minimum wage to $8. You’ll see “small unemployment effects.”
If you raised it to $20, you’ll see much larger unemployment effects. But legislators know this is the case so they don’t tend to raise minimum wages by amounts that will cause large unemployment effects.
So of course most studies of real world minimum wage increases don’t show large unemployment effects.
Personally I think a negative income tax is a much more efficient and fair means of accomplishing the same goal.
I think if we replaced all those jobs with robots, there would still be new, more interesting, work at this level that would emerge.
My favourite example of this is bank clerks. Every bank used to employ an army of clerks that did all the double-entry book-keeping by hand. Then we invented computers and that entire career vanished. All of the people who would have been bank clerks are now doing something else, almost certainly something else way more interesting than being a human spreadsheet. But at roughly the same pay level in roughly the same numbers as bank clerks used to be employed.
> Lets imagine that there is a job with parameters (including wages) where only high schoolers would take the job. Should that job be required to pay above the market wage to make it also attractive to independent adults? Then what job will the highshoolers have? If I've got to pay a full adult wage anyways, I'm probably not going to employ a highschooler.
> It creates a deadweight loss. In this example are kids that would benefit from working, at low wages, from both the experience and income and they're left out. There would be useful work done that probably just doesn't get done, creating harms in the form of missing products and services.
Why would kids benefit from working? Shouldn't the benefit be from going to school? If they need to supplement their parents income doesn't that just mean that their parents salary is not high enough? It seems the only benefit of allowing kids to work is to the employers, enabling them to depress salaries, because somebody trying to support a family would not take the job. I find it interesting that often the same people (not saying you are) arguing against immigration because the immigrants take away jobs, argue for children to work because it's a "great experience".
> Now sure, non-existence of a minimum wage would create other harms and losses so there is a balancing act-- but in the special case of students being discussed here those other costs don't apply. (and that's also why in practice there are minimum wage exceptions like the 'youth minimum wage program').
There is a purely 'academic' educational advantage, -- it's like asking why should there be chemistry lab, shouldn't chemistry be learned by pure manipulation of field equations??-- People learn different things by studying a subject and doing a thing, and some students learn better one way or another. Most people will learn more from splitting their educational time among multiple approaches than from using only a single approach.
But also our goal in education should be the creation of complete adults. We do try to artificially teach a broader set of life skills in school than the purely academic, e.g. that's why assignments have deadlines if all we cared about was teaching material there would be little reason for any deadline other than the end of the semester. Communication, timelyness, responsibility, etc. are all part of a complete education and aren't as well taught via the contrivances of school.
As they say the difference between theory and practice is that in theory they're the same and in practice they are not the same.
It's also the case that the education environment is very unlike the rest of our lives. Most educational environments are very means driven-- you must use the answer you're taught or its wrong, but life is much more results driven. The problems set out for you in education have usually tidy answers which can be arrived at via the tools you've already been provided, in work force (or life in general) that is often not true. In school the (or at least at the sub-gratudate level) the teacher knows best, they're only asking you questions that they know the answers to. In work it's not uncommon that you know best. Your boss knows what he wants done, sure but you know the facts on the ground. If someone asks you a question in work they do not know the answer. Work is also artificial (like.. you have a "boss"??) but at least it's an artificial thing that you'll likely be part of for most of your adult life.
Now one could simulate more 'work like' learning, but education already takes up an incredible amount of time. Being able to spend endless time on unproductive education is a luxury of wealth that some cannot afford. Even if the state were to provide some of it during schooling, an employer still prefers employees with _experience_ and for those who aren't born into every opportunity having early experience can make a real difference.
Work is also not just something people have to do-- the right work in the right conditions is something that people love to do. It can contribute additional meaning in their lives. I would personally rather mop a floor for an hour transcribe a bunch of geometry identities that I could just look up. The grinding school work is nothing that hasn't been done before, it doesn't improve anything in the world, it's hardly something to be proud of (except perhaps if I do remember it a year later, which often students don't). At least if you mop a floor you get a clean floor and the pride of completing a task that in appreciated by others.
And of course, having money that you earned and coming to terms with managing it, spending it on things you want without having to justify it to others and regretting some of those decisions is also an important part of education. And I think it's useful to have the experience of putting in effort to get it, that putting in more effort can get you more of it, and so on. Of course, wealthier families can and do also provide this education for their children through other means... but if there isn't excess money in the household for Jr. to be paid it for chores or whatever, then they'll have to work outside the home to get it.
> It seems the only benefit of allowing kids to work is to the employers
Kids aren't generally great workers. Part of the reason we don't have more youth employment in the US is that employers generally aren't falling all over themselves to get more of them. There are some benefits to employers that make it worthwhile, e.g. occasionally you get a minor employee that is much better than you'd be able to score as an adult, you make your business a more integrated part of the community, and sure you may lower some labor costs particularly for menial tasks that it might be harder to hire a capable adult for. It's also the case that many adults like working with young people, the instinct to teach is human and not just confined to professional teachers.
With respect to your immigrants comments, I think if you talk in terms of immigrants who are taking jobs that generally citizens don't want, who are operating just seasonally or for a limited time, etc. you'll see a lot more support ("well I don't mean THOSE immigrants"), and that situation is more analogous to youth employment.
But beyond that to the extent that youth employment has some negative effect on the broader adult labor market I think most people would feel it to be justified as an investment in the future of their community. The same argument ought to apply to immigrants too but immigrants aren't seen as part of the community unless they've integrated enough and then, presumably, they stop being seen as immigrants. :) For kids it's obvious that they grow up to adults, it's less obvious to people that many immigrants to America 'grow up' to be Americans (by whatever definition makes a person feel good about them being here :) ).
Before this gets me flamed as thinking of young people as lesser, I don't. Different people feel differently about different tasks at different points in their life.
I read an article a while back about a fad teaching method for reading that is devastating reading skills in places where it's used. It focuses on teaching children the skills that illiterate readers use to compensate, e.g. guessing words from context, looking at the pictures, memorization of standard books. Instead of sounding things out or other traditional tools.
A point the writer made is that reading phonetically is utterly mind numbingly boring for adults, but it is absolutely not boring for a child that is learning to read-- they make continual incremental progress, they can quickly unlock new words. It's very exciting for them.
It's not just limited to children. In my teens through twenties I loved doing sysadmin stuff, wiring up and configuring this program to that, scripting this operation or that. Decades later that stuff is boring to me, and my own systems are more likely to be left in the configuration equivalent of a blinking 12:00 except where required.
It was exciting while I was learning stuff and could feel my mastery increasing. But having reached whatever level I reached, it's now just boring. I'd rather mop a floor, at least some far away developer isn't going to botch my mopped floor with a security update in the middle of the night.
In any case, my point is that a task which is menial to an experienced adult isn't necessarily so to someone with less experience.
They are hired because it's expected they will only work 2 months, and are needed because we have 5-8 weeks of vacation per year and employers can assign 3 of those (usually in summer, when they hire students).
A job which doesn’t offer enough to live on will be less appealing to those trying to live on their own, but fine for high schoolers.
The whole "but kids" argument about minimum wages is a pointless distraction from the actual debate, which is "should there be full-time adult jobs that pay so little that those doing it are living in poverty?".
Personally I think it's obvious that the answer is "no", and any society that answers "yes" needs to take a good long look at itself and what it's actually trying to achieve.
It's a completely bullshit argument that says "see, it's not so bad" but purposefully pointing to the small subset of people who are in the most advantageous circumstances.
It would be like me arguing the Great Depression wasn't so bad and then pointing to some group of people who were immensely wealthy and therefore managed to get through the Depression mostly unscathed. It's just... bad arguing.
How are you supposed to live on 0 wage? Inevitably for some people that's what a minimum wage means: There is some work with some wage less than a minimum for which this person in this place could work, and they can't because of the minimum. Among other considerations any minimum wage has to balance that harm vs the harm for people who would be paid fairly more with a higher minimum wage.
It's also just the case that an extremely small portion of the public makes minimum wage, and since they're exceptional each of their situations are exceptional in its own way.
Pretty easily. Once you consider how productive an even below-average worker is in the US, the idea of running a business so poorly that you can’t make bank while paying somebody a living wage seems pretty embarrassing.
While the “teenager” line is often vilified as a sign of unfettered greed (which it is), in my experience it’s been more of the respite of folks with so little business sense that it boggles the mind that they would be an employer.
I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business” out loud with a straight face, there are some folks that gleefully proclaim stuff like that as if they’re talking about something other than themselves
> I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business”
An inexperienced new employee can easily be a net loss for a long time as they mess up more stuff than they produce while they learn. This isn't tolerated by a lot of modern business philosophy so the jobs and industries that work like this increasingly just don't exist in the US.
Yes. It is an employer’s responsibility to train or fire employees that are harmful to the business. If they can’t manage to do that, that’s a failure to operate the business at the most basic level.
Insisting that there exists x or y groups of employees that intrinsically deserve to be paid less than a living wage is tantamount to asserting that an employer or manager is entitled to have their planned failure to operate the business subsidized by that same group that they insist on hiring.
Again, it’s not just greed behind the “[teenagers]* don’t deserve a living wage” spiel. It also tends to expose laziness, lack of imagination, entitlement, an active disdain for work, a lack of grasp on business fundamentals, etc. In other words, a lack of the bare minimum aspects of intellectual capacity and discipline necessary in somebody tasked with employing people
* it is not uncommon to see “teenagers” replaced with all manner of groups that any incompetent manager or employer might foist the responsibility for their failures upon. There is nothing special about them as a group
We have the means, it's a choice. We could make a better choice, but if we don't, demographics dynamics will make it for us.
https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://joshbersin.com/2023/09/why-we-are-entering-a-secular...
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-...
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-employers-hiring/101730
https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attac...
It’s also possible that the increased artificial demand for high school labor pushes their average wage to just below the adult minimum wage.
These same people will also say "these minimum wage jobs are for people just entering the workforce, not people in their 30s/40s etc."
Send ‘em to the mines and the meat packing plants for $7/hr because they’re only kids!