Income Inequality Depresses Support for Higher Minimum Wages [pdf]
apa.org
apa.org
If the poorest people in a country get to live a happy, healthy life with people that love in not be stressed about food or housing, that sounds like a fantastic world.
Do any countries current achieve this? Japan maybe? I have no clue.
Food can also be affordable in Japan.
For a society to become wealthy, those who produce more wealth need to get to end up with more wealth.
Show me literally any study that correlates the amount of work performed/the value of work/the ability of the worker with wealth. I'll wait.
I have read study after study after paper after paper, research on research, research verifying research, over and over, so many they have run utterly into a black ichor that issues from my eyes when people talk this brand of shit. The best predictor in the world of having wealth is being born into it. The second best is marrying into it. The third best is striking it lucky at the free market lottery, entry into which also requires some level of wealth and not a tiny amount of it either.
This is trivially true if you accept the premise that "value of work" is the same as "amount paid", because the statement basically becomes "show me literally any study that correlates salary with wealth". However I suspect you reject the market wage as "value of work", and would rather have some subjective measure like "social value" or whatever. As imperfect market wage is, it's as objective of a measure as we can get, and letting people use whatever subjective measure they want will mean the argument will go nowhere because you can define your value function to whatever you want.
>I have read study after study after paper after paper, research on research, research verifying research, over and over, so many they have run utterly into a black ichor that issues from my eyes when people talk this brand of shit. The best predictor in the world of having wealth is being born into it. The second best is marrying into it. The third best is striking it lucky at the free market lottery.
My claim isn't that wealth right now is distributed 100% meritocratically, only that inequalities will emerge even if we somehow reset everyone's wealth, and therefore the claim that "Wealth inequality isn't some random thing" is incorrect.
I do not even remotely accept your premise. A short list of jobs that are crucial to modern life that are chronically underpaid:
* Teachers
* Nursing/care staff
* Daycare workers
* Janitorial staff
* Delivery/logistics workers
FAR from an exhaustive list.
> However I suspect you reject the market wage as "value of work"
Considering how many working poor there are I'd say there's a solid reason for rejection. If people are working full time hours and still unable to meet their needs, clearly something is wrong.
> only that inequalities will emerge even if we somehow reset everyone's wealth, and therefore the claim that "Wealth inequality isn't some random thing" is incorrect.
This is an utter non-sequitur to anything I was talking about. You assert that value of work is tied to the wealth of the one doing the work. I challenged this by pointing out numerous whole categories of laborer that are and have been underpaid for some time. You assert that this is a subjective measurement. I don't know what to really say here.
If doing work that needs doing for the understood full time hours we as a society have stated is not a path to at least a stable life, if not a particularly luxurious one, then what's the point of working? And, more concerningly, why would anyone take up that job that being the case? Nurse and teacher retention right now is horrific specifically because the pay isn't very good and it's a very demanding job, and as a result we have a shortage of both. But we still need them.
Not too long ago I dug a large hole, and then filled it back in again. It was very difficult and tiring, and entirely useless.
If you accept that I don’t deserve money for this, then you reject the premise that effort/work is the only factor determining value, and “utility” or value to others also matters
As a result, money gets distributed based on the relative power of those involved in the process. Business owners typically hold the most power, in-demand workers have some leverage, and others have less. So being rich doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve created a lot of value for others, it may just mean you’ve held positions of power.
Getting rid of these positions of power is the way to create a more equal and prosperous society.
Even if I accept your premise, it doesn’t explain why some places have far more wealth inequality than others despite having similar differences in abilities in those places. There might be some innate differences in abilities, but the magnification of those differences is socially constructed. It’s not a fact of nature.
You also are discounting luck. Some people are lucky. They were born with enormous inherited wealth. Or, their business happened to be in the right place in the right time.
why should i work hard for strangers who vilify me?
Family relationships are just compound interest.
I'm coming from a libertarian perspective, so I'm certainly not trying to use that to justify no-exit totalitarian thinking. But it's still important to remember that base truth when analyzing the overall outcomes of our current system.
To extend your metaphor, we have tons of the available "surface area" for people to fall on paved with asphalt, to suit the preferences of those sitting in shit. These are not fixed things. We placed the asphalt. We can tear it up, if we so choose to.
The standard argument against this is that "inequality is a good thing because it leads to innovation" or whatever.
Or is it "why do bad beginnings with lots of drudgery not lead to yacht ownership?"
It still matters when some people have 6+ orders of magnitude more wealth than the median person.
Because of this wealth disparity, through the legal channels of campaign contributions, they are able to have a disproportionate and therefore antidemocratic effect on government policy.
This is bullshit. You can have lower income inequality without necessarily having an elite with destructive amounts of money with proper regulations and taxation against the most wealthy.
It's alright for a rich guy to live in a nice house ans drive around in a luxury car. It's not right when they have enough money to just buy access to the highest levels of everything to their benefit (and the rest of society prejudice).
It's truly not a problem if some people have maybe 10x more influence than others. It becomes a problem when some people have so much influence that they, alone, can change the trajectory of their country and even sidestep democratic processes. Which is what we're seeing in countries like the US.
this common sense is somehow anti-democratic.
the weak spam rhetoric because they lack power to actually enact the change they claim to want.
the losing response to this is to whine about systemic blah blah blah, enjoy your subservience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
and in the case of Meta it is not just "morals" or "ethics" but very basic attributes of quality and UX. Instagram fails to load the first time I try to load it on my computer, but it usually comes up after a reload. Uploading photos on Instagram is much more of a hassle (takes much longer) than it is on the unfunded web Mastodon client which is developed by open source fanatics who'd I'd expect to have zero empathy for ordinary users. I like the idea of the Meta Quest 3 but so many things, particularly the social features, are terribly thought out and if you're delighted that something works now there's a good chance it will regress next week.
If Zuck fired his whole front end team in Silicon Valley and hired some good FE people in Minnesota, retired and put a rando in charge I bet he'd be worth 5x as much overnight.
Give me a viable political system where wealth is not correlated with political power, and I will be liable to agree with you.
* Healthcare will be defined as “Primary Care Visits with approved in-network physicians”, who will also have proportionally lower pay so those who made that definition can keep more money for themselves
* Housing will be redefined to include cockroach-infested squallor, so landlords can pocket more money
* Education will have more stratas put in place at higher costs, such that “free” or “baseline” education is increasingly worthless, wages depressed, and only those of means may participate in society
All of those circle back to wealth inequality, and is why that metric won’t go away - and why the rich have a vested interest in convincing the poor that it’s everyone and everything else’s fault for their precarity.
It’s all about money. When more people have a larger share of the money, better decisions and outcomes are more likely than 1.1% of people hoarding 50% of global wealth for themselves. The math is absolutely that simple, as are the solutions (TAXES).
But, anyway - it does matter, obviously. Money are a way for the society to decide what is more important. The more money you have the more decisions in a society you make. If a few people have most of the money - they get to decide for the whole society what is actually happening.
TL;DR: high enough wealth inequality turns democracy into oligarchy. Even if it's a nice cozy oligarchy with good social - odds are it probably won't stay that way forever.
Relative equality is just as important, people get all kinds of stress related illnesses if they cannot keep up.
One example is people people putting themselves in debt in order to get a college degree.
Furthermore, the financial system works as a procyclical tool for the wealthy, since they can use debt financing as a leverage mechanism, while the poor have an insufficient credit score. This makes is easy for those with money to commandeer an outsized share of the available resources within an economy.
For example, wealthy owners using real estate and as an investment vehicle, bidding up house prices for everyone. The banks make a killing on selling mortgages while the population becomes indebted and precarity rises.
Here are some theories which I find interesting:
The Iron Law of Oligarchy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy
Structural Demographic Theory https://peterturchin.com/structural-demographic-theory/
Elite Overproduction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
Firm Hierarchy predicts Income https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/11/19/firming-up-hi...
that's an utopia.
That's a measure of liquid wealth inequality, not income inequality.
Then lack of political power leads right back to lower standard of living for the poor.
Accurately understanding cause and effect, having a diagnosis that actually affords an understanding and solution to the problem is of some importance then.
In the US we see a severe and dramatic event: falling income and rising stock market. In simple terms, corporation profits are rising and those rising profits are going to those who are already wealthy. At the same time, the real income of common people is falling. The discussion often turns to "inflation" as though low inflation is good news. If you cannot afford reasonable health care, food, adequate housing, low inflation does not help. In the discussion of these increasingly common problems, the obvious solution - paying a living wage - does not come up.
A key tool in understanding situations is "Cuo bono?" Who benefits? In the US and other countries it is corporations. An ancillary question is who does not benefit? The answer to that is question is given by the fact that the national minimum wage in the US is $7.25 per hour. Who benefits? Who does not? When the "too big to fail" banks had problems, the US instituted socialism for corporations. Who benefited? Who did not?
And certainly there is less public opinion support for higher minimum wages. Why could this be? Public support is to some extent determined by public discussion - where people express their problems and issues. If there is no forum for this discussion, then perhaps that is the crucial factor. In which case measuring "public opinion" will not be predictive.
A question then is whether there are forums where the experiences of common people are primary. Perhaps the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, is a such a forum? Really? Or perhaps other media, supported for the most part by corporate advertising is the answer. For example, the NYT with their articles about where to buy your two million dollar vacation home? Or here is a recent article for you:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/style/plant-sitter-nanny....
Our so called news media have dramatically failed. And somehow the NYT is surprised that there are people who will now choose any alternative over the status quo. And if you had the nerve to reject both candidates in the last election, the NYT deemed you a "double hater".
Our media is bought out by the very people who benefit, sadly. We've truly hit full oligarchy in 2025. Even manipulating the ones suffering to vote against their own best interests
Inflation adjusted median wage has been increasing since mid-90's: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
The USA similarly relies on low-paid, often illegal, workers being paid less than minimum wage to harvest their food, wash their cars, do their gardening, etc...
We've spent decades saying that the US's culture was immoral for various reasons and did everything we could to import foreigners from places like that, now we're seeing the cultural shift and it turns out the ideas we had weren't as bad as we thought.
In the post-WW2 era, housing, food, and energy were cheap, which made it possible for a single wage earner (usually the husband) to support a family. All of the things that upper-middle-class families commonly outsource - cooking, cleaning, gardening, childcare, housework, driving kids around - were done by the wife. Now they are low-paid labor; before they were unpaid labor, but they still had to get done.
The existence of a market for low-productivity tasks like childcare and cleaning depends upon income inequality. These are not jobs where capital and specialization makes you more efficient; one person can do them roughly as well as another, and often times a household member is more efficient than external paid help. For a market to be profitable in these activities, the opportunity cost of one person’s time must be much greater than the wages they pay for this service, which implies wage inequality.
Two-edged swords and all that. Greater equality between sexes within a family is made up for by greater inequality between families.
You don't invest in your future, don't be surprised when the future doesn't invest in society.
That these sectors are necessary was part of my point. If the parent isn't doing the job, somebody else is; you can't just eliminate or automate the job entirely.
With a longer perspective, the trend in the US can be seen more as a reversion to a prior state. 100 years ago the US wasn't that different than India today in terms of exploitation of poor laborers.
100 years ago there was a period of prosperity in the US following WWI.
100 years ago there was much stronger unionization for Americans both in factories and on farms.
The high tech infrastructure 100 years ago was electrification, US cities being wired up and almost all rural (where most Americans lived and worked) areas not. You might argue for the phone but rural phones took longer than electricity to deploy. The high tech infra today is Internet and rural Indians are much more connected than century-ago Americans.
Conditions are very different in important ways. I'm intentionally leaving out race/caste comparisons, which are valid but will also lead to massive downvotes.
Prosperity for whom?
See for yourself where inequality was in the 1920s vs the post WW2 period:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Uni...
They could start the paper by not stating something obviously false.
If they did that, they would be realize that all their conclusions they draw have zero foundation. The labor market is NOT a free market, and that's good. Everyone wants it to not be a free market. But that complicates things, and we can't make 1 million assumptions and draw basic conclusions. We actually have to, you know, analyze things.
I do believe that Tariffs should actually be determined by wage disparity. So if the US can make a paper plate for $0.01 each, but China can make it for $0.00001, then the Tariff for the paper plate should just be $0.01 - $0.00001. That way both plates are sell-able for the same price.
https://californiaglobe.com/fr/californias-20-fast-food-mini...
Well that's already the first problem.
This system optimizes for some kind of "fairness" between producers, rather than living standard for consumers.
In reality, everyone is best of if things are produced where they can be made most effectively.
Second, you think we need more "CEO yachts"? That's where the resources are going more and more. IIRC billionaires in UK are 5 times richer since Covid. We have many little with poor housing and food situations.
Western Capitalism directs resources to the wealthy, often those who gained wealth through past feudalism or [other?] crime.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per...
The USA has the highest median disposable income (purchasing power) per household.
How could you possibly believe that capitalism is making Americans and other capitalist countries worse off?
There’s a reason practically everyone wants to move to those places!
Like launching a Tesla into space for the lulz?