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Comment by khalic | Hacker News Reader

The study is sound, pretty small impact considering the increase in living conditions. What surprises me is people arguing that somehow a business is more important than livable wages. Americans and slavery really is a love story

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3.2% decline in a year is massive because a year is way too short a time to see anywhere near the full effect due to things like leases often being for 10 years, technology rollouts being slow, etc. On a 10 year timeline i would expect tjat number to be much higher. Its a value judgement whether the wage was a good idea or not but it does us no good lying to ourselves about what that judgement actually cost

Living wage is a NIMBY problem, not a wage problem.

It's like thinking you can solve a GPU shortage by giving people more money to buy marked-up GPUs. That won't do anything except make GPUs even more expensive.

The solution is to build more GPUs. To build more housing.

EXACTLY. I've been saying the same thing for so long. As long as the imbalance of supply and demand exists the way it has, giving the lowest wage earners more money only bids up rents. There is no such thing as a living wage in a system of scarcity where buyers compete for necessities instead of necessity owners/producers competing for buyers.

We've seen with GPUs that building more doesn't solve the problem. Large corporations buy up all the stock and the leftovers are still ridiculously expensive.

Unless there's something preventing the rich from treating supply as an investment to get even richer off of, increasing production only facilitates wealth collecting at the top.

That's not true. You are seeing a massive bubble in AI infrastructure unfold that is gobbling up gpus faster than we are increasing supply of gpus. That bubble will pop at some point (probably soon) and things will get more normalized int hat market too (unless that pop coincides with something really stupid happening like China invading Taiwan, which would take out massive amounts of production capacity)

I mostly agree with you but I do think the issue is a lot more complex than that. I do think there is a valid criticism based on market power abuse at the minimum wage in the food sector, for example, especially with the rise of chains over the last several decades and with labor markets at the low end being much more geographically constrained than most analysis of this situation appreciates. In my opinion there is a kernel of truth to the wage should be higher than minimum in many places if the market was functioning properly and had stronger competition but I kind of doubt that's more than a couple dollars and that is being used to push through bad leftist policies to push wages of their special interest groups up when their other policies are highly inflationary in the costs of basic needs like housing as well, which actively harms these people. it would probably help the low end a lot more having policy that generally pushes down the costs of basics (like getting rid of most of the zoning/approvals processes for building anything so people can build whatever fits the economics of the area on whatever land they want in areasonably short period of time, removing carbon taxes, sales taxes on basics, etc).

If your goal is to make sure anyone who wants a livable wage can get one, you can’t just decide you don’t care about the things that produce them. There’s a number of areas in California that already suffer from a lack of businesses; you may be more familiar with this phenomenon by the labor-focused name we usually use for it, “high unemployment”.

Amazing how they are all universally experts in economic analysis of minimum wage. This thread is a goldmine. If only they educated themselves in collective bargaining next.

That's what you get after decades of relentless propaganda. Anything remotely socialist is completely taboo there.

"Decades of relentless propaganda" also known as the "the 20th century"

Really clever. Bet you'd love it being a coal miner in the Gilded Age. "Hum, no, livable wages are literally communism, you wouldn't want to kill millions, would you? I'm really smart."

You're exactly what I was talking about. Indoctrinated into being absolutely opposed to anything in favor of workers, spontaneously regurgitating those same few tired "arguments".

The poorest people are not the ones working minimum wage full-time. However, the poorest do want to purchase take-out. Increasing the minimum for fast food realistically helps a pretty minute demographic of workers, but the carry-over cost to consumers means that poor people can afford less fast food.

Maybe that's not such a bad thing, but if it's meant to help the poor (who either earn nothing or earn much less consistently) it's pretty ineffectual at it, particularly when accounting for differences in cost-of-living, and the types who typically work minimum wage fast food in particular. Walk into a McDonalds and you'll mostly see students and immigrants, that's not "the poor". "Livable" needn't arbitrarily mean a spacious 1-bedroom apartment either, which is why migrants paid below-market wages don't worry about rent.

Cash transfers and other schemes are better. We already do that to a small extent and could just expand it.

Edit: should clarify, it's a balancing act because a higher main wage on net can be beneficial, but after a certain level will lead to undesirable effects

If unemployment insurance and state fmla pay are any indication, any cash payments will be driven into the same laggy rough to navigate bureaucracy by the coalition between the people who like being cruel to poor people and the people who think insurance is some kind of handout.

That doesnt follow. We already have welfare/handouts and it idnt hard to navigate, some people just need guidance doing so, which is available. 90% of people living on the street have a) a bank account and b) a smartphone

You also need an address that isn’t a P.o. box or a post office. Everyone I’ve talked to who has gotten unemployment or welfare compares keeping it to a part time job.

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