And then everyone comes with their laptop to work and it becomes an open office.
I live in the country with probably the highest sit-down cafe density cities in the world (Korea), and this issue has been figured out ages ago. If you know any such cafe owners who don't understand how to deal with this, I'm happy to have a chat with them. Or they can come over here and I can show them a dozen cafes so they can see it with their own eyes.
You simply set up the cafe to accommodate the exact % of such laptop users as you're comfortable with, which can be 0%, 100%, or anywhere in between. If you do for some reason want to run a cafe where 100% of seating is usable for laptop workers, then the way to keep it all profitable is also straightforward: 1. you make your cheapest coffee (converted to Dutch CoL) 7+ euros a cup (use some single origin stuff that's still cheap when bought from wholesale). 2. As food, only offer small sweet bites and make those similarly overpriced. 3. Make the seating dense so you can fit a lot of these office workers. Bar seating is especially space-efficient for this.
The Netherlands even has an advantage; people can't just leave their setup on the table and leave for hours as it may well get stolen - this is not an issue in Korea so some people actually do this, the worst case scenario for cafe owners.
Thanks for sharing the link though.
Just to see what happens.
Maybe I’ll not serve alcohol and call it Zero Bars.
> Some people open cafes specifically because they dream of creating a place for the community to hang out
Having people sitting alone looking at a laptop for hours while buying the minimum amount of coffee needed to not be just flat out loitering, I think it would be a problem both from a cold business perspective, and even more so from the human perspective.
One macdonalds deciding they dont want to be a sit-down resturant anymore doesn't prevent anyone else from opening a competing resturant.
Like i think the intended path here is that taxes pay for a library, a park, or a community center. Having random businesses create hang out spots out of the goodness of their heart is not the intended path. They can if it makes sense for their business, but community needs should be primarily funded through taxes not business charity.
Increased payroll taxes increases expenses for the business and if expenses increase enough business will go under.
Wage taxes suck for the employee, but they are not the only party affected.
The amount of disconnect from reality is staggering.
Just AIs trading Bitcoin with each other.
This is a common observation and should make more people ponder: why is it that higher local wealth/economic productivity increases homelessness (especially if you control for public services to counteract the effect)?
May I suggest the book Progress and Poverty by Henry George https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55308 that asks almost the same question. The answer is that private land ownership allows landowners to capture economic growth of prosperous places, so wages barely cover rent at the margin. This is particularly relevant to California which passed a disastrous constitutional amendment Proposition 13 (1978) which slashed property taxes from around 2% to 1% and declining, especially for older estates, which is pretty much the opposite of the ideal policy to deal with the problem of rising rents.
But ALSO - these areas tend to lean towards higher levels of social services such that they have much higher homeless shelter / services / etc per capita.
So while many people may go homeless in place, certainly there is some homeless migration towards areas that actually provide food/shelter and don't harass/arrest them/chase them away.
People move there for the jobs, and the ones who do have jobs tend to have relatively well paying ones, so can pay more for housing. But the ones who don't have a well paying job are in trouble...
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-housing-shortages-cause...
Basically at what point do you decide you're "failing" (no moral valence intended) in one area in which you have a support network that you're willing to risk moving to a totally new area and starting over? At that point, do you have the resources required to do so successfully?
And how good is that support network if it leaves you camping in a tent down by the river? I'm not taking about moving across the state, just down the road a bit.
Someone who doesn't have a job can't afford "substantially cheaper" housing anyway.
That's great! But if you have no place to store your clean (or dirty) clothes, or to shower, how many landlords are going to rent to you? How many employers are going to offer you a job?
Those are not rhetorical questions.
Nope. Definitely not talking about homeless poeple. Gotcha.
2. Remote areas don't have services that cater to homeless people.
The cost of living here is about 1/2 of the USA, with rents about 1/4. The unemployment rate is about 5%.
Homelessness is very, very low (to the point of near invisibility) and mostly limited to illegal immigrants.
The thing that seems to make homelessness a non-issue here is the tolerance of ad-hoc construction. This leads to neighbourhoods where construction is really low cost / quality, but people are housed.
I don’t really understand why these neighbourhoods don’t devolve into hotbeds of violent crime as I would expect them to in the USA, but they mostly don’t.
Mostly, the construction tends to improve over time, and the neighbourhoods often gradually metamorphosize into more contemporary and inviting areas with vibrant small businesses and elegant homes.
I often wonder if it’s cultural, as poverty is not seen as failure but rather a temporary condition to be transcended as possible?
>no homeless
bro if everyone is homeless than nobody is
This could get a lot worse before it gets better.
Now they’re ubiquitous but mainly for people who don’t use the app, it seems.
So while one does not need to say "literally" in that sentence (it wasn't figurative, after all), it is possible to say "zero homeless folks" as there may be data backing the statement up.
"To achieve Functional Zero, the number of individuals placed in interim or permanent housing must be greater than the number of individuals who become homeless over a six-month period, and the homeless population, as a whole, must have a median duration on the streets of less than 90 days."
The data is gathered by the city as well as local nonprofits.
Take for instance a proposal that says "no one is allowed to sell their used car for less than $10k". Maybe the justification is poor people are desperate and sell their car too cheap and all these dealerships and buyers are a monopsony underbidding the real value of the car, profiting off these uninformed, unorganized individual sellers.
Does anyone think this is a good idea? Would anyone bother reading studies contemplating the effect this may have?
No, of course not. Everyone knows that this would essentially mean many cars that would have sold under $10k would just not get sold. Sure some people would benefit, maybe getting a higher price for their car. Some things would shift, maybe people would opt for scooters or e-bikes or something.
But I wouldn't want this price floor if I was on either side, trying to offload a bad car or buying one.
In places with strong unions, there is often a de facto, negotiated minimum at least on a sector by sector basis instead.
E.g. Norway has a roughly 50% unionisation rate, and no minimum wage in most situations, but most sectors are covered by negotiated agreements between the unions and employer organisations.
(Btw, the American healthcare system is about as far away from a free market as it gets. Don’t think that example supports your point.)
This is very different from most other goods, because no one really cares if you break your chair, the chair's parents didn't spend 18 years of their life on it, etc.. If you break a chair, you bear the full costs of replacing it.
Also, the full cost of replacing a human is vastly higher than the maintenance wage.
It also has consequences like increasing the attractiveness of substituting capital (i.e., automation) for labor or simply leaving some work undone (e.g., many smaller restaurants in CA are going out of business due to multiple government policies, including very high minimum wages).
The trick for this to work is that the UBI has to really cover a lot of basic needs.
Overall, this works better for lower skilled workers than it does for higher skilled and higher paid workers. But it could also make sense for people staying home to raise their children, a job which is not compensated today.
How would such a program even work? If we say the Maintenance Wage is $15, is the government just paying the difference between that and the market rate? If so, it seems the ideal salaries to offer are $0 (let the government subsidize it) and $16+ (but you could just get two $0 workers, so I'd expect pay scales to really start at more like $30?)
This seems like it rapidly descends into Bureaucracy or Communism
> Also, the full cost of replacing a human is vastly higher than the maintenance wage.
No, that doesn't hold because humans need these "maintenance costs" regardless of whether they're working or not. Therefore it's fallacious to claim that such "maintenance costs" stem from the job itself. It's a sunk cost arising from the person existing in the first place.
Same idea as police, fire, basic education. We want a properly educated, health, safe workforce. That's the basis of a healthy, productive, strong society.
Because min wage policies have a cost and a benefit. The benefit only happens at relatively low numbers (enough for basic necessities). After that point you dont get more benefits but the costs still increase.
Is a three-bedroom house in [pick nicest neighborhood in any metro area] a necessity?
How about a one-bedroom apartment in the same neighborhood?
An in-law unit (e.g., "granny flat") on a farm just outside town?
A room in a six-bedroom co-op house where meals are collectively prepared and shared?
Same could be asked about food, clothes, etc. I can buy used clothes for $5 or new ones for $100.
"Basic necessities" is woolly term that in practice is full of paternalistic value judgements. Every individual has a variety of resources to draw upon that would make them willing/unwilling to work a job at a given wage.
A government-mandated minimum wage means some people who could find employment will not because their output do not exceed the wages the government has declared must be paid. In practice, it also means many people starting out in life or who are less skilled never get the chance to be hired and learn new skills that increase their pay.
Minimum wages remove the lowest rungs on the job ladder that often teach skills required to be successful higher up.
Because you intentionally picked large unreasonable number and now want to argue it implies much smaller number is reasonable.
If maximum speed of 50km/h is reasonable in cities, why not making it 5km/h?
On speed limits, when it comes to road deaths, you get people saying "one death is too many" and so on when one of their loved ones die, even when speed limits are set to 20 mph.
These people are wrong. Asking why a 1 mph limit is bad can help reveal that we do put a cost measured in lives on convenience, and we do face the risk of death when driving a car, and everyone has a number they think is reasonable.
Asking why $100/hr is too high can at least help us decide on a quantitative way to decide on a number rather than just guessing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts#Locomotives_Ac...
"Reasonable" is a completely subjective standard and not a good way to run a complex economy with an infinite combination of job seekers and providers.
Who gets to decide what is reasonable has big real world implications for millions of people. Get it wrong, and as we see in California here, people lose their jobs and businesses close all because some politician or bureaucrat (or misinformed voter) thinks they know better than workers and employers what the correct price for labor should be.
If your question is why is minimum wage a good policy, you could start here for a summary of the arguments and evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage
I don't think a full look at the history of minimum wages will be kind to their supporters. Minimum wages were created by labor unions for the sole purpose of excluding other workers who are more productive or less expensive than their members[0].
Going back further, labor unions were created during the railroad boom by racist white workers to exclude Chinese laborers who were 2x more productive for the same price. Instead of responding to competition by getting better, American railroad workers formed labor unions and lobbied politicians for relief, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act [1] that forcibly expelled 400,000 Chinese immigrants and led to some horrific violence and racism towards Asian people in this country.
In all cases, the role of government should not be to mandate wages or prices or anything else that markets are better suited to establish, or there will necessarily be higher unemployment. Governments can help by establishing some health and safety standards and policing abuses, but when it comes to accomplishing the social goals that minimum wages intend to, that's better done through tax policy and income redistribution (e.g., guaranteed minimum income, earned income tax credit, welfare benefits).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workingmen%27s_Party_of_Califo... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
It sounds like, were you to acknowledge that thresholds exist somewhere for most things you think the threshold for minimum wage is 0 and that UBI and guaranteed services is a better mechanism.
Which is respectable, at least in that you recognize a government role in ensuring humane living conditions for its citizens. Most people who argue against a minimum wage seem to think any government action of any kind to protect or provide for citizens is "theft by taxation".
I’m not opposed to taxes. When designed properly, they’re transparent and avoid excluding economic activity like min wages do.
But you seem to be missing my point on housing code: do you support a nonzero housing code? Some is good, too much is bad. Same for minimum wage, many models and analyses show that some minimum wage improves productivity and counterintuitively increases employment in monopsonistic industries up to the point when they (partially) undo the damage the monopsony caused, at which point obviously a further increase in minimum wage causes damage as you say. My point is that your "real question" (which was an argumentative point in disguise) works rhetorically against nearly every intervention, some of which you certainly support (I tried to pick an obviously good intervention and came up with building code), and thus is a weak argument. If you truly support no market interventions I at least respect the internal consistency of your worldview but think you must underestimate how much food poisoning, fire death, servitude, etc it would cause.
As shown by comments elsewhere, picking a minimum wage is often based on some imagined everyman/woman’s standard of living that may preclude others from earning a livelihood at all due to jobs never created or capital replacing labor because government decided by fiat that no work that generates less than $X/hr in output shall occur. Human skills and living arrangements are infinitely variable, and governments fail when they attempt to preclude people with lower skills from finding work.
In practice, very few workers earn the minimum wage, but union contracts are often tied to it, so unions like to advance laws that increase the minimum wage, which leads to the outcomes described in the parent post.
As economic policy, they’re also bad because inflating the price floor of labor fairly quickly feeds through to higher costs for housing, food, and services.
Safety standards (ie rules of the road) and competent enforcement are good roles for government, and while they do tend to increase operating costs and function as regulatory barriers to entry, setting prices is best left to markets.
Monopsonies are easily solved by workers moving out of the (labor) market controlled by the buyer to better job prospects. Claiming ancestral ties to a place, etc, as reasons for remaining are then the choice of the worker. If enough people leave, the employer will be forced to increase wages to attract workers.
If this community ceases to exist, is it a societal negative? And further, will a high minimum wage speed up or slow down the decline of this community?
The obvious alternative is to tax the rich to feed the poorest. We can start with capital gains.
Prevent a desperate race to the bottom? Ensure something approaching a minimum wage? Nobody cares, so long as they're getting a UBI check from the government.
Not really? Other countries do industry-wide union agreements that apply to the whole sector, seems to work well enough for them.
When facts conflict with beliefs we hold dear and perhaps define our identities, our brains are very skilled at finding ways to keep believing what we want to believe.
Especially when the facts define your in-group. Changing such beliefs, makes you one of the people you and your friends hate. The mind will convince itself of pretty much anything to avoid such social suicide.
I am open to being convinced by either you or OP but your argument is failing to do so.
Of course, I can't prove that from scratch in a HN comment. What I can do is point out that in the science studying this, it is an uncontroversial fact.
I didn't substantiate that, which made it less convincing, but here is an Economics textbook saying the same thing: https://pressbooks.oer.hawaii.edu/principlesofmicroeconomics...
I know, you can think of an externality. Trust me, Economists can also think of externalities, far more than you or me. In general, they just add interesting nuance to the supply/demand model. They don't completely invalidate it.
But I can't easily demonstrate that, so I suspect I have not changed your mind.
Often because they're not even aware of the concept. The more sophisticated claim that it doesn't apply to the labor market.
The minimum wage discussions are dominated by this view.
The supply/demand analysis is simple: If a worker has skills worth $12/hour on the labor market, and the minimum wage is $15, that worker will be unemployed, making 0$/hour. They'll also not learn new skills, since they can't get a job.
Try bringing that up in a minimum wage discussion, and you'll be called many nasty names. Often equalling market wage to human worth, which means you think the poor are lesser humans. A few sophisticates will bring up vague externalities arguments, as if they negate the whole supply/demand concept.
From my perspective minimum wage laws is one of the main factors keeping people in poverty, but that concept is impossible to even explain to most people.
My main thought about externalities is that they their effect is usually minor, and can be ignored. Many of them are also positive. For the bigger ones, it's a case by case analysis.
Is the externality you're thinking of something around the government paying money to the working poor?
To demonstrate that this is a strawman, I will parrot back what that basic wikipedia article provides as a critique of your point: often in the real world that $12/hr number you provide is depressed by a one-sided monopsony (few large employers vs many small employees, a fact known as market concentration that has grown stronger over decades) and minimum wage can provide effectively a mega union against it to put it simply. When a market is dominated by a single entity what is something "worth"? You may say whatever the market will bear but in noncompetitive markets that is absolutely not the most efficient allocation of resources for the broader system. If insulin were a complete monopoly would it be worth $1M/vial because a billionaire would happily pay that much to save their life? I use the extreme to demonstrate the concept of market failure to you. By pointing out monopolistic forces am I saying "supply and demand don't apply"? Maybe in a way, but putting it that way is reductive and unproductive for our collaborative search for the truth in this discussion.
Or, for a totally separate but less abstract argument, say someone has no skills except for an ability to dig a ditch at $5/hr - it is low value because you could pay someone $50/hr to rent and operate a trencher and be 100x more productive at less total cost and a better overall outcome to society (I think these numbers are probably roughly reflective of reality), but this low skill person is unable to run that trencher. Is it better for society to "learn new skills" as you say by digging ditches for years? They probably would get a bit stronger but obviously never get close to the trencher's productivity or bang per buck. This is an exaggerated toy model but it demonstrates the point that many sub-minimum wage gigs teach negligible skills compared to formal education. I point this out just to object to your example - many people turn to education if possible when they fail to find employment, so to say sub-minimum wage employment will teach them skills whereas unemployment will be worthless just doesn't map on to most people's experience in the real world and to be frank sounds out of touch.
Labor isn't just another good, it is actual human beings whose wages greatly affect their quality of life.
Your rant about in-groups is odd.
There's a curious authoritarian tinge to these "free market" argument. "Free markets are powerful, therefore if I support free markets I am a powerful insider."
It usually takes an encounter with a major economic reverse - like being bankrupted by healthcare - for proponents to realise that the free market doesn't care about them either, no matter what they believe.
We can't quite get it together on saying "food, shelter, healthcare are human rights" or it's sinister sibling "we'll let you die in the cold if there's no profit to be had from you".
Those are both consistent, actionable policies, but no one wants a consistent policy on this because everyone gerrymanders it dofferently.
So we get clunky hacks like minimum wage that are sort of the average of Aspirational Star Trek and Aspirational Blade Runner.
You could flip this and say "you're comparing people who are selling off an essential possession just to survive to a bit of company work."
The way people frame things in completely different ways to justify their preexisting beliefs is part of the reason why it's difficult to get people to consider other possibilities. The person could be doing their job to survive, or they could be working a few hours on a fun job on the weekend for a bit of extra cash. A person might just be getting rid of their used vehicle, or they might be giving up an essential possession because they're in dire straights.
Your statement makes it seem as if these populations are of equal size, but in reality the vast majority works to survive.
An item should not have a minimum price as it is just an item, meanwhile every person is, well, a person, and should be able to sustain themselves.
In college I would often make some extra spending money by partaking in social science experiments. I didn't really care if the compensation was below minimum wage - I had time, it was easy enough, and it was easy to opt in when I could. I wasn't doing it for survival, but for a bit of extra spending cash. If someone forced them to significantly increase wages, I might have benefited, but it's far more likely that they would done fewer experiments with a more select group and I would have been worse off.
If someone is on the edge, and it's only a minimum wage job that they have open for them, California's minimum wage could help them if they're one of the lucky ones who benefit from it, or could hurt them if they were one of the people hurt by the loss of 18,000 jobs it caused (per the linked report). A policy that leads to fewer jobs that pay more tends to just increase inequality.
These laws take the form of transfer and registration fees for vehicles, taxes, and especially inspection requirements. We also have much stricter requirements on what a large commercial enterprise can sell versus a private individual.
We have rules like that for everything. We also say you can’t sell houses for less than X by mandating things like how many stairwells they have, and so on.
To the extent you’re tempted to argue some semantics about how you could still sell a car for a dollar you’re wrong and missing the point on purpose by arguing over the definitions in a way that doesn’t change the principle.
We do this because we are a society and we get to decide what the society looks like. Prices are downstream of our value system.
We do not want a race to the bottom for wages. If full time employment is not enough for basic necessities, that is the sort of thing that leads to riots. Society in general does not want that. Society prefers stability.
We’re a few years from the Walmarts in the really bad parts of town turning to pickup and delivery only.
This is sarcastic of course. Ideally if our economy distributed rewards across all of society everyone would be for changes like this if they did actually speed up automation
The other thing that will probably happen is a reduction in service. Cashiers get replaced by ordering kiosks, for instance.
One way of forcing this is making the minimum wage high enough that any venture has to make sure their workers have a high output. And some types of businesses become inviable as a consequence. Investment which would have gone to such ventures will instead go to other ventures, and workers become available for better jobs.
There's also significant down sides to this.
Increasing wages (or increasing taxes on labour) are methods of forcing and increasing the minimum level of productivity for all jobs. If you have a business and suddenly have to pay your employees 20% more, then you have to make sure they are 20% more productive as well. If you are able do that with training them and/or investing in more effective processes and practices, then everybody wins. Or you have to this in combination with raising prices, which is not a bad thing if that means higher worker compensation.
Now let's say your business is not able to train, invest, and price increase enough to cover for a 20% increase in wages. Perhaps your customers simply do not accept a higher price? Perhaps the kind of business you are in has a very low return margin and thus cannot motivate investments in better tools for your workers? Then that kind of business generally goes under - or more realistically there won't be new businesses of that kind opening. For the economy as a whole this is good, that people are not wasting their time with inefficient ventures which customers are not willing to pay for.
Even considering some unemployment, this can be beneficial. Instead of two workers producing for example 100 units per day, you might have one worker producing 1000 units per day and the other being unemployed.
But for all of this to work as intended, it is absolutely necessary to have enough opportunity for workers to switch into different jobs. And why shouldn't we be able to have that?
Why spend $$$$$$ developing a drone delivery system that might face insurmountable technical hurdles like range, capacity and safety if you can just pay undocumented migrants on bicycles $2 per delivery?
I personally know a couple of Uber Eats restaurants whose only physical presence is literally a garage in a residential neighborhood, and they only take orders from the app. I also know of a Uber Eats competitor whose business model includes rider hubs that stock on a limited set of high volume products for quick delivery.
I wouldn't call them net loss of jobs per se. I see those as entirely different businesses with completely new business models. It's more a kin to ordering groceries online than to going on a night out.
Once I'm just ordering a shitty burger from a machine, I have probably lost any reason to give them my money at all, there is just way better alternatives.
More money in low wage jobs is mostly spend and not saved and can lead to more jobs in other sectors.
If the owner was to overhire, it might reduce the homeless population a little, but at great cost. And other businesses nearby will benefit for free.
Only large coordination at the level of state or national government can afford to implement welfare as a real investment in their citizens. If you do it at the city, county, or corporate level, it's just charity.
You make the same assumptive leaps, which are based in fallacy, that cause this route to be a giant circle without agency/choice.
Your, "Tragedy of the commons" implies there's nothing you can do to change the world unless you are at the top of government, and that is both wrong, and the perspective of a demoralized hopeless person.
Actions matter, and you can do quite a lot at the local level by building strong community, and community is not government.
My first time being into a McDonalds since I was a kid was earlier this summer when I gave my 3 year old the option of going in or staying in the car. I was pretty shocked at how barebones it was now. There weren't even napkins available and none with our food...which, when you have a kid with, is an issue.
People started treating "meeting other people in person" as a tiresome chore, and the world is adapting to that change.
Someone linked the short story The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster the other day where this is an element. A character makes a big deal of having to meet her son in person, opposed of through the machine.
Written in the 20s, gets a lot of things uncannily correct for a society 100 years later. Video calling, silence/do not disturb mode, notifications, air conditioning, people no longer wanting to look at real things with their eyes, etc.
Pre-COVID, I used to go to a small kabob restaurant in Silicon Valley. During COVID, I'd order from them via Doordash. The food wasn't as good cold, though, even if re-heated. After COVID, I started going back in person. Often, I'd be the only in-person customer, despite a steady stream of deliver drivers going in and out. Now, they're out of business.
Because DoorDash/GrubHub/UberEats/etc. charge the restaurants more than their gross margins. In such an anvironment, unless a restaurant raises prices 25-30%, they're eventually going out of business.
I'd say that these companies are most certainly not providing 25-30% value add. Rather, it's just leeching off restaurants and their customers.
It's disgusting and has killed many, many restaurants where I live (NYC), even though we already had a culture of delivery before these parasites came along.
And more's the pity.
This is the REAL issue.
By that logic ending child labor is "still a net loss of jobs."
I mean, here you are talking about a business owner having issues with the local homeless population who are homeless because their jobs don't pay enough to afford housing.
All these business owners race to the bottom paying their employees scraps and then wonder why they have empty dining rooms with no customers to afford their products sold at record-high profit margins.
Obviously, minimum wage doesn't really fix the economy on its own, but it is a very important tool in a toolbox for ensuring that capitalism is restrained from following its worst instincts.