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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

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)

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