> ... no matter how tenuous, the precariat had jobs. The new dying Americans, the ones killing themselves on purpose or with drugs, don’t. Don’t, won’t, and know it.

Overtime and wage increases are not going to help people who don't have jobs, and can't be trained for high paying jobs. UBI might help them, but might have some other unbeneficial social effects. And maybe if we invent Soma we could give people a safe way to escape a crushing reality.

But the gist here is that for a certain underclass, things are not improving, and no solutions are being offered. No one even cares that these people are dying, no community is organized around helping them. Nothing. It's bad enough to make one want to take heroin.

So vote Trump! If you can't save the world, better to watch it burn. Fire walk with me.

A higher minimum wage will most likely hurt the unnecessariat. One way to think of a $15 minimum wage is a prohibition on anyone who's labor is worth less than $15/hr from working. Not only will it make the current unecessariat's situation worse, it will likely expand it's ranks.

http://cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/studying-the-studies-on-the-...

I wouldn't advocate a jump straight to a $15 minimum wage because for sufficiently large MW jumps the elasticity has to start heading for -1 (and beyond -- that's just the break even point) and we only have good information for small changes. But for small changes the evidence is unambiguous. The traditional narrative taught in Econ 101 is an oversimplification.

It's not hard to figure out why: markets set the actual price of labor between the producer price (minimum people will work for) and consumer price (value to the employer) based on bargaining power. If employers are winning at the bargaining power game, wages will be close to the minimum. If employees are winning, wages will be close to the maximum. Only those earning wages already close to the maximum will be affected by a minimum wage increase. Since the unskilled labor market is flooded, approximately everyone is on the "minimum" side of the spectrum. Both theory and evidence say that small MW increases are boons to laborers under these conditions.

As machines advance and begin push humans out of the market, the maximum side of the spectrum will begin to drift downwards and impinge on all the people crunched up against the minimum side, squeezing them out of the market and into "unnecessariat" status. Minimum wage will become an ineffective tool at that point, just as you say. But we aren't there yet.

The cited blog is by the CEPR, a leftist/progressive think-tank, this doesn't make their conclusion wrong, however, my reading of the graph present on the blog looks more like there is a negative elasticity, with respect to the demand for labor at higher wages, indicated by the meta-study. The graph looks like it might be as large as -0.1, suggesting that doubling of the minimum wage could have a noticeable negative impact on employment. Not all studies show that happening, but a greater number do.

Also: GP makes an excellent point, which I should have thought of myself.

Another model is UBI and government as employer of last resort (or a equivalent strong labour movement). If there is an employer who can absorb all applicants at a minimum wage, then the market floor is pushed up.

Remember, a living wage is the minimum all-in cost of labour. If you're operating a business which cannot afford to pay a worker what they need to survive, you're not operating a business, you're operating a charity supported by your workforce (or social welfare systems).

If you can and fail to, you're simply pocketing profits from the public purse.

This is straight-up Adam Smith: "A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation."

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/29ecw4nrl7ap2fu4chnjsw

Exactly. It's amazing to me that people claim there just isn't enough work. There is more than enough work -- there's always some way to make the world a better place. And in the USA there are fairly obvious things, from social services (in the broadest sense) to mundane upkeep to large infrastructure improvements.

The problem is that there isn't enough work that's motivated by profit motive in the near-term.

Likewise, if you are a working-age individual who is only capable of creating value at a rate less the minimum wage, you aren't looking for a job, you're looking for charity dressed up like a job. (That's fine as a social policy, but when that charity is expected to come private sources, it's a very unstable employer/employee relationship. The minute affordable automation comes along or the business revenues take a dip, such charity cases will be the first to be let go or have their hours cut, because they're fundamentally unprofitable in the normal condition.)

I'd also inquire as to:

1. Who or what the economy is supposed to be for, anyway.

2. What the situation is when it's not trivially possible to create increased value through exploitation of labour. That speaks to some problems with the production function.

3. The possibility of positive externalities and/or public goods (also of negative externalities and rent-seeking).

4. The relationships between wealth and political or negotiating power.

I'll give you a hint on that last. "Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." Smith again.

I am speaking on a micro-scale. Individual people with low skills and no capital. It's not at all clear to me that minimum wage laws and social safety nets with sharp claw-backs or cliffs (where money earned doesn't help at all or not much) help this class as a whole. Sure, minimum wage laws probably prop up many in the class who have jobs but harms those in the class who don't.

For me, I've run two small businesses and now am a happy employee. It's amazingly aggravating to deal with having employees and it's perfectly proper to me that my employer makes more profit on my labor than I take home. They should: they take all the risk that I'm a lemon employee and provide the structure whereby I can concentrate on where I can add vale and all the stuff I couldn't care less about (HR, Finance, Legal structure, IP, etc) they handle.

If I start a third company, it probably won't have any low-skill workers at all, certainly not if there's a min wage law that makes it uneconomical to hire them. On a micro scale, I'm deciding what's best for my company, not for the economy or for society.

Edit: I should also clarify that in my GP post that I was referring to the payment of minimum wage at a rate higher than the value creation as a form of "charity", not that all low-skilled work (paid at free market wages) is charity. One of the appealing aspects of most UBI proposals is the "U" in that they don't scale back benefits as punishment for gainful employment.

Also I think you can survive on minimum wage, but surviving just means not dying. A surviving wage would only have to be high enough to afford the worker a 9 squarefoot of decently heated dry room to sleep in, two sets of adequate but not nice or new clothing, a winter coat and sufficient caloric intake not to starve, as well as access to a place to urinate/deficate and, probably, the occasional shower. I don't think that is that costly, actually, but it is possible to survive at this level.

So personally I think we should aim a little bit higher than survival. I am not concerned with the differences between the poor and the rich - no person was ever fed because his neighbor is also poor, but with how the poorest are living.

He's adamantly clear that the survival wage criterion is an absolute minimum. He also lays out what the story is, for the economy as a whole when this isn't met (his prolonged discussion of China).

He addresses (mostly in chapter 10) additional considerations which raise the value of some work. Something technical workers and contractors would do well to read.

Smith discusses the matter of elements which had been considered luxuries but which are, by the custom of a nation, essentials. That would include, in most developed countries, electricity, running water, sewage, residential gas (possibly), phone and Internet service, a fixed postal address, reliable transportation, and the like.

What Smith doesn't mention (excusably) nor Robert Gordon (in The Rise and Fall of American Growth) somewhat less so, is Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. You'll frequently see (including sadly here on HN) arguments that the existence or ownership of a cellphone or smartphone somehow indicates someone isn't poor. While Gordon does* correctly point out that predictability and reliability of income is crucial to a middle-class existence, he fails to note that Maslow's pyramid cannot be built from the top down. Providing for safety and security, food, clothing, and shelter are the minimum.

I've explored Smith and Maslow more at my subreddit / Lair of the Id, you might enjoy reading articles there: https://dredmorbius.reddit.com

Did you miss this bit, or do you not believe it?

>> Goldman Sachs says this will add 100,000 jobs, as employers try to avoid paying time and a half for overtime.[2]

TL;DR yes, I don't believe it.

It will increase wealth because the companies will still be paying more than they are today - if two 40-hour workers were cheaper than one 80-hour worker today, they'd be hiring the two 40-hour workers already.

Additionally going from one unemployed person and one person with an 80-hour job to two people with 40-hour jobs is probably a win, even if there were no extra money.

They can get those through welfare, after all. /s

Yes we do. There is so much work to be done. The problem is the poverty of the public sphere, brought on by specific, ideologically motivated decisions.

"But it's not fair to demand that the hard working robot owners pay more in taxes to help the people too lazy to own their own robots."

It's part of the foundation of every sovereign country. They formed a new government to get better representation because they felt the old one was robbing them and not providing enough services.

I don't think the next revolution is around the corner. But, this election cycle, evidence of the widening wealth gap is more apparent.

* People should keep their money, they worked hard for it!

Then Bruenig points out that there is capital income, which does not come from work. Capital will keep "working" for you even if you stole it or inherited. It's extra obvious in the case of owning fully autonomous robots that could do anything a human could, but it's true for much simpler forms of capital, too.

Then they retreat to voluntarism:

* OK, so capital owners didn't work to get that money, but it was all voluntary. I'm just against force and for voluntarism.

Then he points out that property rights are enforced through violence too - the only reason you will make those "voluntary" trades for food and shelter, is that men with guns will come and arrest you if you just take it.

Then libertarians retreat to common-goodism:

* OK, we could imagine a society where people could just take as they please, so property rights are in a sense man-made. And they do require violence to enforce. But not having them would lead to the tragedy of the commons. Without property rights, we would all be miserably poor!

And this is certainly true, but if the common good is what we target, why not have a proper welfare state, a solid UBI funded by high taxes etc.?

Usually at that point they go back to the first step.

Well, taxation is theft, so that is the easy answer to that. :-)

But to dig a little deeper... a UBI is an interesting concept, and especially so when one considers a future where most, or even all, human labor becomes unneeded. In a world of 100% technological unemployment, it does seem that we're going to require a different system than what we have now. But I don't think just saying "have an UBI" is much of an answer, because - IMO - the entire fundamental basis of the economy will be so radically different that we can't even imagine how the UBI will be funded and how the economy will work.

I keep running through scenarios, trying to come up with a scenario that makes sense, even hand-waving around the "initiation of force" issue temporarily, and it always seems to come out looking like a Ponzi scheme in the end.

Luckily, I think we're still quite a ways away from the total obviation of need for human labor, so we have some time to figure it out. Well, hopefully anyway.

Here's what you do:

1) Tax the monetary gains made by corporations from greater automation, not enough to disincentivize R&D, but enough to counteract inflation from step #2.

2) Institute an unconditional basic income, like Alaska already does for natural resources. Everyone gets a check in the mail.

You balance #1 and #2 so there is no net inflation. The more corporations lay people off in the aggregate, the more wages will be replaced by UBI.

I believe that an individual should be allowed to save the results of their work and consume the benefits later. I believe that they should be allowed to gift (or share) these savings with someone of their choosing. I don't believe that these allowances should be voided by death.

From that, I conclude that if my wife and I die with $2MM estate and give $1MM to each of our children, that they are entitled to the income from that capital, but it doesn't change the fact that that income originated from (my wife's and my) work.

And the problem with that is that it really relies on a "facts on the ground" view on property entitlements. If our laws about property are man-made and supported with force, why shouldn't we change how they can be transferred (or possibly voided in case of death?). You can disagree, and you certainly can fight it, but you can't really morally condemn anyone for trying to take it from you.

You can disagree, you can certainly fight it, but you can't really morally condemn me for sharing my earnings with my family.

But you're, as I said, not justifying it with desert now.

You think you deserve to be able to do as you wish with your money. But why do you deserve that? It can't be because you worked for it, because in giving money to people who didn't work for it (e.g. your kids), you acknowledge that having worked for it isn't important to you. And I guess you think that your kids, too, should be allowed to use the money you give them as they see fit.

Apparently, having the money ("facts on the ground") is sufficient for you to think you should be allowed to do with it as you please. That sounds like might makes right to me...

I'm not condemning you for "sharing your earnings with your family", but I'm certainly condemning your deficient justification for it.

If I have property rights over a steak or a measure of rice, I can cook it and share it with my family. Likewise with my house, car, or abstract medium of exchange (money). I don't see that as "might makes right", but rather as "that's inherently what property rights are".

But let's use your dictionary where property rights are always unconditional. In that case, we have never had property rights and it doesn't seem like a good idea to get them!

Libertarians do not say "people should keep their money because they worked hard for it." They say that "people should keep their money." No qualifier.

Libertarians are not "against force and for voluntarism." Libertarians are fully in favor of force, particularly when it comes to the defense of personal property. Some libertarians are in favor of voluntarYism (the y matters) but that's a totally different thing than whatever Bruenig trying to reference here.

It's partisan screed that oversimplifies concepts and twists words to appeal to people who don't actually know enough about libertarians to spot the bullshit.

There are three possible answers to that:

* Desert: It's mine because I deserve it, having worked hard for it.

* Contractualism/Voluntarism/VoluntarYism or whatever you want to call it, the idea that the arrangement is fair because it was all voluntary from the involved parties.

* Tradition: It's mine because however I got it, now I have it, and you can't take it from me. I call this the "facts on the ground" argument. It's not really a moral argument, so if you take this approach you can't morally condemn people who challenge the status quo (want to take it from you). If you leave out a justification for property claims, you're really here by default.

These three answers are not compatible, for reasons explained at length.

It's not bullshit, because it's a clear argument that I can follow. Whether it applies to "real" libertarians is another matter - as far as I can see it does, though.

I will refer the following article to show how tragedy of the commons did not happen in common land in the last couple of centuries:

http://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/short-history-enc...

---- begin quote ----

The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell'd to pay by some Law.

All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it.

---- end quote ----

Every system uses force or the threat of force, to enforce the rules. A co-op or mall charging rent is not much different than a city or state charging taxes. "Men with guns" will come evict you if you don't pay your rent. But in the majority of cases what usually happens is that your taxes get withheld by the employer from your wages and no guns are involved.

For defense, not offense. I thought that would be clear, but apparently that needed to be called out explicitly. My bad.

A co-op or mall charging rent is not much different than a city or state charging taxes. "Men with guns" will come evict you if you don't pay your rent.

It's not even remotely the same thing. In the mall case you very explicitly entered into a contract with the mall owner, with clearly defined terms regarding the rights and responsibilities on both side. Taxation, on the other hand, is done by agencies which presume the authority to tax anybody within an area defined by lines drawn on a map by men who are long dead. As Thomas Paine put it (paraphrasing a bit) "by what principle can the dead bind the living?"

"Defense" of your property claims, not self-defense. Again, Matt Bruenig has been over this. What if we both claim something as property, are we both acting "defensively" in trying to kill each other over it? One man's defensive claim is an offensive claim to another man, and there's no objective standard by which you can decide who's right.

Sure, one may have the backing of a state, but surely that's just more effective violence. You're not in favour of might makes right, do you? And tradition is no good, because claims have to start somewhere.

To achieve higher aggregate utility, by redistributing some of the money to those who would get higher marginal utility from it. Objecting to it based on freedom is backwards, because freedom is just one component of utility.

The key is in "taking something": there is a baseline state of the world against we're comparing the current status quo.

For point (1), there is clearly a historical baseline in which no land was owned by anybody, and all land was equally accessible to all. Then people started to make claims that some part of land was theirs, and that they had the right to exclude others from it - if necessary by force. They took something from others by (threat of) force - hence committing theft according to your definition, and this theft is enshrined by modern property law.

For point (2), consider the way income taxes work in many (most?) countries. Instead of money being paid by / taken from the employee, the money is instead withheld. The money that is "paid as income tax" is in reality never the employee's to begin with, so it is not taken away from the employee - hence no force is involved.

You might argue that the money is taken from the employer, but nobody forced the employer to employ someone.

For point (3), consider what happens when person A owns some widget, but person B enters their house at night and takes it from them - without force, because person A was asleep. Note first that, that is not theft according to your definition! Later on, person B is tracked down by police, who arrest him or her by force to return the widget to person A. The police have just engaged in theft - which is totally absurd use of language, but a necessary consequence of how you want to define theft.

Points (2) and (3) highlight something important: what belongs to whom is always a social construction. Social convention (encoded into law) says that land ownership is possible, and therefore land ownership is not actually theft. Social convention says that police are allowed to take stolen goods back to their original owner, and therefore those actions aren't theft. And whether you like it or not, social convention also includes taxes, and that is why taxes aren't theft. Because at the end of the day, the useful definition of theft has nothing to do with force - the useful definition of theft is "taking something against the established rules of society".

That is not my definition of theft. Theft by force (or threat of force) is a subset of theft in the more general sense.

For point (1), there is clearly a historical baseline in which no land was owned by anybody, and all land was equally accessible to all. Then people started to make claims that some part of land was theirs, and that they had the right to exclude others from it - if necessary by force. They took something from others by (threat of) force - hence committing theft according to your definition, and this theft is enshrined by modern property law.

If no land was owned by anyone, then taking a chunk of land is not taking it from "others". Its taking something which was previously unowned.

The origin and nature of property rights IS an interesting discussion, but it's really a red herring here. Consider this: You live in the proto-world with no land ownership. You select a piece of land that is unoccupied and unowned, and you build a home on it and start a garden. Later, somebody else comes along and says "I want your home and your garden for myself". Would you argue that you have no right to say "bugger off" to that person? Are you saying you have no right to defend that home and garden, that you worked on, toiled, and cultivated?

If not, how do you propose mitigating this conflict?

In the proto-world, unoccupied land is generally regarded as held in the commons, free for use by hunters, fishers, herders, gatherers, migrations, ceremonies, scattering seeds of herbs and plants you like, and whatever else. There is basically no unclaimed land.

> Would you argue that you have no right to say "bugger off" to that person

You have no inherent right to do so, but it would absolutely be in your interest to do so. And indeed, while it took many thousands of years to settle the question, the settler-agricultural types did finally crush the more nomadic peoples in the last couple centuries and assert an absolute claim to formerly common property, so the question is moot: your property rights were established by thousands of years of violence and genocide by people tired of nomadic peoples asserting their traditional rights.

Fair enough, but how do you reconcile that with my point (3)? Police returning an item as in the given example means the police are thieves according to your definition.

If not, how do you propose mitigating this conflict?

In the same way as it is done today. Note that I'm not the one who is saying that land ownership is theft - you are, because you are trying so say "taking by (threat of) force is theft".

In reality, what is and isn't theft is defined by social convention. So land ownership, police returning items, and tax aren't theft, even though they all involve (the threat of) force. Taking an item from somebody else's home is theft, even when no force between humans is is involved at all.

I'm not saying that land ownership is theft. I don't advocate taking someone else's land by force, but I do claim that (at least in "proto-world") taking unclaimed land is acceptable exactly because it is unclaimed.

That whole discussion does lead to some other interesting points though... for example, if I abandon the home and garden I build on unclaimed land in proto-world, and move 8,000 miles away, does that land remain "mine" or does it return to its unclaimed state? It turns out that in the modern world, "we" decided that once you own a piece of land, it is yours forever, unless you sell it, trade it way, etc. I'm not actually convinced that is right. On this, I may be closer to the position of some left-anarchist types who hold that land ownership is temporary and only based in actual use/occupancy. I'm not entirely convinced one way or the other on this point though.

Inheritance is another interesting issue, although you can kinda sorta hand-wave around that by saying that "if you can transfer something to a new owner, then doing so a split second before you die is effectively the same thing as allowing inheritance".

In reality, what is and isn't theft is defined by social convention. So land ownership, police returning items, and tax aren't theft, even though they all involve (the threat of) force.

Sure, the social convention is what it is. What I'm arguing is that the social convention is wrong and needs to be updated. It's not like these things are chiseled into stone tablets and made immutable for all time.

I'll also point out that I'm far from alone on the "taxation is theft" thing. It may be a minority viewpoint, but it's hardly some fringe idea held by just two or three crackpots. There's at least five or six of us. :-)

The salient point here is that everything done with force is theft, but we depend on mild, egalitarian theft to keep society functioning. The primary issue with private theft is its asymmetry (every security system that doesn't deter a theft is a waste of money), while governmental theft is roughly symmetric and underlies even the institutions libertarians care about.

If you'd like that night watchman state to keep your neighbor from killing you and taking your canned beans, realize that you're asking for property reassignment through force. Not just taxation-theft to fund that government, the actual behavior you want is ownership determined by force. You haven't invented a grand claim against taxes, you've rediscovered the observation that somewhere down the line force (or the lack of it) is a consideration in every exchange.

Why is taxation theft?

Because you're taking something you have no right to take possession of. And you're right, "theft" is a broader category of actions, but I don't consider that distinction relevant here. Eg, the State doesn't (yet, AFAIK) sneak into you home and take your property without your knowledge, in the name of taxation. Although they DO do some other pretty sneaky things, like civil asset forfeiture, but that's a separate issue, IMO.

The thing with what we call "paying your taxes" in the popular vernacular is clearly a case where the State wants something you have (the spoils of your labor, if we limit this to Income Tax for the time being) and if you aren't inclined to give it to them, they use force to take it. If you were willing to pay it without the need for coercion, then it wouldn't be theft.

And here's the rub, that makes this all so ironic: I expect most people would "pay their taxes" to at least some extent, even without the need for coercion. This is especially so IF the agency requesting said payment is actually demonstrating its value clearly.

They tried it in France -- nothing really changed. The law says you can go home but you still stay and work; the company culture doesn't change.

In theory, the best economic answer, I think we can all agree, is UBI.

Those policies don't seem well targeted to help the permanently unemployed.

My comment was addressed to the $15 minimum wage, not the 40-hour week. The Goldman link does not address that at all that I could see.

Why will the $15 minimum wage eliminate jobs? Basic supply-and-demand economics. When the price of something goes up, the usage goes down. (Unless you can make labor a Veblen good, where the high price increases demand. But that depends on status signalling. You could think about trying to make that apply to labor, but I think it would be rare to have cases where that worked.)

No. But we need that many people to buy the stuff.

Inequality has increased so much that the bottom 50% don't really own anything, they have no wealth to speak of. Their income, combined, pales to the top 1%. If they stopped buying and renting tomorrow, there was be a hiccup, to be sure, but not more than that. And that's new too.

40 hour week? Try 32 (4 days a week). Active workers in the US industry are hardly working more than 30 hours on average anyway (lots of part time workers).

Of course, the minimum wage should be raised accordingly.

[1] http://www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic...

Better yet, get behind eliminating minimum wage altogether. It's an unnecessary and immoral restriction on free and voluntary trade. If I want to offer up my time for $6.00 an hour, I have that right damnit. Especially if the alternative is doing nothing and netting $0.00 an hour.

Pushed little bit further, this could even re-introduce slavery: just give this little bit of "freedom": the right to renounce all freedoms. Surely that's better than starvation, right?

Altman says the same thing [1]. It doesn't resonate with me.

This is the 21st century's version of the "let them eat cake" attitude [2]

People need more than food or money to survive. They need challenge and a way to be creative. People who don't have these things either (1) blame themselves and fall into depression despite having plenty of money, or (2) band together against those who tell them they're useless.

There will always be a need for people to do work: people need people.

The case for BI is hurt by the argument that some people are worthless. Some would say techies do not fully understand the needs of the poor [3], and that this alienates would-be supporters of BI.

[1] http://www.techinsider.io/sam-altman-praises-basic-income-on...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

[3] https://medium.com/the-development-set/silicon-valley-s-unch...