But in knowledge/service based industries it's not always about shaving pennies to make businesses better and there are many chances for better returns for small salary investments.
And to clarify, because the point is often missed: I'm not mentioning Smith because I agree with all he's written, and certainly not for what he's claimed to have said, or to suggest that Jacob Viners very tortured re-assembling of various snippets across three separate books of the work is the book's central message. Smith is verbose as hell, but can, and does, get to the point when he really wants to:
"Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power." "A man must live by his work." "No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable." "[Political economy proposes] first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people...; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services."
Smith isn't the last word on economics. And he's not the first. His views, even when wrong, are almost always well-considered, and it's usually possible to learn from his mistakes. And he anticipates a verry surprisingly large number of present concerns (with a few gaping holes: mechanisation and automation are almost wholly ignored, even though Smith personally arranged for a position for James Watt at Edinborough).
He is simultaneously highly influential, greatly ignored, and tremendously misrepresented. Reading him is extremely revealing, though I'd suggest he not be thee sum total of your economic education.
But what he absolutely is not is the laissez-faire advocate of harsh market therapy for all things, and corporate apologist, he's often represented to be, by both critics and so-called advocates. Which even brief passages can make clear. His two chapters on wages particularly.
This is more of a political issue than a cultural one. Companies always pay what they have to pay to get workers they need. The problem is we have policies that depress wages.
For example, the H1B program nominally isn't supposed to have foreign workers competing with domestic ones, but the rules are easy to game, so it does. The easy fix is to get rid of most of the other rules and just require employers to pay the government $75,000/year for each foreign worker they hire. Now it's impractical for someone under H1B to replace a US worker who makes less than six figures, but companies who legitimately can't find what they're looking for in the US workforce have the ability hire outside it -- for an extra $75,000/year on top of whatever salary they pay.
Similarly, it's plausible that minimum wage laws actually depress wages. An unskilled worker or college student isn't legally permitted to accept a $4/hour internship, but may not be able to find one that pays any more than that. So they stay home and play video games, there is $4/hour less disposable income in the economy (the profit from which could have allowed someone else to get a raise), and the person who couldn't take the job/internship now has no experience to leverage into a higher paying job. Even if you want a minimum wage for career fast food workers, imposing one on college students and other people just starting out is likely harmful to wages on net.
There are many other examples of things like this. Companies or misguided people lobby for bad policies that depress wages and the people whose wages are being depressed aren't organized enough to stop it or even recognize the mechanisms by which it happens. Then people are more desperate for work and companies don't have to pay them as much.
https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valle...
> In early 2005 ... Apple's Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google's Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other's employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators.
> ...an estimated $9 billion effectively stolen...
They can't steal from you if they're in prison.
Law is a tool for managing human wickedness. If we weren't wicked we wouldn't have invented law. That shows trivially that character is more fundamental than policy, eh?
Whether we put them in prison is the policy decision. Culture influences policy in the same way that policy influences culture, but they're not the same thing -- and there are two different cultures here. One is that of the executives making the corporate decisions, the other is that of the voters/representatives making the political decisions. They could be wicked and we could still put them in jail.
> If we weren't wicked we wouldn't have invented law. That shows trivially that character is more fundamental than policy, eh?
If people weren't as wicked we wouldn't need laws. If we had better laws people wouldn't be as wicked. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The undesired results are created by the existence of bad laws as well as the absence of good ones.
And more to the point, it's easier to change laws than culture. What would you suggest is the best way to affect the culture of corporate executives? Not even they can easily change it without a policy change, because the culture is derived from the existing policies and the corresponding consequences. The executives who cheat and steal and don't get caught are the ones who get bonuses and promotions and end up running the largest corporations.
Culture isn't static, it evolves based on the environment -- and the biggest part of the environment we have any control over is the laws. Bad laws suppress wages and cause economic inefficiency and wealth inequality, so here we are. Half the regulations on the books were passed under the guise of taking from the top, but the people actually at the top have the resources to avoid them so what they really do in general is take from the middle. But the middle is the place we wanted the people at the bottom to get to -- so all we're doing is making it harder for them to do that while pushing the people who are already there further down.
If you want to improve the culture, get rid of the bad laws and actually enforce the good ones.
After all, Gödel showed that any powerful system of rules will contain inconsistencies. Even closed tautological systems like the Catholic religion contain flaws (that was the premise of the movie "Dogma": two banished angels find a loophole in God's Law and attempt to destroy the Universe) and theologians literally get to define God.
Any system of human law must be inconsistent, so we perforce rely on human judges, which means we rely on their [lack of] wickedness, i.e. their culture, and we are back where we started.
> If we had better laws people wouldn't be as wicked.
Meaning no disrespect, that is a proposition to which I assign a low truth value.
I read "Walden II"[1] at an impressionable age, and I thought for a long time that if we could just make the "right" laws, construct the right system, then we could easily achieve Utopia. I was too young to realize that the novel is actually "behaviorist" propaganda.[2]
My own experience of humans, and something Gandhi said, later convinced me that law, no matter how good or wise, cannot of itself make for good people. I've never been able to find the actual quote, but it was something like, "No system [of government] relieves the people under it from the burden [or obligation] of trying to be better human beings."
If prison worked to convince people to take up that burden I don't think recidivism rates would be as high as they are, eh?
So, again, I don't reject that good and just laws are a vital part of a good and just society, but I see them as a result, not a cause.
In any event, well met.
I think the people who can “afford” to take a $4/hr internship is the same cohort that could take a free internship. The rest need enough wages to live off of.
Except that there are now a bunch of restrictions on unpaid internships that have caused companies to increasingly stop having them.
And even that is still a problem for the people who could "afford" to take a $4/hr internship but not a $0/hr one. And even the ones who suffer being unpaid are still deprived of the extra $4/hr they could have had.
> The rest need enough wages to live off of.
In which case, why do they not take a different position that pays more? Unless there isn't one, but in that case their alternative is having no employment, which pays even worse than $4/hour.
Let me put it more bluntly - rich kids are the ones taking the unpaid internships. Nobody can survive off of a $4/hr internship. The $4/hr might as well be $.50 an hour.
> In which case, why do they not take a different position that pays more?
They will, but its worse for their careers in most cases. Unpaid internships tend to give much better career progression - you just need to have the money to be able to survive it. Thats why they're restricting unpaid internships - if you want to offer them you can't just offer them to wealthy people's kids.
What you're really saying is that $4/hr might as well be zero. But it's different -- by $4/hr. There is not a brick wall separating rich kids from poor kids, it's a wide spectrum. There are lots of in between kids who could swing $4/hr but can't get away with working for free.
> They will, but its worse for their careers in most cases.
Then why are you advocating forcing them into that? If the choice was $4/hr now for $50/hr later vs. $10/hr now for $10/hr forever, how is taking away the first option supposed to help them?
> Thats why they're restricting unpaid internships - if you want to offer them you can't just offer them to wealthy people's kids.
Except that the wealthy people's kids are the ones whose parents have the influence to get them a paid internship, or at least one of the few remaining unpaid ones after the others are destroyed, so all you're really doing is screwing over the people in the middle.
The five following are the principal circumstances which, so far as I have been able to observe, make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employments, and counterbalance a great one in others: first, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of employment in them; fourthly, the small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them; and, fifthly, the probability or improbability of success in them.
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_...