It would take a lot more than that. Remember that the gains labor made after world war II were built upon decades of struggle by labor, including frequently being targets of violence by armed militia hired by corporations [1]. Despite that, America desperately needed labor for world war II (where the alternative was defeat at the hands of the Nazis), so for that moment in history capital and labor found themselves in a obvious win-win scenario. Most of the gains made by labor in America were made during this period.

The minimum wage does not naturally rise - it is a policy decision, one implemented under pressure from labor. And as labor's political power has waned and capital's political power has increased, minimum wage has stagnated.

Under our current system that heavily favors returning productivity gains to capital instead of labor, returning America to that global monopoly (which would require the highly improbable destruction the industrial capacity of the rest of the world while leaving America's untouched) would just turn the hypothetical gains of that monopoly over to the owners of capital.

Realistically, any attempt to return to the prior American monopoly would result in a massive regression in the American standard of living, through the destruction of purchasing power abroad for American goods and services (remember, we have a lot more people today than we did back then, and many of them - especially farmers - work in occupations that sell to other countries).

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...

The minimum amount of money you have to pay for someone to show up for any job rises (and falls) alongside demand for labor in the broader economy.

> Under our current system that heavily favors returning productivity gains to capital instead of labor...

If you look at the profit margins of those companies that employ a lot of low-end labor, you will find that they're generally in the single digit percentages. I think that's a pretty fair deal for organizing all that labor and taking on the capital risk. Profits aren't guaranteed, after all. There just isn't that much money to redistribute here, you would have to raise prices, which can make you uncompetitive.

Oh, what that it were so simple. There are far more factors governing "market wages", which you are describing, including labor supply at a given skill level, automation, political representation of laborers vs employers, and how that representation manifests as power in the local and global economic contexts.

The "minimum wage" specifically is a policy designed to put a floor under the standard of living of people whose market wages in the economy would provide a standard of living below what the society considers humane. Some societies have no such humanity based floor.

Maybe that's the intention, but what a minimum wage actually does is remove the possibility for anyone to work below an arbitrary number of dollars.

If that value is lower than the going market rate for low-skilled labor, minimum wage makes no difference.

Above that, it removes more and more people from the "eligible to work" pool. There's nothing humane about preventing people from being able to work, especially when you don't have a welfare system to pick up those who are now doomed to unemployment.

My reading of the argument (maybe different from OP) is the choice to work a low wage job isn't a choice made completely by one's own volition due to a huge stack of societal factors.

Let's break your counterargument down a bit, preventing people from being able to work denies them sustenance yes, but also embedded (IMO) in your argument is the intrinsic value of a job as a part of someone's life. Here we agree and this is why I don't support cradle-to-grave welfare and think it would be a disaster if implemented. It is something welfare advocates tend to ignore, to the detriment of their credibility on other economic matters.

A retraining program coupled with a large hike in minimum wages and temporary retraining assistance could sustainably raise the minimum standard of living with no government takeover of the economy. The program itself can be a private one if designed the right way. Prior retraining programs didn't work due to 1) lack of accountability and 2) lack of demand for upskilled labor. A very high minimum wage fixes that on the cost side and also on the aggregate demand side. (Something approaching the median US wage today or possibly 1.5x-2x higher, phased in over several decades to give business a measure of predictability and planning capacity.)

Most low paying jobs can be automated, when they aren't it is because human labor is so cheap that the expense of capex to automate isn't worth it. By raising the floor cost of labor, government provides business an incentive to retool the economy around higher-wage paying activities. Any business that can't automate and relies on cheap human work to do drudgery isn't worth saving in my opinion. A bonus is that the resulting capex will generate second and third order effects that will catalyze economic growth and spare many otherwise impacted small businesses from failing.

We want to idealize the person who starts out in a fast food restaurant, learns discipline and organizational skills, and moves on to higher paying work. Several decades of data have shown us this is a nice theory that fails in practice in most cases. Those people remain stuck and that is bad for economic growth in addition to causing needless suffering. Keeping the minimum wage low hasn't solved this problem and won't solve it in the future.

It should be paired with a federal jobs guarantee and universal healthcare then.

It shouldn't be normalized to be a "lifelong" thing, in the same way we think it's unusual for someone to be a lifelong college student. At least one without milestones such as degrees, etc.

The last forty years has been redistributing profits from labour to capital.

There is nothing at all wrong with reversing that.

Society needs to find a way to have people gainfully employed keeping the minimum wage at poverty levels is not a good choice.

Unless you're saying that the problem is that the US doesn't make every new auto manufacturer a UAW shop with no opt-out?

The US specifically did not want this to happen, which is why it made unionization only valid on the basis of the adversarial, shop-vote model, but grandfathering in some unions that already functioned along similar, sectoral lines, such as the Hollywood unions.

Why do those other people get some automatic raise?

Because other people are constantly told how great Europe/Scandinavia is. So these 'other people' just want to have good life by moving there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavia#Use_of_Nordic_coun...

Then it's often interesting to point to various places in the world where in fact, the thing is possible.

As you said, oil helps, but it’s not determinative. Norway is interesting in that they’ve used their oil money very wisely, but it seems pretty clear that other policies are necessary in order to ensure that economic prosperity is well distributed.

There were a few potential inflection points / events that happened around then.

1971 saw the perhaps ill-considered abandonment of Bretton Woods - arguably this ineluctably led to an ongoing boom / bust cycle.

(Can recommend John Ralston Saul's discussion around this in his book 'The Collapse of Globalism'.)

What are these other companies doing that we are not? What can we do to make ourselves more competitive such that each employee has enough productive capacity to easily receive $24/hr or equivalent? The peak of 1973 is gone and not coming back, we have to look to the future now.

And/or the fruits of globalism have not been fairly shared. Depending on whom you ask.

The surprising thing about the current era is just how little wealth is inherited and how much has been largely generated during the owner's lifetime, in many cases due to labor and receiving compensation in the form of stock. The vast inheritances we read about from the 19th century aren't there this time, barring a few exceptions. Thomas Piketty wrote about this in Capital.

What do you think about that? Did they make any errors?

Edit: Also, from the link, this is very fishy to me. You could argue the medical benefits they exclude aren't meaningful because of healthcare inflation not being linked to better health outcomes. You can't make that argument for capital gains. It's likely not be meaningful because there are indeed severe inequalities among Americans in capital assets holdings, it is still an omission however.

> And it takes into account capital gains but, due to certain technical constraints, only for those above the 90th percentile.

I have an issue with this. By some definition, of course. But there is still something very different about the kind of labor which goes on there. Class, opportunity, connections, access to capital, and access to political influence further entrenching their position. It's almost like the nobility of yore.

I find pointing to the 1% labor as some kind of redeeming quality of the system, is instead a distraction from capital vs labor. For the regular labor to have a chance to enter the top 1% of labor, is just as much of a pipe dream as them falling into Big Capital.

We need to fix our relationship with work, especially for the sake of those currently unable to do "fun" jobs that pay well. I don't think working less or a redistribution scheme via the government is an honest solution.

Instead, a much higher minimum wage coupled with retraining and temporary economic assistance that can spur a mass automation of "drudgery"-type jobs is a better answer. This in turn would allow society to redesign work so that it is more humane and more valuable. I also don't buy the belief that only some are capable of creative work.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-fre...

I think that’s kind of what the OP you responded to was getting at. I know professors at large state universities making $100,000+ in medium to low cost of living locations. Some make even more. They aren’t 1% but they might be top 10%.

I guess what’s piqued my interest here is, at what point do we consider labor to be labor?

If you get a nice UAW job for 30 years and plow money into the market, are you not a capitalist?

Is a surgeon not labor since he or she may not own the hospital? Sure they may make $700,000/year, but... aren’t they working for a living?

The Meritocracy Trap is a great book I’d recommend that’s related to this question/issue. Wealth and the bourgeoisie used to just hang out all day and go for walks in the park. Now they work 120 hours/week.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/the-fre...

A salient quote:

'Elite men in the U.S. are the world’s chief workaholics. They work longer hours than poorer men in the U.S. and rich men in other advanced countries. In the last generation, they have reduced their leisure time by more than any other demographic. As the economist Robert Frank wrote, “building wealth to them is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”'

How do we maintain it? An obvious factor is our military capacity. That means defense spending. Under a capitalist system that also requires a competitive commercial defense sector and also a strong economy capable of sustaining such a sector via tax revenue.

Most tax revenue comes from individuals. In an era of mobile capital, corporate taxation is sub-optimal. So the economy's health is linked to the prosperity of individuals, in aggregate. Prosperity can come from competition, but the most durable forms of prosperity are tied to increasing productivity.

Continuing on this first principles trajectory should lead to a stable structure. It's not one that is dominated by "print-and-export-dollars"-style industries.