High pay is great, but to a point, I place a higher value on the dignity that I enjoy in my employment.

> Inflation-adjusted minimum wage imposed to all businesses/states.

I can't say I have a better idea here, but the whole concept of a minimum wage seems like a problem. It strongly implies that there are a large class of jobs where the employer has all of the power, and does not have to compete to attract employees. Also strongly implied is that minimum wage workers do not have an alternative means of supporting themselves.

Practically speaking, raising minimum wage regularly should help keep workers out of poverty. Still, these people will still have to contend with employers that treat them like commodities, with no real alternative way to support themselves.

In practice, that's the case. I think that the idea that it isn't so, and people go to this or that employer out of "free choice", stems from a religious-like belief in "free market", than from real-life empirical evaluation of how desperate and poor people pick jobs - and what options are open to then.

>Still, these people will still have to contend with employers that treat them like commodities, with no real alternative way to support themselves.

True. But at least they will make some more money will doing so - and might even afford to save a buck or too, and eventually look elsewhere.

Yeah, I hope so. Maybe someone will come up with a better idea later.

That is even true in cases where there is even balanced employment-employer availability due to other factors. My country should be more civilized by my dad got 6 years of pension payment reduced because the employer "failed to pay" but on every balance sheet his pay was added because "automatic" and nobody warned him, just the employer. Afterwards the lawyers told him to take the "I'll pay one year" deal of the employer because of the likelyhood of getting nothing due to limited liability companies protection. And this in Europe, not even the US. The balance is so far off it's not even remotely fair game.

The last 5-6 years has made me thing so much of _why_ this is the case is rooted in:

1. Race and how people are perceived--the rise of race issues in the referenced period is so confusing to me, as I thought we were getting past them, but it is very clear that a huge percentage of the US population is still have 19th century views on race.

2. Certain companies (like Amazon) who few low-skilled workers as machines to use up and throw away.

As for the "inflation-adjusted minimum wage" ... the argument used to be "small businesses will suffer" but strangely I haven't heard that in a long time. In fact, I don't hear anyone refuting the idea of IAMW. It's so insane to me that we don't do this. Maybe that would give politicians an incentive to keep inflation low? (Because they want to keep the minimum wage as low as possible?)

I think it's clear that this is how it's portrayed. I'm not sure the portrayal is all that accurate, or even relevant in most of the cases being discussed.

No matter what, that money is paid, or the labor does not exist and or show up for work.

Your argument is one of merit, skill and market value.

This is exactly the wrong way to look at things. If we start from the cost of labor, and it does have a cost as I put above, whether to fund the labor boils down to the value said labor has for others, and that value can be traded on accordingly.

Fact is we need basic labors. Anyone can do them. There should be no shame in this work, and it should be valued as the massive time and effort savings to others that it really is. And automation holds few answers right now, and I would argue for a considerable time yet. People will be doing those labors.

Question really is how much does it cost people, who hold other positions in life, to perform basic labors themselves? And the answer is expensive!!

That difference in value can very easily fund labors then. It's a perfectly acceptable basis, and it means we value labor differently and it means we recognize that guy digging the ditch, or making our shit disappear, or any number of basic things has the same waking hours any of us do, same basic needs any of us do, and may have a family as any of us do.

This idea of people being inherently worthless is very highly toxic and is doing a great harm to all of us. It's completely unacceptable given the quite obvious value even basic labors actually do have for us overall.

Humans aren't like ec2 servers that can be spun down when they're needed. The cost for that person is paid whether or not he's employed. I agree there's an additional cost to show up to work, but that's nowhere near the minimum wage in most places.

And are you arguing we simply must pay the costs for people to exist? I agree given not existing is very highly undesirable.

Employed people, getting a subsidy so their employer enjoys greater profit makes sense how? Should a for profit enterprise earn it? Why is our help required?

If they really cannot afford their labor, they are not a viable business.

Or, we all agree to not care, so we end all the fucking with people on assistance?

Which is it?

To be really clear, I'm OK either way here. What I am not OK with is so damn many people underpaid and struggling hard with assistance despite arguably too much labor otherwise.

I don't get it. Subsidizing someone's living is okay, but subsidizing someone's living, and then that person deciding to earn a little more money is not okay because profit is involved?

>And are you arguing we simply must pay the costs for people to exist? I agree given not existing is very highly undesirable.

Yes? If you don't want them to starve, then obviously somebody as to pay the cost to keep those people afloat.

>Employed people, getting a subsidy so their employer enjoys greater profit makes sense how? Should a for profit enterprise earn it? Why is our help required?

Would society be better off if those "Employed people, getting a subsidy" were unemployed instead? They'll still get the subsidy. If anything, they'll get more subsidy because welfare tends to be means tested. If anything the "for profit enterprise" has a negative effect on the amount of subsidy that needs to be paid.

> What I am not OK with is so damn many people underpaid and struggling hard with assistance

Underpaid? Maybe they're being paid fairly given the market conditions, and that prevailing wage isn't enough to sustain someone's first world existence so some sort of subsidy has to make up the rest.

> despite arguably too much labor otherwise.

can you reword this? I'm not understanding what you mean by this.

That is gaming the system, mooching off the public dime for profit.

Maybe that helps.

I am not going to respond on this topic again. It has been fun, but I do need to move on.

Employees are working yet still they need government assistance to offset the low wages. Walmart knows this and one might argue they incorporate in their business planning. Why pay employees to work full time, when you can pay them part time, reduce your labor costs and have the state pick up the rest of the expenses (i.e. medicare, Foodstamps)

Walmart executive's know this is a win/win for them, they get the labor they need and pay little for it. This is not something that just happened overnight. It's corporate greed on a massive scale that hurts everyone but no one cares because Wallstreet see's the profits rolling in.

Deceptive businesses like Walmart are consistently fucking us all, and nothing is done about it. The tax breaks they receive are enabling this behavior.

End rant.

but the thing is, that person is going to be around regardless of he's working at walmart or not. unless you're okay with the guy starving to death because he's unemployed, you'll still need to pay foodstamps or whatever to keep him alive. I'm not sure why that person deciding to voluntarily work at walmart, suddenly makes the entirety of his living expenses walmart's problem.

Put another way, suppose someone is unemployed and living off government assistance. I learn about his predicament, and offer to pay him $10 (or whatever) to mow my lawn. What you basically want is for this transaction to be stopped, on the grounds that $10 isn't enough to keep him alive, and therefore I'm exploiting him. You'd rather the person stay unemployed, and have me keep that $10, even though that's worse off for everyone involved.

>Deceptive businesses like Walmart are consistently fucking us all

I fail to see how anyone is being deceived here. I can see why you might think this is bad, because walmart has a duty to their employees or whatever, but not really deception.

What I did do is make an economic one, and suggest how we value things change. A whole bunch of Economics is rooted in a few basies that we all just take as givens. We don't have to.

I also didn't make an equal economic value argument, for that matter.

>"how much does it cost people, who hold other positions in life, to perform basic labors themselves? And the answer is expensive!!"

What is the "expensive" assumption based on? Is it the opportunity cost? E.g., is the assumption that if I make $50/hr and I perform basic labor, I'm forgoing work that would otherwise be making money at that rate? Or is it that I don't have the skills for that basic labor and I would either have to get those skills or suffer the cost of doing the work unskillfully?

If it's the former, I think there's enough friction in markets to erode that argument. E.g., I can't just decide to get another $50 through my skilled labor once I hire someone to shovel snow in my driveway for an hour. If the latter case were true, it would be skilled labor by definition and generally command higher wages. Or is there another basis for the expense of performing basic labor that I'm not considering from your point?

Yes, and the basic assumption of free markets that competition drives prices to the minimum sellers are willing to accept (equal to opportunity cost of the units actually traded), and that this value per unit increases, so that the next unit must have an opportunity cost to the seller higher than the average of the prior units.

Our lives break down into thirds. One to work, one to sleep, one to do what we will and can as people.

If I must do those basic labors, they either consume my sleep or free time, and if not, carry an opportunity cost of $50 / hour.

My time is very valuable, both in a labor to income sense, and personally, in that I have plans for my time that must be balanced against basic labors being done.

Paying what it costs for laborers to exist and show up for work is a no brainer. Worth it to me, again based on my own costs.

There is "expensive"

We can always find cases where basic labors do not carry those costs, or are difficult to handle as a market. We do those ourselves.

However, making our own food, making our own shit and garbage dissappear, moving things, clean ups and all manner of basic labors combine to allow many of us the time freedom to earn more, do more.

The value in that is high enough to require enterprises fund their labor fully. This may mean their overall profit is less. It should be, they didn't earn it. They didn't fund the labor. We did!

Failure to do that comes with other costs, both real in the sense of the massive subsidies that end up unearned profit (our money goes into their bank account, funding labor they profit from on top of margin on goods and services rendered), and opportunity in that we see lower demand and that impacts many others who could earn more and or fund their labor as well.

Again, laborers have a cost to exist and show up for work, and when their labor does not pay enough for those things, someone else's labor does, or the labor does not exist and will not show up for work.

So which is it? Who pays and why?

How we value things can change those answers dramatically, which is the economic argument I made.

One last thing, and that is ignoring the cost of people for them to exist and show up for work, doesn't make those costs go away, it just hides them, and we end up paying them in all sorts of other ways that are expensive. That's another way to look at this.

When a business does not make enough to fund its operation it closes, or dies in other words. The same is true for people. So not fully funding labor is expensive to literally everyone else except for the people not fully funding the labor they require.

This is the part I disagree with. The only time that is rated at $50/hr is the time you are producing something of economic value. Sleep and leisure do not warrant a $50/hr price tag in-and-of-themselves. In part, because of what I already mentioned: market friction prevents me from giving a 1-to-1 trade for sleep/leisure time to production. Just because I decide to wake up an hour early doesn't automatically mean an extra $50 worth of work is ready and waiting for me.

>we end up paying them in all sorts of other ways that are expensive.

I completely agree with this and think it's the governments job to ensure markets price these externalities appropriately.

You are ignoring tons of labors saving you time and or providing a rich field in which to profit.

You are ignoring time value. I did not ever say 1:1 at whatever rate.

What I did, and continue to say is your work time would consume far more of your life sans basic labors you benefit from every day.

Cost it how you want, but when suddenly faced with half your personal time gone, having to choose less, or less sleep, or less income delivering work, and in all cases a lot more physical activity in your life will absolutely cost you far more than you are allowing for here.

Please elaborate.

I mean, the market is exactly how we price that time value. Whether I pay for basic labor or decide to do it myself is exactly based on the price I place on my free time minus how much I value learning something new minus the risk of a bad contractor. If you're not advocating the basic market pricing principles we already operate under, I'm not sure what you're advocating. Are you saying Tom Brady should pay his landscaper $175,000/hour simply because that's what the market has priced Tom Brady's personal economic differential value at?

I'd be curious how you'd expect that to happen in practice. Even though you don't come outright and say it, it's beginning to come across as a Marxist ideal of "to each according to his ability", which I'm sure you already understand all the problems that poses. In the end, all it seems like you're saying is to factor in the externalities to get at a fair market price. If that's the case, I already said we agree. But the same point can be said with a lot more brevity.

Making extreme claims does not bolster your points here.

Tom Brady can definitely pay their landscaper enough to exist and show up for work same as McDees can pay their people enough to exist and show up for work.

I made no Marxist argument.

I did argue we need to recognize the inherent cost of people and value labor in ways that account for those costs.

Or!

Say we don't. Then we accept a large number of us require assistance to make it, right?

Which is it?

And if we go the assistance route, then we also need to quit fucking with people simply doing as we compel them to do. Getting assistance while also laboring a reasonable time at a wage below what it costs to exist and show up for work should be an ordinary, accepted thing. No shame, no hassles, just ordinary and it's not.

What we currently do is push people off assistance hard, and frequently, while also underpaying them, expecting magic to happen and they suddenly are just doing OK when we know too many of them won't be.

Unacceptable.

We need either:

A floor for labor price

, or

Subsidies (assistance)

, or

We accept that some people are just not going to exist and or show up for work because they are not viable economically.

Which is it?

People laboring and getting enough to exist and show up for work can make skills and other arguments to further improve on their value, sell their labor, whatever.

This is about the nearly half of us who labor and do not receive enough to fund their labor, exist and show up for work basically.

I don't care how we solve this, and proposed one idea where we value things differently, change the basies the economy depends on. We could do that, it may be a great idea, and it would eliminate a big problem with the overly simple supply / demand theory of labor value in play today.

Say we do agree to a subsidy. Great! Then we also need to agree people need that and quit fucking with them about getting it too. No shame, etc... just an ordinary condition where we don't value their labor high enough, yet we need them economically viable, able to exist, show up for work, etc...

Re: Free time

Right now, one third of my life, approximately, coupled with another third for sleep, together provide for "my" remaining third which is the third where I get to do what I want.

I may invest some of that third. Did for many years, which made my labor third a hell of a lot more valuable. Not everyone can do this. We don't even have the jobs available if everyone were to do this!

I may fuck that third right off too. Rest, play, fuck, whatever right? No worries, as adults, it's our third! Yay!

Now, when I must eat into that third to exist and show up for work?

Nope. That's extremely high value time.

Here's one cost, investment. If one's labor does not fund existing and showing up for work, the solution is often more labor, right? Well, now that eats into either sleep, or our personal third of time. Often both.

That costs a person investment time! That investment time is extremely high value time. I would be worth one hell of a lot less had I repeated how I lived my life in the labor markets today. Seriously. Not sure I would make it in the same way. Some of my kids really struggle in ways I did not.

Same root cause: Labor failing to deliver enough income to exist and show up for work.

I tossed some dollar figure out there when I probably should not have. This is another way to get at that value.

And finally, food for thought:

What defines wealth?

The basic definition involves time. Wealthy people can self purpose far more of their time. This speaks right to what I'm getting at, and it's subtle!

A person making a ton of money, yet who is enslaved to it, unable to purpose their time, is as poor as someone laboring a ton, lacking income needed to even purpose their time. Both cannot make use of their time beyond labor, and or sleep.

A trust fund baby, or someone who just sold a company, having fuck you money is quite wealthy in the time sense. So is the person living lean, requiring very little to live and do what they will.

Hope this helps. I'm not going to respond on this further, and thanks to those of you being good discussion partners. I enjoyed this.

>Which is it?

Right now, in the U.S., it's a mixture of the first two. We have a minimum wage covering #1 and a host of social safety nets that effectively subsidize living standards covering #2. There's certainly room to argue the best levels for each. Personally, I think there's room for improvement so taxpayers aren't essentially subsidizing the profits of companies who pay a wage low enough that require workers to rely on a safety net while the companies simultaneously post ever increasing profit margins.

Yes. These companies are keeping too much for themselves. There isn't any nicer way to say it. At the same time, the labor creating all that wealth isn't able to keep enough of it to continue to exist and show up for work without someone, somewhere paying for those things to happen.

Re: The mix

#2 is a problem in that we don't just grant the subsidy. It comes with a lot of hassles, checks to limit qualifications, more checks to reduce it should the laborer make a little extra here and there, and of course, a LOT of blame and shame.

Somehow, we've arrived at a place where important, basic labor is seen as a negative, despite the fact that someone is definitely going to be doing it, and we need those people doing that work! This does not sit well with me at all.

Those people have families (well, large numbers of them do), needs, and are in general people same as any of us are, and should be doing that work with the basic dignity and respect any of us would expect when doing our work.

And there is the moral argument you suggested I was making, made here now.

I am making it now because it does tend to complicate the overall discussion. This negativity biases the value perception of both the work and the people doing it away from the objective value it clearly has when one views our society, sans that labor being done for hire. What does getting it done even look like?

We are still somewhere apart on the economic argument.

I said this basic labor could be valued differently, and suggested we value it in terms of what that work being done is worth to others who hold other stations in life, often at higher, can be very considerably higher income. Doing it that way does suggest Tom Brady could pay his basic labor at a very high rate, creating a basic problem you identified easily. Fair enough.

But that really was not my intent. After some thought, maybe this gets at my intent better:

Who pays for the laborer to exist and show up for work?

And by exist, I mean the laborer has a reasonable, though spartan place to live, can see the doctor, has food, and can afford to get to work somehow, and the amount of labor leaves them free to follow other pursuits as any of us may be inclined to do with our leisure time. Put simply, a modest, reasonable, respectable life. And we avoid the live to work, work to live case for the unreasonable life it is.

Having set that up, just because Brady could pay that amount does not mean he should. And that's not really inclusive. We all benefit from the basic labors being done all the time.

The value comes from the fact that when we do have people performing these labors, others do not have to do them, and given labor is valued in a way that provides for life to be broken down into thirds as I suggested earlier in the discussion, this dynamic allows for our leisure third to be ours, generally speaking.

One third is for sleep. One third is for whatever labor we do for income and together that provides the machinery of society to exist and operate as it does today. The remaining third is our time. Family, hobbies, research, whatever we want to do, are inclined to do, and can afford to do.

At another point in the discussion, I also took a look at wealth:

Anthropologists define wealth in terms of time. Poor people have most of their time purposed for them, with slavery being an extreme example of profound poverty. Ordinary people of modest means generally live by the thirds I talked about here, and wealthy people can purpose the majority of their time as they please.

Someone can have a lot of money and it may occupy the majority of their time. The demands related to having or earning that large amount of money can be stiff, largely directing their time. Put simply, they do not purpose much of their time and are living in poverty, despite having considerable spending power.

The same thing is true for someone who makes so little that they basically work to live, and live to work. They purpose very little of their time as well.

An example of a wealthy person might be one who requires little, labors a little to meet those needs, and can purpose a majority of their time. Another example might be someone who has inherited income, or is in possession of a resource of some kind such that it takes very little of their time to labor, and they too can purpose a majority of their time how they please.

And just for shits and giggles, "labor" is generally time spent that is purposed by someone else other than the person doing labor.

People who love to work do present confusion, and that's related to the basic idea of loving what one does for work so that more of life is pleasurable, and or self purposable in that the labor is the purpose... I am just going to ignore this and keep to the basic definition of labor and leisure.

Leisure time is time one can purpose any way they want to. Hobbies, laying out in nature, art, whatever.

When we have many basic labors performed for us, our wealth as a people is very considerably improved! This is why there is wealth in numbers, generally speaking. As there are more of us, so can the basic labors needed to live a life and have a society be well distributed, creating more leisure time. Such an arrangement does provide for advancement in technology, the arts and more, due to some people choosing to invest their time in these ways.

And there is the value I suggested expressed in a way largely ignoring money.

To that end, what is required is basic labors yield enough economically to allow those performing basic labors to live a reasonable, modest life of thirds as I've defined above.

So, who pays?

We could continue subsidies. And if we took this route more formally, recognizing the value backing that idea as defined above, we should also then eliminate the blame and shame. Getting that subsidy should be a rather ordinary, common transaction and those doing the labor should feel no shame related to their contributions to society and the value those have.

Personally, I feel that's something like UBI, and I feel it could work, depending. I dislike the idea of the likes of Walmart and McDees banking billions when they could very clearly afford to pay their labor well enough to live that modest and reasonable life of thirds and still put billions in the bank, just fewer billions. And I would suggest, enough billions with obvious expansions and innovations able to increase the billions they find it possible to bank every year.

For anything like these kinds of value changes to really stick and transform market dynamics, we've got to use law. The likes of Dan Price can successfully model what things can look like, and that's great, but likely seen as a threat and expensive (to them) way to move the discussion forward.

Requiring employers fully fund their labor is an option.

Allowing for that mix, subsidy and employer wages.

We could require neither of those be true, and basically turn charity into a sort of tax with real teeth. (this would be undesirable state of affairs, if you ask me)

Or, nobody pays, and we accept that people will just cease to exist and or show up for work where the costs of doing that simply are not paid.

Who pays?

What basis do they use for understanding whether their people are able to make it?

Finally, I don't have complete answers here. Am just really trying to suggest how we value things could be done differently and provide a basis for ending poverty and or ending the negatives associated with it as we face it today.

I also doubt that empirical evidence supports that assertion. How many people are really being priced out of work because they are only worth $6/hr, not $7.25/hr? In my experience people on the low end are either worth at least what you're paying them, or they're basically not worth hiring at all, at any wage point, because they disrupt others in the work environment, cause accidents, are not amenable to working in groups nor amenable to working alone, report to work too unreliably to make effective use of, or whatever issue they have that makes them count among the ranks of the "least skilled."

Sure, your argument holds given some value of MW, $20/hr? $25/hr? But in real world practice I think the number of people harmed by living out of their car or in shelters @ $7.25/hr vastly exceeds the number of people who but for the minimum wage would easily find relaxing side work at $2/hr sweeping gutters.

And in theory the MW could be tailored to mitigate any adverse impact. It could be restricted to employers grossing over $1 million/yr or in excess of 10 employees. It could be augmented with an earned income tax credit, which has been done to considerable success. There could be a separate under-21 MW. Etc. In practice, though, movement seems to be going in the other direction: about half of US states have minimum wages higher than the Federal level, even places like Florida and Missouri which are not liberal strongholds.

Don’t worry, these companies view high-skilled workers the same way.

This probably says more about the breadth of your sources than anything else. If you aren't hearing the case against a minimum wage (and it's a strong one) you aren't reading widely enough.

Long term, if you have MW as a key minimum support measure, you want it to keep pace or better with inflation, but over the short term you want it to be countercyclical with inflation, rising most rapidly when inflation is low, and least when it is high.

And this leaves out discussion of the problems of a minimum wage as a basic support mechanism, which are also significant.

That's not much of an issue in practice: to even get a few those ideas implemented already requires voter vigilance and strong societal push.

If you have those then a reliable CPI is just another thing this vigilance/push should cover.

If you don't have them, you wont get far with those proposals either.

So it's not like we can get the proposals into laws, but the CPI will be the issue making them ineffective. It's all or nothing.

Raising taxes and cutting Social Security without getting caught is the third rail of politics. The amount of pressure to find ways to do this is immense.

This is the level of corruption you are dealing with. We are not even on a path from "here" to a place where the CPI is an actual fair estimation of inflation. Most people don't even know this is a problem. It's too complicated for regular folks to even deal with and all the establishment political figures are in on it, so they obviously won't draw attention to it.

1. Starting a business that generally pays minimum wage and attempting to pay their employees more

2. Buying property and renting it out at below market rates

3. Supporting, training or helping people who are unemployed.

4. Going to work as teachers in underserved school districts.

5. Offering university level education for free

6. Buying USA made only

Hasn’t this traditionally been the American way? People going out and trying to experiment and build the things they wish to see in the world? I think everyone wants the things you mention but for some reason we are unable to execute on them and a convenient scape goat is that the government should solve it or that “the other party” is getting in the way. Where is the “You must be the change you seek” crowd these days?

Wouldn’t trying to make a small change in your community have more impact than all the comments posted in this thread?

Money, markets - the cost of things regulates behavior, more money = more permissive behavior

Physics - the rules of the world regulate behavior, and the better our understanding, the more lax this regulation is

Norms - mutually agreed upon and generally, widely enforced "rules" that are not laws, but do impose rewards and consequences for behavior.

Laws - like norms, but more formal, and with real teeth beyond being shunned or praised.

Norms and laws act post fact. They do not actually prevent behavior, but can reward for it, or punish for it.

Physics and markets, money do inhibit behaviors. The rules of the world are the rules. Violations = failure. Inability to bear costs = failure.

A few entities trying to set new norms, and play against the generally running market, can do that to some degree, but money and markets are very strong forces compared to norms. And what Dan Price is doing with his $70K minimum wage at Gravity Payments is an excellent example. Price is establishing a norm. Weak sauce in the scheme of what regulates behavior.

Law needs to bolster those ideas and it's law and norms that can change how we value things and with those changes come real market dynamic changes, IMHO.

And this is why "be the change you seek" has limited power and cred. In the niche Price is in, it's possible, and he's doing that and arguably doing it at what others who do not value things like he does, would say he's doing it at a very significant opportunity cost.

And given the current state of affairs, they are RIGHT!!

This does not invalidate an effort like Price is making, nor the ideas, nor the potential for things to operate differently and to a much different overall effect for the population and it's elite members. Not to mention Price himself valuing things in ways that clearly make it all worth it for him to operate how he is. He talks about this all the time too.

But, scope and motivation are sharply limited. It's hard advocacy, and again as the opponents of Price would argue, very, very expensive advocacy.

But "go it at alone, and hope it catches on" is not how this would (or should) work.

It should be made as automatic to do, as paying your taxes, getting police to arrest a thief, or passing a sanity inspection to open a restaurant.

That's how society progresses as a society, when it makes what it wants the future to be either law or an custom/ethical thing that doing otherwise is frowned upon.

Not when things are merely left up to each individual's goodwill to set an example.

Doing it the formal way also e.g. makes it easier for an employeer to pay a good minimum wage AND still compete with other businesses of the same sector: since they all have to pay the same, it's a cost of doing business for everybody, not just for the "good heart" that opted to enforce it on its own (and is driven out of business by others undercutting him and paying worse).

>Hasn’t this traditionally been the American way? People going out and trying to experiment and build the things they wish to see in the world?

I don't know.

For example, from my understanding of Us history, it took a whole civil war, riots, and federal laws accompanied with police intervention to e.g. force the end of slavery and deseggregation. Some good white souls going out and doing it on their own didn't manage to get far...

Probably plenty doing 1. I do this.

2 through 4 is basically asking to be exploited and undervalued, and very few mentally-well people could keep it up for more than a couple of years.

Plenty of us probably doing 5 in some way (I personally designed low-cost electronics lab gear, I'm sure plenty of others make cheap/free online courses and tutorials of a high standard), but it doesn't matter because employers are only looking for the credentials. I'd even go so far to state that many degrees aren't actually indicators of a particular valuable skillset, but indicators of class.

6 doesn't make sense in the broader scope. If everyone in every country did this, it would hurt the global economy more than it helps it.

No.

Some problems are rightly solved at the government level and anything that serves to distract from that is propaganda.

Waiting for the government to step in when you could do something right now is just hypocritical.

You can lay the blame on individuals all you want, but you're just going to be attacking symptoms, not the the problem.

I'm sick of this notion that having the government "step in" is a bad thing. There is no purpose to government if not to be used to act in public's benefit.

Sitting comfortably behind a computer claiming someone else should fix a problem is easy. Actually doing something (no matter how small) isn’t.

How does this help, exactly? If the businesses who can't afford to pay at the standard you want go bust, you can't just assume there will be others who can. If the unit of labor a person can provide is worth less than its state mandated cost, that unit of labor will go unemployed. People don't buy things for more than their value to them.

But the poor shareholders would be very sad with that, they don't deserve such a misfortune. It's better and easier to just underpay their employees, they don't need to make a living anyway.

I'd be very pissed off if dividends or bond yields from across the industry dropped 50% overnight.

Of the largest shareholders of major corporations are mutual funds, pension funds and such that fund people who are completely dependent on investment income to live. A policy that causes a 50% change in profits would be a massive shock to those people.

[0]: https://www.cato.org/commentary/let-data-speak-truth-behind-...

But is it good for the laborers themselves? Or for society at large?

Do minimum wage laws or lack thereof correlate with broader measures of wellness and prosperity? How do countries with and without minimum wages compare on life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity rates, cancer rates, median disposable income, median wealth or net worth, suicide rates, divorce rates, accident rates, vacation time or leisure time, levels of pollution? How about harder to quantify stuff such as happiness, contentment, and stress levels?

The market exists to serve human needs and wants. "GDP go up" is not the point of all this effort.

Those people cost money to exist and show up for work. How are those costs being paid?

Same way farmers get paid. Why don't we worry about the price of corn going to $0 a bushel and nobody wanting to plant corn? The market will find a price point where supply meets demand.

supply and demand applies the same way.

> And we subsidize them too.

the same supply/demand dynamics apply to non-subsidized goods/services

Which is it?

We continue to undervalue basic labors, and by that I mean the income from them is less than it actually costs laborers to perform them

, or

We subsidize them?

If we agree to the latter, then we need to make sure all that makes sense and there should be no shame, no blame, and it should be ordinary and expected to be getting assistance despite working.

Right now, we consider that labor near worthless, despite society depending on it massively, and we discourage people from getting assistance and do all manner of things to basically shame people doing those labors despite the fact that we know they are necessary in most cases and we know a lot of people will be doing them.

Again, which is it?

>Which is it?

>We continue to undervalue basic labors, and by that I mean the income from them is less than it actually costs laborers to perform them

>, or

>We subsidize them?

We're already doing the latter, because if it's really the case that they're not "economically viable", the people would have starved to death long time ago.

>there should be no shame, no blame, and it should be ordinary and expected to be getting assistance despite working.

>[...] we discourage people from getting assistance and do all manner of things to basically shame people doing those labors despite the fact that we know they are necessary in most cases and we know a lot of people will be doing them.

I'm not against society subsidizing the lifestyle of people who are not productive enough to afford it, but judging by your other comments, you seem to be against companies hiring the very same people for extra money.

>Right now, we consider that labor near worthless, despite society depending on it massively

that's not a contradiction. Civilization is "massively" dependent on clean drinking water, yet you can get it from the tap for pennies a gallon.

In your case, the great comments... ah well. Happens. Nicely done.

It's OK that they have an agenda. In fact, everyone does! Bias is everywhere. It's for sure present on the cable newscycle. To avoid it is very difficult, time consuming and expensive! It takes large numbers of us considerable periods of time to produce objective material, if it's possible to produce at all.

A lot of people tend to respond to entities with agendas they do not like, for whatever reason --does not matter why, by marginalizing them, or ignoring them, rebutting them (the best of poor options IMHO), and so on.

In most cases, those responses do more harm than good. What happens there is your own biases get amplified, or resonate in ways that you may also feel pretty good about, despite the harm being done; namely, the loss in your ability to make good use of the otherwise fairly high general information value out there being high on the list of subtle harms.

With me so far? Let's take it just a bit farther. Humor me for a moment please. It's worth it. Promise.

A much better response is to evaluate that agenda, or bias, as well as the overall clarity of the presentation.

Biases work two basic ways, one being the entity under examination is truthful, clear and accurate about their biases, whatever they may be. The other way is simply not accurate, or unclear. Bear in mind FOX took a case to court where they won a case where they forced journalists to basically lie. They could do the lie, keep their job, or take a walk. Simple as that. The big players do this. All of them do it. It's legal for them to do. Ethics? I sure don't find any of it ethical at all, but I'm not in charge, nor running a media giant either.

Clarity boils down to whether someone using the information can accurately and consistently and EASILY differentiate fact from opinion. This is the primary factor in play, and it is the one more people understand more poorly, or haven't considered it at all. The secondary way clarity works, and this is far more widely understood and is generally well considered, is whether the language conveys the ideas in high fidelity. Low clarity information generally is a mashup of fact and opinion that is difficult to sort out, and whether it's sorted or not, the whole thing is written with dubious language, making it difficult to understand on a basic level.

Rather than avoid bias, which is generally futile for reasons I've given above, embrace it! Bias is OK. Seriously!

It's also largely unavoidable, and it's only a core problem when it's unknown and or unclear, or deliberately misrepresented. Otherwise, that bias can help put whatever info you are considering into a greater context and that's a value add straight up. Worth it.

You are not wrong to be wary of the data!

I see your comment in grey, meaning some of us balked on the idea of that and who knows why? Maybe they think highly of Cato, or maybe they feel the whole statement is more judgement than value, whatever... It really doesn't matter much, beyond the reduction in value that happens on HN with that sort of thing going on.

But, I wrote this because you aren't wrong to be wary of that data, and some information on why that is has high value. In fact, you should be wary of most any data coming out of think tanks, fast news cycles, and in general anyone not working from original documents and or not linking to them for whatever reason. Sometimes those originals are unavailable, or paywalled, or obtuse, and other times it's nefarious, or low value, in that they are available, but it's simply not done.

Sorry, this ended up being a bit long. I didn't intend for that. Stuff happens. For what it's worth, I didn't just ramble. And I'm not judging or telling you what to do either. Just putting some perspective and my own hard won insight here for consideration.

There are other factors too, like disclosure and how it can hide important conflicts of interest. An easy example might be getting your facts on net neutrality and or opinion on policy about it from mainstream big company media owned by a handful of people. The conflict is easy and obvious, and we've all had great discussions about that topic here, which may get a few minutes when it's peak interest, and nothing at all otherwise. From their point of view, a neutral net carries with it costs and risks as well as enables competition those media giants have spent decades pushing away from their media empires right along with shutting down, owning, marginalizing indie shops all over the place, and I digress! Sorry about that.

Suffice it to say disclosure is a big deal, it's not being done to the degree it should and the problem is widespread and chronic. Conflicts of interest as well as understanding who might be a competing source are both problems we all deal with on a regular basis and there is very little discussion on it, certainly not discussion on par with the importance and scale of the problem.

I tend to lump all this under clarity, just to keep it all simple.

What you want is to understand their biases, ownership, and how clear that all is. Ever wonder about the multiple talking heads deal done all the time, Sunday shows, prime time "news" and other productions being easy examples. They do this for a ton of reasons, but a big one is reduced clarity so that facts and opinion get mangled together leading people to conclusions they are likely to have not arrived at given a higher degree of clarity. These productions can be clear, and sometimes are. You can sort it out by asking yourself whether you found fact and opinion easy to differentiate.

Having thought about these things, sorting fact from opinion, biases become important as context and all that can be framed up and used more effectively in your own reasoning and potential communication!

You can then find other sources and or entertain discussion being far better informed and able to participate in those adding more value than you would generally add otherwise.

From there?

You come to your own conclusions. No joke.

At first, working through these things is a slog. Takes time, energy, isn't always compelling, and we all know the list of reasons why we might avoid doing those things.

...which comes down to trust. Just trusting is a lot easier, and it's why so many of us do that so often.

Your statement implied a low degree of trust related to Cato. Fair enough. I don't trust them either. But, whether we trust them or not isn't the point as much as WHO YOU / WE DO TRUST!

I suggest not doing that to the degree you probably are. Verify more, compare / contrast more. This too takes a bit of work at first, but if you do that work, soon it becomes just part of your process and you won't notice it, but you will notice your own clarity, ability to participate in discussions, and just understand and benefit from whatever information sources you prefer improves considerably.

To that end, humor me just a bit more please!

Let's talk about those sources you do trust. For whatever reason!

I want to challenge that and get you thinking a bit differently. For your benefit. Overall, mine and others too. Start looking for these two concepts:

"there is always two sides to every story."

Nope! There are the facts and there is opinion as to what we think those facts mean. Could be what others think they mean, what you think, me, anyone really. The most common abuse of this idea is to put a reputable source alongside a full bat shit one and then have a debate... That is more entertainment than it is informative.

High clarity sources make the facts easily differentiated from their own editorial / advocacy. They do this so you can take those facts, consider them yourself, consider what they want you to, and when using other sources, see the facts there, find missing ones and in general get informed to a degree beyond whatever intent may be at hand otherwise. Being informed means understanding the facts as well as the various schools of thought out there as to what those facts may mean.

When I was a kid in primary school, my school actually taught this stuff! Identifying bias, clarity, fact, opinion, and we were asked to collect sources, compare, contrast, and talk about what we learned and why it mattered.

This hasn't been done very well for most of us, and a whole lot of us simply do not even get introduced to the topic. My kids didn't see this kind of education, and my grandkids are not either. I've had to do it, and will be doing it again soon once my grandkids are ready for it.

"Always two sides to every story" is toxic.

There are facts, and there are a lot of opinions and frankly, the only reason we see two sides more than not is the media consolidation has also resulted in message consolidation and the highly polarized discussion centered on our two parties.

The other concept to be watching for is whether the bias is truthfully communicated or not.

FOX runs with "Fair and Balanced", or we see others like, "Lean Forward", "News You Can Trust", and so on. None of that crap actually means a damn thing, and it's focus grouped to the nines all intended to imply positives while not actually communicating bias in a concrete way. A great parallel to understand what I mean here is something like the Arco gas company "No Gas Gets Better Mileage" slogan. Of course! No other gas gets worse either, because we've regulated what gas actually is!

Cato sometimes produced great info. They will do it again. They often produce pieces that are clear and appear to have high information value. And they might, but there is usually some bit left out, or a dubious source, or whatever subtle device made sense to them at the time too.

Any of that seem familiar?

Well, we can have this same discussion about CNN, FOX, or MSNBC and arrive at very similar conclusions, and if we did that we would not be wrong about it! Just like bias is everywhere, these basic ideas are in play everywhere.

It's hard to trust right now.

Our mainstream media environment isn't all that reputable by time tested, global standards related to this kind of thing. And we aren't alone. Australia, Europe have similar struggles, and the one thing they have we don't is a multi-party government that makes it all a bit harder to pull off to the degree seen here. One thing that does stand out is media from other nations can often present the same stories with better clarity and a different take because their point of view, bias, is also different, given their position in the world overall forces that kind of thing. I found this out after travelling some to see the world. I was quite surprised to see our politics and news covered very well, while our news here rarely covers foreign news and politics to the same degree.

My advice?

Don't trust so much.

If you find yourself really invested in a narrative, or story, or even some facts, take a little time, seek original documents where you can, try a few different sources, and even a foreign one or two. Just doing that will broaden how you see media and improve your process and that's a big win.

None of us have this stuff right. We all have biases. We all have our faves in the media scene too. That's OK. One of our best tools is simple discussion among peers. Just put it out there and see what others think.

When we can talk among ourselves without judgement, without hating, and just exchange thoughts, we benefit.

If nothing else, that's why I wrote this. Ended up in a place where all this kind of bubbled up with unusual clarity. In my experience, that's always a good time to put down some words and get the value of it all out there for others to consider and benefit from. That's all this is.

Again, you aren't wrong. The why of it may not be as expected. No big deal there. Maybe this helps drag some of the subtle bits out into the light where you can take a look at it all and benefit. Hope so, and I hope you do.

That is what I did intend.

Have a great week.

A business that cannot fully fund it's labor is not a business. Who wants to pay a subsidy, which is exactly what happens when labor is underfunded, just so someone can mooch for profit? I don't.

The answer to your question is we simply do that labor ourselves.

This takes commerce as a given. Another outcome is that those that cannot cease to exist and are replaced by nothing, leading to more poverty. That has been a common failure mode of that policy.

It dies.

Same is true for people who are required to labor for more than it costs them to labor.

It just so happens we will fund people who cannot exist otherwise, right?

And there is the problem. We have many companies perfectly happy to underpay their labor, mooch off the public, and bank that for profit. The likes of McDees, Walmart and many others can and should be fully funding their labor and they don't.

The balance of power between labor and employers is different in those nations, which works to reduce the need for minimums. The ones I have looked at also have assistance / subsidy policy that is lower friction and generally not associated with the near constant blame and shame seen here. That's a big deal frankly. Having robust norms well aligned with human quality of life basics is necessary for the help to work as intended.

Labor law is a contributor to that balance of power too. "At will" type policies, "right to work for less" policies are examples where the lack of labor protections very significantly bias labor negotiation power toward employers, who tend to get a better deal. Implications here should be obvious.

I tend to use business and labor dying when they are not funded well enough to exist as a strong rhetorical tool. This meta discussion is one negative artifact of that. No easy answers, IMHO.

No, because those positions pay the same as what they're currently getting, but not how much they would pay with a higher minimum wage. The context is that a person's current position is unprofitable under a higher minimum wage, but other positions would not be, thus their wage ends up boosted even if it means getting a new position.

Furthermore, targeted automation has tended to increase employment in other industries, historically.

I have no problem with a higher minimum wage, but that's rather like giving someone who has lost a lot of blood, a blood transfusion. It's good, but it's a stopgap measure that is ignoring a more fundamental problem, and if you're not stitching up the wound you're not doing much good.

If jobs can be exported overseas to places with much lower wages (and lax/nonexistent environmental laws), then all a higher minimum wage (here) does is put more people out of a job. Higher minimum wage, ok, but it can't be done in isolation or you've replaced "low wages" with "no wages".

As far as I know, the economic literature is pretty clear that this is not the case in the US. Even regional changes, where an employer can reasonably relocate outside the e.g. city boundary without much difficulty, don't show job losses.

Automation and self service (like in European cafeterias) is largely the response when services become too uneconomical to be done manually. Those elevator operators aren’t coming back to the USA.

And people often wave the automation threat around - but why hasn't it happened yet? In concrete studies of minimum wage increases that actually occurred, we do not find job losses.

But this is just the government being conservative, actual significant increases that affect more than one percent of the population will have an affect.

Not widespread yet, but neither were cars nor computers in their early days. The ratio of robots to humans in kitchens is likely to grow in the future. From its current very low value to something more meaningful.

[0] https://singularityhub.com/2020/11/06/flippy-the-fast-food-r...

Just as income inequality is bringing a new wave of app-based delivery servants.

I can tell you absolutely that is my response. I'm not going to eat some automated thing that nobody's checking, or has poorly maintained for the least dollars.

Besides, nothing about that automation actually changes the funding labor problem.

I have always found it tough to sell a robot a good meal too.

There will be basic labors we need doing and a lot of people doing them for the foreseeable future.

And robots don't need a good movie, a night out, a good meal, or any of those things, so whatever taxes has to find their way to the people who do present real demand for those things.

And those people do have costs, unless we simply allow them to cease to exist and not show up for work anymore.

We might need some qualifiers to understand exactly what you mean. Most automation is readily within reach if the job is rote and the economic differential is there. (FWIW, I used to build and program assembly line robuts).

>whatever taxes has to find their way to the people who do present real demand for those things.

I think this is the intent. Call it UBI, Freedom Dividend, or whatever, but the goal is to fund the societal base that has the actual need for whatever automation (or humans) will produce.

As for rote... look, automation is expensive to establish, adapt transport and maintain, and need infrastructure to support it all.

People, at their real cost, are a GREAT deal and that will be true for a very long time yet.

Go work through a few cases. I have experience in automation. It is the little things that cost a lot.

We are more likely to succeed with augmented labor, and already do. Better tools = labor multipliers.

Yep. I am not anti automation. Cars, for example. Great use case, as you say.

Scale there, appetite for capital investment there, ability to weather high maintenance, change costs all there.

There is an opposite end of the scale, and it is that end we are a very long away from.

Also, the likes of FANUC do have dark running facilities that use robots to build robots.

I do have experience too. That stuff is expensive, complex, and very rigid. Not applicable, at this time, to the vast majority of basic labors we depend on every day.

Finally, one can automate workers away, or automation can free them to do more things.

The latter is a lot more sustainable, but a lot less sexy, and not so well aligned with the dominant business justifications used to sell initial automation.

This was my latter point. Automation is often augmented, to use your words. This is more true the higher you get in skills. A Da Vinci robot does not replace a surgeon. But lower level skills are where the difficulty is at. A fork-lift driver may be automated away completely by a parts-picking robot. This is where unions are beneficial in my view. They can ensure at least a relatively soft landing with retraining, replacement, etc.

Amazon did find a niche, the package movement, where everything aligns nicely in a fashion not too unlike the cars. IMHO, the big difference is more dynamic decisions are needed for the packages, where the cars require more complexity, but are very consistent otherwise. Software innovation got Amazon where they wanted to be, and it's a good, genuine innovation that did expand the automation space.

Similar levels of effort are necessary for all those basic labors. This is why I maintain we just won't be there for a considerable time, despite successes like Amazon out there. Scale, and dynamic locations, terrain and decisions are huge barriers to entry. So many cases... and mechanisms / processes that can address them, and or minimize them.

Costs on all that are off the charts, as is maintenance, simple acquisition of the machinery.

More people centric augmentation will happen sooner. Mostly, this will preserve people from wearing out and or increase their throughput more than anything else. It may be we extend capabilities in a more transparent way too. That's going on now, of course, but maybe some of that will scale, get cheap, someone finds another niche...

All good stuff really.

But, "the robots are coming" really does not apply for a solid majority of the basic labors out there we depend on. Of course, that doesn't mean we won't be automating. We will, and it's a good thing regardless of how we sort out the humans economically, which was your point, and one I agree with.

Cheers! Good discussion. Have a great week.

That is a raw subsidy, and it's US paying so big players get a bigger profit.

We should not pay a dime, and they make a smaller one, but they also earned it fair and square too, not mooching on the public dime.

I disagree here. Global poverty is at its lowest point in human history, in large part due to jobs being exported to poor countries.

Let's see (only what I have answers to):

Cheap rents and affordable housing.

Allow more vertical building.

Protective nets for periods of illness/unemployment/etc.

I and my employers pay a fund that covers it.

School districts equally equipped, with good teachers.

From the taxes, it's not so expensive.

Free (or very affordable, no-loan-based) college education if their kid passes a hard tamper-proof exam.

From the taxes, it's not so expensive if you only pay the smartest ones.

Taxes on outsourcing work outside the country.

Well, that's income, but I disagree. Just forbid making any business with tyrants. I know, I know...

The rest maybe, but this is a core issue. And I don't know how you can read that quote and go "that's increased spending".

I don't share all the points of the originator of the thread (was it coldtea?), you might find interesting which ones I didn't mention, but some of them are a good idea even from the point of view of more affluent people.