I would try to commoditize housing,healthcare and food. It would be essential to make sure that these fundamental needs of people working for minimum wage are take care of.
We know sucides and death goes down the more money you get up to at least $120,000.
They don't seem to have quantified anything?
What's the cost per life saved here?
We often joked here in Eastern Europe that we would be better off leaving our current IT jobs and just go to the US to work at McDonalds.
The next big culprit is other drug addiction, like fentanyl and heroin. Stemming the flow of cheap fentanyl dumped into the United States by China and throwing doctors in jail who over prescribe these drugs would do wonders for people.
OK, and how's the "war on drugs" going thus far?
> Mental health professionals and managers at large drug companies need to start going to jail for over-prescribing psychiatric drugs.
Really? You want to put people into jail for trying to treat depression?
> throwing doctors in jail who over prescribe these drugs would do wonders for people.
And now you want to imprison doctors for treating pain and taking care of patients?
You can't be serious, I hope you are merely ignorant rather than that punitive.
BTW, prescriptions have nothing to do with illegal fentanyl overdoses, and virtually nobody prescribed painkillers becomes addicted to them. This is well studied but largely ignored by the political posturing, media hysteria, and moral panicking about an imaginary prescription crisis, data shows it does not exist.
"Overall 675,527 patients underwent urological surgery, of whom 0.09% were diagnosed with opioid dependence or overdose."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00225...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27400458
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a3z98b/big-pharma-didnt-c...
Read facts and change your mind, or don't and remain ignorant. You have that freedom.
The case with fentanyl is not like heroin, well established factories make it in China. It is within the Chinese governments power to stop the flow, this is a foreign policy issue. The fact that its not at all in the news is disturbing.
> Really? You want to put people into jail for trying to treat depression?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Secondly, this isnt "trying to treat depression", its a profit driven industry. SSRIs commonly do not outperform their placebo. Most of the recent adolescent mass shooters were on SSRIs!
> throwing doctors in jail who over prescribe these drugs would do wonders for people.
If Boeing engineers design an unsafe plane to squeeze out more profits and then line their pockets, which results in airplane crashes, they should go to jail. The same is true for healthcare.
Claiming that prescription opiods are not fueling the heroin and fentanyl crisis is a radical opinion. There was a massive lawsuit against the big pharma companies making money off these drugs. I'm not going to google research, its plain and simple.
Criminal doctors have been prescribing these drugs and making money off them. This has caused mass deaths and suicides.
Look at the chart of opion consumption on this page:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/nov/...
The number of opiod prescriptions year by year looks like the price of bitcoin. I dont need some study to try and convince me otherwise.
Research from the past few years has been questioning if the brain will just adapt overtime while on medication to the point of becoming oversensitive when off the medication and where the normal state of the person gets worse. I've only read this about antipsychotics more so than antidepressants.
In any case much if not all research in the topic of mind altering medication is still in the infant years and should be read while being skeptic. Multiple unique life factors can make research very difficult to get right in this topic.
There are also many cases of drug companies going to court and losing over suicides and murder-suicides. Leaks during those trials have shown horrible cover ups such as Study 329.
The whole thing is really is too horrible to imagine. The idea that we could give drugs to people making them want to kill themselves, which I think is why so many people don't want to believe it could be true.
> studies showed that children and adolescents taking antidepressants were almost twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts or to attempt suicide, compared to patients taking a sugar pill.
http://www.center4research.org/antidepressants-increase-suic...
I was put off for so long because I had read so many people saying that antidepressants were evil or bad or whatever. I wish I asked my doctor about them earlier.
It's OK to take them. It's ok to not want to take them. I wish they were less stigmatized because they do help some people a lot.
edit: paper shared below!
Globalization and protectionism also play a role here, and are a critical factor in the answer (think global minimum wage vs local minimum wage).
This time cost cannot be less than a factor directly proportionate to minimum wage (local minimum wage or global minimum wage depending on economic policy).
In a sense, minimum wage is the cost of (human) time itself. You’re saying “regardless of the labor involved or otherwise, the skill involved or otherwise, the care involved or otherwise, the social skills involved or otherwise, the know-how involved or otherwise, this is the lowest you can pay someone to do something on an hourly basis (with many caveats, such as allowing employers to deduct the cost of services they provide their employees from said wage, etc). You can’t raise that cost without the cost of everything else shifting upwards by some extent with it. No one that understand economics debates that. The question is just how big this shift is.
https://jech.bmj.com/content/jech/early/2020/01/03/jech-2019...
If this result stands up, it'd be very interesting to drill in and figure out what's really happening. Quite challenging, though--apparently long study hasn't even settled the question of how minimum wage affects the job market.
In this case, one could imagine all sorts of confounders. For example, maybe communities that have higher minimum wages simply have them because they're wealthier as a whole, which could in turn lead to lower suicide rates. Or perhaps a higher minimum wage leads to the most marginal workers losing their jobs, and it turns out that they're happier for it somehow.
If you a see a piece of research that seems to contradict some elementary principle of economics, it's possible that the researchers somehow forgot all about it or never learned it and that the paper somehow passed out of peer review without anyone pointing out its glaring deficiencies, but it's more likely that that an elementary understanding of economics is insufficient to explain real world phenomena.
You can see a parallel to this in the climate science debate, where people object to scientific assertions on the grounds that the sun is very much hotter than burning fossil fuels or 'climate is always changing' and human activity is too nebulous to possibly have an impact. Often deliberately simplistic arguments are used to mislead the slightly-educated and discourage them from becoming better informed.
Seattle--a world-class tech nexus point--raising its minimum wage affected a relatively small percent of businesses compared to a "normal" city, as businesses in Seattle would have long since needed to offer higher wages in order to keep employees.
I'd be much more interested in seeing the effects of a $15 wage in Nowheresville, USA than in Seattle.
"Normal" towns' leaders would recognize it as virtue-signaling rather than transformative change, because it would've affected proportionally few people.
If people are buying more because of wage increases, what is the macroeconomic effect? If people have better health care and take less sick days, what is the effect? If the government has more revenue to spend on programs to benefit people like public transit, job training, drug treatment, what is the effect?
Also worth it to a look at this paper, that shows that there aren't less jobs when you raise minimum wage.
https://www.sole-jole.org/17722.pdf
Also CEO income (an exec compensation in general) has risen dramatically over the past 20 years while regular wage growth has been anemic. Are CEOs dramatically more productive, and workers barely so? That seems illogical, much more likely that the executives are capturing the value of their workers increased productivity. A company doesn't have to raise costs to consumers, it can always cut executive compensation.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/16/17693198/c...
> When a person’s depression starts to lift, he or she may feel less hopeless and helpless. That sounds like an improvement, but when people feel less helpless but still feel depressed, they may think about suicide as a way out, whereas before they were too immobilized to make a suicide plan. For that reason, a decrease in the symptoms of depression can increase the risk of suicidal thoughts or actions.
I'm unaware of any study that answers this question definitively, but I'm interested, so if anyone sees something useful, please chime in.
UBI would also probably help. As a freelancer I've had some really slim months and depression hits hard when money is tight.
There's a very direct correlation between income security, insecurity, stress, depression, and suicidal thoughts.
[1] https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2011/02/us-vs-can...
* Global rate: 10.5 per 100,000 people * Canada rate: 10.4 per 100,000 people * US rate: 13.7 per 100,000 people
(the leader, not the car company; the brother of the crack smoking mayor, the white one)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/...
Solution: make this country slightly less "dog eat dog" and you'll solve a LOT of social issues almost overnight.
Another anomaly: Hispanic people have the second highest life expectancies in the United States (after Asians), significantly higher than non-Hispanic whites, despite on average having lower incomes and health insurance coeverage.
How are you supposed to study it, though? Not exactly a good situation for an exit poll.
Imaginably the government could be in a position to grant a gift, and help, to offer a moment of respite from whatever is causing the most distress -- that might help some people...
As the only candidate currently running on a UBI platform, Andrew Yang has argued that one of its benefits would be a reduction in economic anxiety, with ancillary benefits to health in the form of stress reduction and improved executive function, as well as lower rates of depression, suicide, and drug addiction.
I'm not sure that max wage algorithm creates a healthy incentive though. it would seem to encourage hiring more employees than necessary just to increase the executive's compensation. I think people can often tell when their job isn't really necessary and it probably doesn't feel very good.
I can't see a drawback, aside from someone at that ceiling simply wanting to raise their salary without raising those working for them.
If finances are a factor in suicidal ideation then it’s a secondary consideration in addition to more prominent concerns.
My most depressing times were when I was unemployed (not to be confused with "funemployed") and not making any money.
Moreover, price ceilings have a rich and long empirical and theoretical argument against their existence in the economics literature https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_ceiling
Finally, by what measure do you feel able to assert that no one is more productive than someone else based on some constant? How much more productive was the team of the Manhattan project than some other team of physicists?
Fast forward to the 1860s, and nail production is automated to the extent that wire nails can be produced by the tens of millions with almost no human intervention.
The worker who forges nails by hand and the inventor who automates their production are undoubtedly orders of magnitude apart in productivity.
Having met people causing net negative productivity, this is pretty hard to believe. Why do you expect this to be true?
Raising the floor without modifying how much or how quickly those at the top earn only makes those barely above the bottom relatively poorer.
Hmm, this seems suspiciously biased towards certain types of business (for example, tech CEOs would make way more than retail CEOs)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/06/opinion/suicide-young-peo...
I am being serious. Some things have to be the top causes of death for young people and the list definitionally can’t include the aspirational “old age.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...
> The WHO statistics are based on the official reports from each respective country, therefore are no more accurate than the record-keeping in the specific country, and revisions (updates) are usually performed as well.
> In much of the world, suicide is stigmatized and condemned for religious or cultural reasons. In some countries, suicidal behaviour is a criminal offence punishable by law. Suicide is therefore often a secretive act surrounded by taboo, and may be unrecognized, misclassified or deliberately hidden in official records of death.[3]
It is very hard to compare rates of suicide across countries.
Many of the countries I think of as socialist healthcare (UK, Denmark, Canada, to name a few), they all come up below the US in suicides.
High historically high levels of income inequality have torn countries apart.
Could this have to do with the mounting inequality? It seems the standard indicators for the health of the economy are breaking because wealth just keeps pooling near the top. So what this study could be saying is, "make changes so that more people get the benefits of the booming economy."
Stop buying cheap, disposable stuff and buy durable things affording locals a living wage. Minimum wages are only slightly better. In my mind minimum wages are wages to minimally support a teenager or similar who has no other responsibilities. People with responsibilities need actually decent jobs.
Hollowing our decent paying blue collar jobs will drive some people to despair.
No one listened to the crazy Texan when he warned us.
Now their supposed to be happy having access to $5 T-shirts which last a week and should be mad that tariffs could push that up but could make s better paying job viable for an employer who no longer gets undersold.
Isn't that's just one half of the problem. Isn't the importing of labor the other half of the problem.
We've exported jobs and imported labor. That's a double whammy for workers and can't help but put downward pressure on wages. But it's great for the wealthy elites. Exploit cheap labor overseas and cheapen labor at home.
New Zealand also has a terrible youth suicide rate. http://socialreport.msd.govt.nz/health/suicide.html "New Zealand’s youth (15–24 years) suicide rate was the highest among the 34 OECD countries, ahead of Finland for males and Korea for females."
It doesn’t take a genetic predisposition to get to a dark place when your life is falling apart.
For a second there I thought you we're being serious!
You can be damn sure if the cost of mobile phones suddenly doubled, a lot fewer phones would be purchased and companies would go out of business.
It doesn't. A good working environment does. £1/hr more is nothing if you're on minimum wage working for Amazon Fulfillment or Facebook Moderation, being treated like a slave.
Source: totally unscientific experience with factory work and workers.
I suspect raising that cutoff would increase suicides.
1) NO taxes till $40k-50k for a family 2) Free healthcare 3) Not so crazy tution fees
all these are doable.. just like raising minimum wage..
You're talking about quite literally like 80% of the entire tax revenue generated by the government. Income taxes we're devised because an industrial nation cannot collect property taxes on non land owning tax payers. As the cities grew, governments realized that they could only tax the wealthy and prominent land owners so much before they had to generate it in another way.
This is wrong.
$50k/yr is below median household income so we're talking about eliminating income taxes for the bottom half of taxpayers (less than that actually, but whatever). The bottom half pays roughly 3% of income taxes.
Now, that number gets somewhat bigger when you take into account payroll taxes but it's nowhere close to 80%.
Its actively harmful to pretend it is because it diverts from real research and actual solutions and
In the US, 434,000 make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Another 1.3 million make wages below the federal minimum.
The article mentions raising the minimum wage by 10%, or 73 cents an hour, which would save 1230 lives per year (plus a 10% increase in federal EITC as well). Assuming a 2000 hr work year, this increase in minimum wage would cost $633.64 million nationally for those making exactly minimum wage, and some larger value at least 3x that, if we also bring those 1.3 million making below minimum wage up to minimum wage + 10%. (It's unclear who is making below minimum wage, it might be family farmworkers? $2.13/hr service employees who aren't getting tips? Students exempt from the minimum wage? All of the above?) In any case the cost per life saved using this method at a minimum comes to $1,745,921, but probably around twice that. That might be a good value. Or it might be that there are other methods of saving those lives that would be more effective at lower cost, allowing even more lives to be saved.
Retail is the land of the minimum wage jobs, and margins are fairly thin there as it is. Raising the minimum wage simply means some employees become former employees. If the unemployment is at historic lows as it is today, there's a good chance those former employees will be able to find another job, so I see how the conclusion of the paper could be plausible, although loss of a job is still a very stressful event regardless.
When the unemployment rate is high (as it was in the studied date range), however, the effective wage becomes whatever unemployment pays, which isn't very much, and then it goes away entirely at some point. I don't see how this would reduce suicide.
Seems to me like another study crafted to produce the outcome the author wanted. The hypothesis isn't really testable anyway.
The "wealth tax" is a system that examines wealth and taxes wealth (not income). It's theorized that it's unconstitutional, and even if it isn't, the conservative US court might cause it problems anyway.
But if instead you examine wealth and tax income, maybe that gets around the issue. Higher income tax brackets for those with more wealth?
I read this as you thinking there's a problem with no more people getting rich. Can you expand on that?
For example: how many people need to get rich to balance the economic, social, and political power of the people who already are? Is this the best way to achieve that balance?
If you want to pay for these things, you need to bring your idea of who's gonna get taxed way, way down to earth.
Oooh, is the reason "because a lot of services are publicly delivered instead of privately", because I'll bet it is.
I pay $30k/year for private healthcare here in the US; a $2200/month premium and an annual out-of-pocket of $4k.
I'd happily accept a 10% tax hike to make that go away, and that doesn't even account for my kids' eventual college costs...
To get rid of these high levels of inequality we don't need to make it impossible to be rich, just make it very hard to be rich and let nature take its course.
Note that in my lifetime the top marginal tax bracket has been over 70% so it's not even that radical of a change.
You would have to strip income inequality, then reduce income mobility - but inevitably someone would become wealthy, further cementing their lead.
[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
I also think social media/internet is to blame for this though, because it makes the realities of economic inequality much more real than just tangentially hearing about celebrities in rags and trashtv.
By what measure?
This feels like the sort of thing that's really going to depend on the definition of mass shooting used. Inner city African American gang violence is the majority of "3+ killed by gun at once" incidents, and if your definition includes that then that's what you'll be measuring. And on the other hand if you use "2+ unrelated people killed or injured including shooter, not gang related" like some advocacy groups do you'll get different results, and if you use what most people would consider a mass shooting (3+ unrelated people killed in public place not including shooter excluding gang violence, or "something that shows up on national news") you'll have minimal data to go off of since those events happen <10x/yr.
Can't be happy when you can't afford medicine for yourself and your kids, can't pay for food, can't pay the rent/mortgage, etc.
Money can't buy happiness, but lack of money causes a lot of unhappiness.
You don't need to look further than Maslow's hierarchy of needs to see why, when you don't have enough money to reliably fulfill some of the most fundamental needs like shelter and food, it's going to severely hinder your self actualization. Forget about moving on to the more psychological higher-level needs when you are worrying about where you are going to sleep tonight. It's easy to understand why happiness might be very hard to reach for individuals who don't have enough money to cover their basic needs
Or, money is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for happiness.
the lack of a psychological safety net is one of the most anxiety inducing things about American capitalism. we underestimate as a society how damaging it is because it's so hard to measure.
I'm not sure I agree with that. It has been known within public health for decades that poverty is an important predictor of life expectancy and quality of life.
The real problem in the US appears to be a deep cultural belief in self-sufficiency, and an accompanying unwillingness to vote for politicians who support implementation of said safety nets.
Food money is not the same as rent money and is not the same as money allotted for a fancy holiday.
House safety, food safety, personal safety are what humans worried about for thousands of years before money even existed.
Assuming that's accurate, then shouldn't we mandate that these corporations pay their workers a livable wage? If they don't pay the workers a livable wage, guess who does? The taxpayers, in the form of food stamps, welfare, and increased prison population. I really don't see why the American public should be forced to subsidize Walmart (or any large megacorporation) just because they won't pay their employees enough.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#cite_note-104 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#cite_note-105
EDIT: Before anyone says it, I know forcing Walmart to pay more to their workers would increase the prices of their goods; that's still almost certainly cheaper than increasing welfare.
In my opinion, almost all of the actual past raises to minimum wage have been on the small side, and have not significantly affected unemployment. You're right about that.
But if my opinion is true, then there's a huge leap with no scientific basis to saying "therefore this specific large increase in minimum wage will not raise unemployment."
Unfortunately, there aren't any scientific studies of increasing the US minimum wage by 100% because it has not been done multiple times in the past. So no one really knows what would happen if we did it now.
These would have ripple effects up the chain. Malls and retail real estate are empty as it is, for one; any fewer and we legitimately might see problems.
Also unemployment should never happen, and if we simply declare how the economy should works, it will magically reorganize itself in a way that makes it so, and which doesn't do serious harm to anybody, and doesn't cripple our futures. And you are a monster for daring to entertain the notion that achieving goodness in the world is any more complicated than this, and you deserve to be shunned and hated.
I don't know if I've been brainwashed growing up by fake news but... isn't the idea "work hard for a living", not "do the minimum and be rewarded?" (aka minimum wage)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Canada#Among_Indige...
Curious to see how Michigan would compare with Ontario or Alaska or Northern Washington would compare with British Columbia
I suspect that the larger and more cohesive one's support network is, the less likely you are to commit suicide, and that the more socially isolated one is, the poorer one is, and the sicker one is, the more likely one is to feel hopeless and see suicide as the only way out.
Other important factors are things like how many recent traumatic events (such as relationship breakups, serious illness, bereavement, rape, witnessing or being a victim of violence, etc) one has suffered, recent alcohol and drug use/abuse, and then very hard to quantify things like how good one is at coping with such events.
You can't really boil all this down to any one factor, and there's no one solution to any of these issues. But, yes, reducing misery (whether economic or social) should help.
UK – 11.2 per 100,000 people – in 2018 (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/sep/03/suicides-rat... & https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...). I think the UK's Office of National Statistics is a better source of information that Wikipedia.
UBI is a great idea. Unfortunately, minimum wage now usually means "in work" poverty, that's not a good thing.
edit: @0000011111, I think income inequality could certainly be a driver.
I agree that the ONS is a better source of information than Wikipedia.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
Here's the old definition:
> The previous National Statistics definition of suicide includes deaths from intentional self-harm (where a coroner has given a suicide conclusion or made it clear in the narrative conclusion that the deceased intended to kill themselves) and events of undetermined intent (mainly deaths where a coroner has given an open conclusion) in people aged 15 and over.
It's this "events of undetermined intent" part that is different. In the US (and I guess many other places" those deaths are not counted as suicide.
The US uses this definition:
> Death caused by self-directed injurious behavior with an intent to die as a result of the behavior
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide...
But your correct that we should probably go by the individual countries’ statistics, where the UK is slightly above the average compared to other developed countries and the US a good amount above it.
apparently google and facebook already have some kind of tech that estimates if people are vulnerable to suicidal ideation based on searches ("hey google, how do I kill myself painlessly?" gives the national suicide prevention hotline -- good)
Housing is a more complicated story; there's certainly a theory that landlords will simply raise rents in proportion to their tenants new ability to pay more. On the other hand, a stable income boost might make the housing market more fluid, giving renters more options to move when the rent goes up. I personally favor LVT to discourage rent-seeking, and there's a lot that could be done by removing zoning and building restrictions (multi-family conversions, etc) to make housing more competitive.
Do we have 1000x or more business leaders? Because that's how well compensated a select few of them are. I don't believe we have. Because at most one developer is 100 times more productive than other one, so it makes no sense that a business person would be 1000 times more productive than another one.
At 2% inflation, it's not possible to maintain $100M of wealth without also having $2M in annual income. If every dollar over $1M in income were taxed at 70%, then you would need over $4M in annual income, plus more than twice your annual expenditures to maintain that level of wealth.
4% rent on $100M in assets is probably sustainable over a long time, so if you live frugally, you could likely self-sustain that level of wealth.
If you have $1B in assets and make a 7% return (which is my conservative estimate of the maximum long-term rent you could extract on a large fortune) then that's $70M return in income, essentially all of which is taxed at the 70% rate, leaving $21M remaining, $20M of which is "lost" due to inflation.
This means that if you have a billion dollars and want to live just off of rents, you would need to both invest prudently, and live on expenses of no more than $1M per year. Mess up either and you are on track to leave the billionaire's club.
In addition, consider an heir who gets a high-paying professional job with a rags-to-riches one. The one with no wealth isn't having unearned income to pad their tax bracket, so the marginal pay they get for working is much higher than the heir who is also collecting investment income, thus allowing them to grow their wealth faster if they have an identical savings rate.
The US right now has an income tax scheme that is regressive for wealth because wealthy people have a greater fraction of their income in the form of long-term capital gains. GP suggested making it extremely progressive vs wealth, and I'm merely pointing out that a properly implemented wealth-blind income tax will work out to be progressive vs wealth due to inflation.
If you haven't seen it, you might appreciate this article by Eric Weinstein. It details explicitly how the NSF went about betraying us. https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-why-gove...
FICA Payroll taxes paid 50k * .0765 = 3825
Tax Burden 50k - 24800 (Standard deduction MFJ) = 25600
25600 = $2676.90 in FIT taxes owed before credits
Child tax credit $4000 EITC ~$750
Total Credits $4750
Total Federal tax burden -4750 + 3825 + 2677 = 1752/50000 = 3.5%
So not zero, but pretty darn close.
maybe I misread this and GP meant increasing the fraction of US employees?
If you have 10 workers average pay 100k and you last off your lowest paid worker the average goes up, and you're paying less out of pocket.
By having bonuses showing that you're not trying to game the system by laying people off it encourages job growth.
That and the idea of pay cap is to ensure business growth over CEO enrichment. How does it hurt the companies bottom line if the CEO can only earn 10 Mill not 50m? When it gives 40 surplus for new devs or r and d people to grow new products and income opportunities.
Jet Skis are pretty easy to load/unload and store compared to a bigger boat. Also much easier to maintain, most of the jet skis I've ridden have all been small 2-stroke engines. Bigger than a lawn mower engine, but not as powerful as most motorcycle engines (except for the bigger wave runners, those are 4-stroke motorcycle engines). Like a go-cart engine. Yes, they require maintenance, but also probably the simplest engine you could possibly maintain.
[0]: https://www.myboatlife.com/2010/12/two-best-days-of-boaters-...
Considering that almost 70% of people in Sweden are part of a union* compared to about 10% in the USA, scrapping federal/state minimum wages in America would be catastrophic, at least in the short term.
*and those that aren't will still benefit from union set minimum wages
But it is not obvious at all how demand responds to global increases in salary. It tends to increase more often than decrease.
Which is clearly not true.
> Concept and origin (1991)
> Partial closure (2018)
To essentially cap wages, you could use higher tax rates in higher tax brackets, and that might actually be enforceable as it would leverage the existing enforcement apparatus that has decades of experience patching workarounds.
I figure you made your comment to demonstrate that the reasoning doesn't work on the extremes, but that only really works as a rebuttle if someone were seriously suggesting something extreme.
Whether or not it generates happiness, money can make happiness more visible. That's worth a moment of reflection.
The answer is they don't happen here, they'll happen somewhere else. They may happen with the same people even, and then you're losing knowledge and experience to other countries, which is fine as long as those other countries choose to be friendly with you.
In other words, you willfully put your country's advancement into the hands of other entities. You no longer control your future.
Not as many as you think I would suggest. In the US a golden era of invention was the postwar era during which inequality fell and the American middle class rose to power and the American government still participated actively in shaping innovation and economic future. Even the Soviet Union invented a good deal of stuff.
Today economic growth is low, inequality is high, it looks like we're on our way to a second gilded age and the things that we call innovation are escooter startups and expensive juice machines. Even die-hard capitalists like Thiel have pointed this out.
If you want innovation what you need is a healthy, equal society, individual opportunity and collective ambition.
At least with our current system the rich people change every couple generations, if income and capital gains were frozen after $100M without any other changes to the tax code, everyone who is presently rich would keep their money while suddenly there would be no risk of replacing them. Bill Gates would become the richest man in the world, not just today, but forever. That's terrible according to Marixist and modern economic consensus: so not a good plan!
People do it all the time. When their basic needs (food, health, shelter) aren't being met, they'll take whatever work they can. It doesn't mean they're getting their true worth out of that work, it just means they're getting screwed by their employers who are taking advantage of their need to pay them less than they would otherwise.
We need minimum wage laws to protect people from being crunched by capitalists exploiting labor market inefficiencies.
Says who?
Inefficiencies in the labor market happen all the time. A minimum wage is one way to protect desperate people from being unfairly exploited.
That's beyond absurd, showing no understanding at all about human nature whatsoever. I have billions of counterexamples for you. I cannot think of anyone I know who hasn't done this at some time in their life. Working for less than one's worth is, in fact, what the majority of the human race is doing. Working for one's worth or for more than one's worth is what is rare and almost nonexistent.
In other words, was there really a spike in youth suicide or did it just climb in rank because we reduced other causes of death? Something must be first, something must be second, and so on.
https://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-suicide-rates-rising-...
So there’s unequivocally a spike.
The only argument you could really make is that suicide rates have been rising across the US since 1999, up in most states and up by 30% in half of all states, making youth suicide of a part with the broader trend. But I don’t think this is any less disheartening.
> Data analysis from a 2013 study published in the journal Clinical Psychology Review shows that those who died by suicide were eight times more likely to be in debt.
Correlation does not imply causation. To illustrate the silliness when the related items are transposed the statement becomes absurdly false even though the logic remains identical: persons in debt are 8 times more likely to be suicidal. Nobody is claiming that because it’s preposterous and there is no such data.
Stress is not a mental health illness. Having debt is also not a mental health illness.
I was discharged from a mental health ward 3 weeks ago after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. My brother was murdered a year ago and I've been struggling with depression since.
I lose my job a few months ago and money has been tight in my household, to the point where I began to see myself as nothing buta financial anchor weighing down my partner.
Freeing her from having to manage my debts was the primary justification for my suicide attempt. My mental health illness (mixed anxiety and Depressive disorder) is not caused by debt, but the affective symptoms (in this case suicidal ideation) were.
Or to put it another way: the easy way out of debt allows people to rationalize an an otherwise irrational decision. (°)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/society/201...
NatCen analysed detailed NHS data about adults’ mental health undertaken for the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute. It found that 13% of people in problem debt – about 420,000 a year – think about suicide and 4% of them – more than 100,000 people – try to end their life.
Having debt certainly isn't a mental illness, but we can't ignore the effect having debt has on people with mental illnesses.
Edit: sorry for any typos or grammatical errors, my medication causes difficulties typing and recognising errors
(°) Of course, it may actually be rational, since her financial security would be significantly improved by the removal of debt and the extra mouth to feed - but rationality does not necessarily imply correctness.
Why do you think this is absurd? How are you defining "suicidal"?
There's good reasons why reputable organisations involved in suicide prevention recognise financial difficulty as a risk factor (one of many) for suicide.
http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=38469
> 156. Patients who died in the first week after leaving hospital were more likely than those who died later after discharge to have a diagnosis of personality disorder (15% v. 10%). Over half (52%) had experienced recent adverse life events, especially financial (25%) and family problems (23%).
https://www.hqip.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/8iQSvI.pd...
> Although under 20s and 20-24 year olds had many antecedents in common, there was a changing pattern,reflecting the stresses experienced at different ages. Academic pressures and bullying were more common before suicide in under 20s, while workplace, housing and financial problems occurred more often in 20-24 year olds
https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/improving-care...
> Factors that should be recorded in an initial assessment of social circumstances include, but are not limited to: (i) family members, significant others or carers who can provide support; (ii) dependents; (iii) housing; (iv) personal or financial proble
...Of course, we can actually be even more clever than this, if we want, and imagine models where we are both right (of course they might not be true).
For example, we might say the value provided by a manager is, on average, $1,000,000. However, this is driven mostly by the top 10 percentile who are worth $10,000,00 a year, whereas the median is actually slightly overpaid. We can justify this distribution by adding uncertainty on the signal. A more thoughtful model of this quick example exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#Job-mar...
So the next question would be: What is more likely? That people are overpaid, obviously, and the government needs to stop it? Or the market is behaving optimally under complex uncertainty, and the government, being no better at interpreting signal than these firms themselves, is likely just to make things more complicated and screwed up by entering? (I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader, but if you want to solve it formally follow the journal articles in the link I shared above).
Sure, but first lend me a few hundred million in capital would ya?
I realize not every business requires that much but I work for an oil supermajor... so, little hard to do what you're suggesting without your help. The "capital" in "capitalism" keeps getting in the way.
If public health officials were running the planet, we'd all be better off.
Perceptible gap widening since 2007:
https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/a-guide...
Meager pay increases outpaced by housing, medical and insurance increases?
That's not how economics works. The prices most stores charge is limited by competition. The only areas you might see an effect are in ones where supply is highly, and likely artificially, constrained.
There would be no much change in competition, as everybody that sells anything of low-medium value will benefit from the increased spending capacity UBI receivers. The increased demand across all competitors will raise prices.
"Supply and demand" is an absolute economic law. Anyone trying to distort that (say, redistributing taxes so all get $1000/month) finds out the hard way. If S&D is not directly addressed in your pet socioeconomic proposal, implementation will fail.
As I said, the actual economics around this are more complicated, but the paraphrase/summary is that if nobody has to work for $1000/mo and everybody gets $1000/mo then $1000/mo will be worth practically nothing, with staples & necessities rising to consume that.
If we exclude rent from consideration, and apply the economics of UBI to just food: the average price of 1 Calorie (of which you need ~2000/day) rises $0.016, or $32/day. For a baseline reference, I regularly make healthy meals at $1/plate. Congrats, you've just increased the cost of food to at least $35 per day - precisely because "everyone now has $1000/month, free".
If we then roughly combine that with housing (as primary costs): I figure a normal baseline poverty minimum of $10/day for living space & utilities plus $3/day food, but then you're adding $32/day available which those necessities will instantly absorb (supply-and-demand) ... ergo you've just increased poverty-level living costs by 3.5x!
Unintended consequence: giving everyone $1000/month increases the cost of a $1 hamburger to $3.50. Now the beggar with $0 has to find/panhandle close to four times as much to afford something barely considered a complete meal. This is not what you had in mind.
'Trading' is a complex little signalling display where the seller shows how hard it is to produce a good (represented in price) and the buyer signals that they have previously contributed enough of some sort of resource to justify the production of the good (represented by having the money to pay the price).
UBI messes with that by allowing everyone to signal they contributed economically even if they did not. This effectively redistributes resources contributed by someone who is economically productive to someone who is not.
The impacts of that are hard to nail down. It might cause some prices to rise and other prices to fall. It will likely cause less resources to be allocated to the future; because economically unproductive folks tend not to invest in the future. However it is much more efficient than the bureaucratic complexity of a modern welfare state and easier to reason about.
This sounds like a dystopian nightmare.
Yes. Having every man, woman and child line up for government potatoes, government bread, and government cheese at some government office is unequivocally a dystopian nightmare.
Have free 'bootcamps'. Want to change careers and be a mechanic or welder? Take an intense 6 month course. That's what happened in WWII, people stuck in crappy depression era towns all of a sudden got retrained in a few months.
You can't push money around; it's tougher than you, and will push back. But you can push a sack or potatoes. If a domestic potato farmer tries to raise prices, a foreign farmer will be all too happy to undercut them to get back to the commodity price.
Instead of taking money from some and giving to others, it has to be invested in actual production, and the output granted to the recipients directly. If there are any middlemen involved at all, they will certainly reduce the efficiency of the entitlement program.
I call this the "loser" class (obviously, I don't personally see them as losers, just in terms of societal expectations). You're supposed to go make money or you're a loser. Hopefully, you're "in charge of people" too, because managers and executives are the only people that contribute to society. Do-ers just cost money. You buy a house and become a homeowner to be a "real American" and not be a loser. You better get a big car and attractive partner too. I think there's a talking heads song about this.
Worse, we think that all failures should be permanent. Once you become a member of this class, especially as you age, it becomes difficult to get out. What have you been doing all these years? Did you not want to sit in a cage for your entire adult life? No degree? Have you ever been fired? Have you had any issues with the law? Well, you're done. No longer a member of the "successful American" class, you're now a loser. A despised and ridiculed lesser class within society.
We'll let a few losers out, and rise to the level of good American, but generally, they stay there. Don't forget that you deserve this, and it's your fault because you're a bad person. I'm not surprised by the suicide rate at all.
That's not necessarily a contradiction, since churches double as social clubs and Christian charity means supporting your neighbour who is in trouble. So if you are active in a church you belong to a circle that is a little less dog-eat-dog. Same thing with immigrant communities.
That would imply that life in the US ~300 years ago, when pretty much everyone belonged to a church, was less dog-eat-dog.
If anything, I would say it was the opposite. People would often shoot someone—someone who is just as likely as themselves to be a "good Christian"—just for being an interloper on their farmland, i.e. for having the opportunity (whether they took it or not) to make off with some of their turnips.
When society says your white privilege means you have no excuse for failure, that is a hard dead end.
If someone is making a claim that someone is clearly doing something wrong, the burden of proof should -- to some extent -- be on them to explain why despite this, they are continuing to be successful without going out of business (if that is in fact the case).
For example, it feels to me that the way FANG companies hire SDEs and place them on teams is inefficient and weird. Why are 24 year old 1337coders considered fungible to work on any project? It doesn't make sense to me. But it's hard for me to convince myself that my feeling is correct, given that there are billions of dollars on the table for anyone who can come up with a better strategy.
You would if you're homeless and can't pay the rent because you need food to survive.
Contrast that with the modern luxurious miracle of the $1 hamburger: with just 9 minutes of minimum-wage commodity labor, one can obtain a fresh complete meal (bread, meat, veggies, cheese) any time all year.
When you’re living the latter, the gravity of the former is hard to grasp.
In my experience, the lower you are paid, the harder you are worked. Cooks, janitors, sanitation workers, mail(wo)men and amazon delivery workers, waiters, teachers, mechanics, construction workers, etc. all work longer hours in more emotionally and/or physically taxing jobs, with worse pay and work environments than any dentist, accountant, lawyer, CEO, sales person, or software engineer that I have ever met.
Wages are inversely correlated with how hard you actually have to work, perversely
You are right.
Why are cooks + janitors paid so little? Because that's their worth to the economy. A ton of people are willing to do that job because it is an "easy skill" with a low barrier of entry.
How do we get unskilled labor on STEM paths? I totally understand unequal opportunity not allowing everybody the same options, but at what point do we say "people aren't created equally, most cooks/janitors wouldn't be great engineers for reasons X, Y, Z"
Are the reasons because they never had the chance, or is it genetic?
The rest of your comment is social-darwinistic horseshit based on nothing but prejudice and ignorance. Good day.
1. education
2. language
3. physical/mental inability
What are some other ones?
Minimum wage jobs are frequently difficult and labor-intensive, but the individual workers are replaceable. The idea that pay rate and effort required are perfectly linked is what I'm contesting.
Teenage homosexuality is another high suicide pattern. Nobody is suggesting treating juvenile sexual orientation.
Since suicide is the result of mental health illness and mental health illnesses are a medical problem would you agree that it’s safe to say it is something that demands medical attention? Medical doctors treating that condition don’t throw the patient into a finance class to hear about managing debt or give the patient money to relieve the financial distress. The subject of financial crisis isn’t treated at all.
Many things can have an effect on persons with illnesses. The goal of a doctor is to treat the illness and lower the pain. They do this through a combination of observation, medication, and counseling.
Ignoring the medicine and medical aspect of suicide to focus purely on financial management, as so many in this thread suggest, will likely result in a sharp increase in suicidal completion.
If advocating against such harm and ignorance costs me all my HN karma I am ok with that. I am not afraid of being stuck in an echo chamber.
You have to treat the entire patient, it's the difference between the nightingale and peplau schools of nursing: the patient is not just their symptoms, they are a complete human who has to be treated to prevent recidivism in to a dangerous mental state.
Without the stresses of financial debt I'm not suicidal, I'm depressed and have anxieties and impulses, but one of those impulses isn't suicidal ideation.
In this instance, the diagnosis is an anxiety disorder, not suicidal ideation, but the addition of a second aspect - the debt - can severely increase the chances of the symptom of suicidal ideation occuring.
Again: people with mental health illnesses should be treated for those illnesses, but we also can't ignore the family practicioner and governments role in ensuring that people in financial hardship have the support that they need.
As they say, a small amount of prevention is worth a lot of cure: I imagine the cost on the government to help with the debt is lower than the cost on the government to deal with the mental health issues exacerbated by the debt.
There is no discussion of eliminating those jobs to save people from mental health illnesses.
Edit: again, sorry if I don't make sense in some areas, I'm trying very hard :)
This is not supported by anyone working within suicide prevention. Indeed, focussing on the medical model is rejected by any organisation working in suicide prevention, and they talk about the full range of bio-psycho-social factors involved in suicide.
It is simply incorrect to say that suicide is caused only by mental illness.
The difference is that the cost savings should make this enough enough to cover EVERYONE, not just the upper-heeled middle class.
It's possible that quite a bit of the middle class may not notice a large difference in take-home pay even with an additional 10 percentage points of federal income tax.
0: https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/what-percent-of-health-insur...
Changing how we pay is different from paying more.
(Not saying you're doing that, you just reminded me of it)
The per-capita healthcare spending of Europe, public and private, is about half what ours is with similar health outcomes. We are an extreme outlier.
https://data.oecd.org/healthres/health-spending.htm
The remainder of the premium stops going into the pockets of insurance middlemen.
This just replaces one middleman (insurance co) for another (government).
I can tell by the downvotes that my point whooshed over everyone's head -- my point was essentially yours. Changing who pays isn't going to change anything. We have to change what gets charged.
There's also no reason that distribution has to work that way. How about an EBT card mailed to every home, which can be used for potatoes, cheese, and bread at any grocery store?
It's also a strawman because not everyone would be lining up for potatoes in this instance, presumably some people can afford to eat in this free suds world. Maybe we'll even have a post-potato society eventually, when everyone decides they hate potatoes after they all get jobs (probably not).
More importantly it shows that deaths from suicide are i: no longer declining and ii: increasing.
This increase appears to happen around 2007 onwards -- this is when we had worldwide financial insecurity, with things like the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
We know financial insecurity is a driver for higher rates of death by suicide, and we have a good idea that the financial problems in 2007 drove some of the increase.
On the linked graph I see the highest suicide rates in the late 90s. They dropped in the early 2000s and then at some point start climbing.
It’s like, one can pick any window from a graph like that to make a point.
Think if someone did that with the stock market. You could prove the market was going down, or up, merely by choosing the window that suits the claim.
Now, the graph only goes through 2015. I am receptive to the notion suicide rates have been climbing and are at all time highs. You may have a vital and valid point.
But the graph I linked doesn’t back it up, and you are including a whole bunch of causation in your comments that makes your argument start to sound ideologically shaped.
This is substantially easier to do in a single-payer style system.
But by that point more people stopped paying completely and got foreclosed, or declared bankruptcy.
My point is that it’s logically inconsistent to say on one hand, the banks are to blame, it was all fraud, it was a fraudulent bubble caused by greedy banks, etc — and on the other hand say, look at all this wealth that was destroyed, because the wealth itself was caused by the bubble.
To clarify, I’m talking about “wealth” that is equity caused by home value appreciation, not caused by paying a lot into the mortgage. Remember that most of the distressed assets were subprime (0-down, no doc, etc) loans — the sales pitch at the time was, put nothing down, and in a year your homes appreciation will make it like you put 20% down. The gains that analyses like the link above count as “wealth” were all smoke an mirrors.
Don't people work hard to become more skilled though?
(And frequently money.)
What does that mean for all of the $12/hr workers now? What about the $16-$17/hr workers? Do they get raises too?
Do we just flat out raise all wages 50% overnight?
Society values X jobs at $8/hr. Bleeding hearts value them at $15/hr. Where's the middle ground?