Why do politicized right-wing economists pretend supply and demand pricing doesn't apply to the labor market? It's supposedly the foundational pillar of right-wing extreme laissez-faire cult economics.

Universal healthcare would go miles to making these tolerable/palatable jobs to a wide variety of workers. Often what is lost in the "americans don't want to do job X" is that "Job X DOESN'T GIVE HEALTH BENEFITS".

I don't accept the verdict that these economic hardships necessarily mean that "capitalism is broken" or "rigged" or that we need to rethink "ownership scenarios" (whatever exactly that means). The economy is a vastly complicated system of countless trades per day, and there are a lot of variables in flux that are making things very crappy for a lot of people. But I fear trying to make things better by blaming it on capitalism being "broken" or a "rigged game" is more likely to make things worse.

But Pandora's box was opened, and destabilization seems to be the only possible outcome at this point. It won't be as rosy as this article makes it out to be.

You can't stop the murders. But you can land me a dream job? Puh-leeze.

    A: "we should give everyone free money!"
    B: "no, that'll make everyone lazy..."
    A: "no, people will work on things they love instead!"
    [everyone gets free money]
    [nobody works, everyone plays video games all day]
    A: "see, this proves that everyone was being exploited!"
    B: [smh]

If employers really wanted more workers, they'd up wages.

If employees really wanted to work they'd settle for less.

If neither is happening then everyone is happy and anyone complaining is a liar in the economic sense.

Paying everyone a living wage (last sentence) is impossible; not because 'living wage' is relative - from a city to another, from a country to another, from a person to another (can you live without an iPhone? why not?) - but because increasing wages to that level, assuming you can determine one, will just increase the prices to fit.

My first job was paying $100 and it was about the average in the capital city of my country. 5 years later I was earning $700, but that was just double the average pay. Another 10 years later, a bit over $1000 was above average, but not by much. The salaries grew 10 times, but the prices adjusted about the same rate, at least the price of food, rent and houses: if you pay 10x more to workers, the house will cost 10 times more. If you increase the salaries of many people, you will not increase their standard of living, just create inflation because they will not produce more, it's just their cost is higher and the money value is reduced.

This is the real story of a country with 20 million people. If you increase the wages of the lowest paid, you need to increase to everyone to keep some proportions, otherwise you will pay restaurant cleaners more than teachers or doctors and that is dangerous, ~ 20% of the younger doctors in my country emigrated because at some point their salary after 20 years of tough school was sometimes lower than a driver's salary. If you increase the salary of everyone, that is very soon making all prices to increase at the same rate, changing practically nothing.

But in addition, unemployed people have been getting unprecedented amounts of weekly Unemployment Insurance payments. In normal times, you can only get these for a few months while proving that you are actively looking for work. During the pandemic, these have been extended and greatly increased, and the government has mostly stopped checking whether people were really looking for work. The normal rules are going to go back into effect soon, though.

What can help is government regulation that raises the wages at ALL restaurants. Then consumers don’t have a choice. I grumble more about paying an extra 4% on top but what am I going to do, never go out again?

However there is a problem. The 'standard job' is now gardening leave with a wage, which any other job has to compete with. And what that leads to is a 'dead zone gap' in the wage structure between the 'standard job' and the next reasonable job (say working 9-5 Mon-Fri with full benefits, close to home). A private employer has to pay a much higher wage than the payment for the 'standard job' to get people to work for their 'reasonable job'.

(You get the same between unemployment benefit and the 'minimum wage' in many countries).

However we could have everybody earning the living wage working for a publicly provided 'reasonable job' at a living wage, which would mean the that the private employer would only have to pay a penny more per hour to get the labour they need.

The most efficient construction is when the 'standard job' and the 'reasonable job' are the same. That eliminates the 'dead zone wage gap', and allows people to smoothly move between public and private jobs, increasing the efficiency of the use of labour - all without exploitation.

And those business that can't deliver a profit with this system? Well they get to close to make room for better businesses that can.

Business is there to serve people, not the other way around.

Pretty expensive for a little town in the middle of nowhere...

No one is “too lazy” the wages don’t pay enough to support even a single adult in most places!

Most impoverished adults would have a better chance of climbing out of poverty if they DID NOT work at low or minimum wage jobs at all and instead foraged for nuts and berries.

Beyond that, there's too much noise in this article about "capitalism" and "BIPOC" and in reality what's happening is a job market going back to normal, where people actually have options, rather than the extended "recovery" of the great recession where people had none.

But you can't get the $X that you'd get if you didn't work at all, and add on $Z dollars working a job of some kind.

The perverse incentives of these programs around their phaseouts are and have long been a reality of low-income communities.

But then a pandemic comes along and takes away job A, meaning that there's not extra friction to leaving job A. You've already left! All these people have gone to job B (or location B, or family arrangement B, ...) which was better all along, it's just that the change had too much additional overhead in normal times.

Now you have places which depended on that friction wondering where everybody went.

They have fast food and other restaurants here, but there’s a shortage of good bagels. They seem crowded at the times one would expect. I think things come down to what people expect and how they set things up.

Basically, you have an administration 'silently' waging war of certain types of business or jobs without needing to pass controversial legislation for things like a minimum wage increase or universal income. If it feel subversive, it is. But the cost of controversy these days causes people to find alternative options.

It is now possible to make 130% to 200% your pre-covid salary/wage by being on unemployment. [0] It is generally human nature to do as little as possible to survive. In this case you don't have to do anything to survive. Why would you go look for a job.

This will put large swaths of businesses who could stay afloat pre-covid and were forced to close due to covid to not be able to open their doors again.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/09/it-pays-to-stay-unemployed-t...

Stores and restaurants are thinly staffed around here. Even the ones with signs out saying they’ll pay a premium.

certainly applies to tech

For 2, consider this: https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/special-reports/l...

New entries in Q4 2020 down 78% from the year before, and that's on top of a general downward trend in net immigration to the US that's been happening for a decade. Is this temporary because of Covid? Probably. But immigration at the low end of the wage scale is a factor that drives down the wages. Anyone who has ever lived in an apartment complex in Santa Ana and seen neighbors with 14 people packed into a 3 bedroom apartment understands why. Native born Americans simply aren't willing to live like that. The expectation for what constitutes a baseline reasonable lifestyle isn't the same.

For 1, these comments about "experimenting with UBI" or freeloaders living off the government seem to miss the point that augmented benefits are a temporary pandemic relief measure. Of course the low end of the labor market is abnormally depressed right now. That is on purpose as part of a calculated, intentional public health response making it easier for people to decide not to work. Lo and behold, many are now actually making that decision.

For some reason, there seems to be this widespread notion that this is a permanent change, but it isn't. You're still not technically allowed to just quit or refuse to work because you want unemployment, but go ahead and look at the actual description of what constitutes a Covid-related reason to apply for relief: https://wdr.doleta.gov/directives/attach/UIPL/UIPL_16-20.pdf

If your place of employment was closed, if your kid's school was closed, if you were ever diagnosed, had symptoms, were quarantined, or anyone in your family was, your head of household died, you need to care for some who was diagnosed. None of those are usually reasons you're allowed to claim unemployment benefits. Now they are.

How long will this go on? Who knows, but definitely not forever. This is also the answer to why businesses don't just offer more. Prices are subject to a ratchet effect. Offer more now to overcome the inertia of people choosing to stay unemployed during an abnormally favorable time to be unemployed and you're very likely to have to permanently pay higher wages even when the enhanced benefits are gone. Businesses are getting relief, too, and are willing to gamble that they can wait long enough for wages to come back down.

I think your new marginal rate only applies to anything over the limit that bumped you into a new tax bracket, so I don’t think this is right. A raise always gets you more money.

The exception being if it bumps you out of the government assisted healthcare bracket. Then, a raise could indeed be a loss.

Edit: I thought you were talking about income tax, but you might have been talking about business subsidies, which I know nothing about.

They might either go out of business or automate those roles if they can't afford to pay blue collar workers a living wage. I'm not a socialist, but some business do rip off low income workers. So they might as well cease to exist if they can't find workers to rip off, instead of claiming that people are lazy.

Also, I'm not talking about the people who need support, I'm talking about the people taking advantage and staying on unemployment because they don't want to work.

I worked a shitty job to get through college, it's a stepping stone.

These jobs aren't meant to live on. They should be used as part time jobs for people transitioning in their careers, like students.

When you give handouts to people who don't want to work you are not doing them any favors. They become reliant and trapped in that loop.

That's not to say there shouldn't be a safety net with strict qualifications. You're doing no service to the people who need it by allowing those who don't.

We should be spending money creating new, better paying jobs, not new social programs.

I wonder how much those issues would fade from their consciousness if they weren't constantly fed the lie that their precarious economic status is the fault of immigrants, the cost of social welfare programs, the "gay agenda", the "great replacement" theory, and so forth.

We already do that. Many of my coworkers at Target are on medicaid and SNAP and get child care assistance and they will be, perpetually (well not so much the child care part).

We just also make them work until they're 70+ anyway.

Here's an idea: next time there's an oil spill, lets take the money for cleanup out of the executives' bank accounts (and investments, and properties) before we dig into the public coffers. Then we can talk about freeloaders at the bottom.

This claim in particular was examined in studies on minimum wage increases, and found that increases in the minimum wage had no impact on the adoption of automation[1].

[1] https://research.upjohn.org/up_workingpapers/260/

https://www.expatistan.com/price/big-mac/stockholm/USD

She actually addressees this in the very last paragraph:

> if a business can’t pay a living wage, should it be a business?

If the government mandated that when you raise your prices, everyone else had to too, then suddenly increasing wages won't put you out of business! Same story if the government mandated that you raise your wages (in this particular hypothetical).

You're right that both sides of the equation need to be examined, but it's actually a bunch of equations with a bunch of sides.

This is why higher minimum wages are so important. They force all businesses (not just the ethical ones) to increase prices to point that workers receive a living wage.

Brings to mind the growing prevalance of self serve kiosk for placing an order that so many fast food restaurants have now. Removing the need for the cashier all together. That and self checkout at a lot of big chain retail stores. I don't think the business concern is necessarily with making a profit, but making 1% more profit than not.

What about profit sharing?

Hire an employee who agrees to get 1K currency units if company (store, resto etc) made 100K CUs.

But 500 if company made 50K CUs and 50K CUs if store made 5000K CUs.

There's always a max cap, but never a min cap. When someone talks about min caps we all get antsy.

There are maybe ten lunch places within walking distance of my (suburban) office.

The variety is nice, certainly. I like having a bunch of options. I don't think it would destroy society if I only had half the choices, though.

And the people you’re hiring won’t have to live off the dollar menu at fast food restaurants anymore.

Businesses need to raise prices. Some do and less people buy from them. Some can't make ends meet and close. Now the number of businesses is less. So, the number of open jobs is less. Potential employees now have a lower 'supply' of jobs. The wage for those jobs then falls. Somewhere in there, a new equilibrium is reached and everyone is unhappy for a while.

I'm not trying to discount the emotional pain that comes with this process. Putting your life into something that just blows up is hard. Especially when you had nothing to do with it. I feel for those owners, the situation is the opposite of fun.

But this is how capitalism works. The US is not a planned economy like China. Capitalism is core to the system (bastardized as it is). Markets change and shops close up. It sucks, but this is the process as I understand it. If I'm understanding it wrong, I would very much like to know because then I really am missing something big, and that's not good.

That’s not necessarily bad for workers. It might mean holding more than one job, which is common in the food business.

"The tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) is a hypothesis in the crisis theory of political economy, according to which the rate of profit—the ratio of the profit to the amount of invested capital—decreases over time. This hypothesis gained additional prominence from its discussion by Karl Marx in Chapter 13 of Capital, Volume III, but economists as diverse as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo and Stanley Jevons referred explicitly to the TRPF as an empirical phenomenon that demanded further theoretical explanation, although they differed on the reasons why the TRPF should necessarily occur."

Consider that if the rate of profit tends to fall, and shareholders require greater profits each quarter, how that affects "inputs" such as labor?

I agree with this sentiment. Mostly. But I can't say it freely, or with impunity - I'm on the lucky end of the spectrum partly by my own hard work, partly blind luck to be born in a middle class family, partly because my country has racial equality laws that give me the opportunity. I can negotiate my own terms for work and when I'm out of work I can freelance or build a product. But I can't swallow looking at workers as a line on an income statement. Something about it feels uncomfortable, uneasy. Like casually throwing talent and skills into the ocean when theres still so much work to do.

Sure, it's great for some. Most people in this forum are part of the economic and cognitive elite. I would expect words like automation to be thrown around freely because "optimization" and "free-market" are fantastic myths to belive in. They might even be self-fulfilling prophecies. They just never come up to help people get a leg up. Those families that could be paying taxes are going on welfare, which means we get taxed more but do we have a right to complain and try to dodge out of paying taxes to support the people we've put out of work for the sake of automation and progress? Would we be happy to automate to our hearts content if you had to pay more taxes?

Cities like Seattle raised their minimum wage, there was a lot of worry that everyone would go broke and there would be no food to eat. As it turned out, a few people shut down and someone else almost immediately opens a similar business in that place.

Not everyone runs a business that is properly priced, or properly managed to make a profit, but lots of people can do it, and they tend to fill the void that is left by businesses that can't offer a product that people feel is worth paying enough to support less than poverty wage.

Even for companies that pay really well, some don't make it.

The real drag on business and progress

I live in Missoula. I am a regular customer of Black Cat Bakery and I can see them struggling. In fact most restaurants and breweries I frequent face the same issue, a few employees desperately trying to keep an inundated ship afloat. I will tell you this article largely ignores what everyone who lives here understands is the biggest problem faced by laborers in Missoula at the moment. This city is amid a dire housing shortage, expedited by lack of new construction and a migration of buyers from more lucrative economies. The median home price increased by 57% in the last 10 years, 8.6% in the last year alone to $315k. In the meantime the median family income remains only $46k. https://missoulian.com/news/local/missoula-housing-prices-se...

It is truly a seller's dream market and as such the availability of rentals has evaporated. You'd be lucky to find a 1 bedroom right now.

My wife and I bought a home here a little over a year ago and were fortunate to find the nut who, "didn't need a realtor, what with craigslist." Before then we had been outbid 5 times previously, during which we offered up to 30k above the asking price. Frankly, we wouldn't live here if we didn't get lucky. Our experiences weren't unique at the time and it has only gotten worse. I regularly hear of houses selling for 50K over listing price to people buying sight-unseen.

Frankly I don't care what the owners of Dales or Black Cat Bakery think about Covid or whether they voted for Trump. I really, sincerely, don't care. I only hope for the best for their business and their employees. I know what it's like to struggle in Missoula, I did for years and I still would be if not for dumb luck and a bit of privilege. The problems people face today are starting to pale in comparison to my own, and a solution is becoming truly urgent. I can only hope people will come to understand if we care about solving these problems, then we have to put down the tribalism and intolerance for those with different views and focus on the matter at hand.

To quote Vince Staples, "Ain't no money in havin' hate in your heart."

McDonald’s model is pretty different from standard franchises.

Most are franchise owned and operated, but corporate owns the real-estate the store is sitting on.

If we're talking about raising the minimum wage arbitrarily high, then this is true.

But this argument also gets made a lot when we're talking about a specific proposal (such as $15). For a specific proposal this argument is not always true.

It was raised a ton in Seattle when Seattle was considering a $15 minimum wage. Endlessly. The main argument was that it would devastate employment for the jobs it was supposed to improve.

Then the minimum wage increase passed and it didn't do that. Employment in those jobs actually went up slightly (probably not a casual increase, probably more coincidental). But it certainly didn't devastate the employment in minimum wage jobs.

So, the argument is one that feels compelling since it is true in the extremes. But it needs to be evaluated with the facts of each proposal.

The only articles I've ever found that say that come from the Heritage Foundation or the American Enterprise Institute, and neither of those is anywhere near an unbiased source.

All the research (excluding the pieces from those two think tanks) suggests that the job markets remain stable through minimum wage increases, and in some cases the labor markets actually gain jobs -- possibly because more money in the hands of poorer people is going to go right back out into the community, as a matter of need.

Look at empirical studies of past minimum wage increases and you don't often see unemployment increase. The employment rate is often stable through a minimum wage increase.

I've only seen costs for stuff go up with inflation, and most people don't have wages that track inflation. The owners benefit from the cheaper costs, but nobody else does

"1. a young person especially between infancy and puberty

2. a person not yet of the age of majority..."

It depends on the definition of child you are using, I always thought the first to be correct.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/child

Split shifts is a horror story. I've seen my younger sister working at a restaurant, the main hours are 12am-2pm then 7pm-11pm.

What are you supposed to do during the massive break in the middle? It's royally screwing up your day.

To make things worse, a trip in the tube and back will cost you £3 to £5, a sizable chunk of your first hour (£8/hour pretax).

As if the night hours and pay were not terrible enough, the hours are set daily on a short notice. You constantly must adjust your schedule and if there's less hours to do you simply don't get paid.

In your rush to defend the actions of asshole bosses, you miss an important part: people who are trying to make a living with part time jobs are going to get another part time job. Not only are those people NOT more flexible than full time employees, but half the time they are less available than full time workers because they are stuck on a treadmill where not being at both jobs equals a loss in hours for the next week. There are tons of full time hourly employees who will JUMP at overtime.

A nice vacation, nicer larger home, new car etc. UBI would just give people the cushion to take a risk and know if I fail I don't end up homeless. Or the piece of mind to relax and know they can eat a healthy meal and pay rent no need to work 2 or 3 jobs. Maybe the reinvest in their education.

If you are comfortable with fluctuating minimum wage to control unemployment, you could do the same thing with UBI.

Personally, I don't think that we should to threaten our citizens with homelessness and hunger to get them to be contributing members of society.

I would personally institute UBI gradually, pairing UBI increases with reductions in the minimum wage during economic downturns to stimulate the economy.

I don't really know how one can solve for these kinds of issues online, even if we could CV together what clothes would look like on people (which is at least theoretically solvable with current technology).

And fwiw, clothes are like one of the things that everyone needs to buy, so online only is almost certainly not going to happen in this space.

Tomorrow? Definitely not going for anything’s. In 60 years? I can’t tell. It would all depend on if the risks work out or not.

This framing passes the buck for inflation from the government onto businesses that have no control over it whatsoever.

When the money you have buys less and less, the wages suddenly become less and less "fair" without the employer doing anything differently. Who's to say that their business has increased enough to support the higher wage?

This is, IMO, why basic income is critical because it puts the cost of dealing with inflation directly back on the government itself, rather than the small businesses that are constantly framed as paying "unfair" wages.

If the taxes to support it come from the people at the top who've reaped disproportionate benefits...GREAT. But the small businesses at the bottom struggling to keep their doors open are not the enemy here but they will absolutely be the ones that suffer the most from wage-based legislation that they can't afford.

And let's not forget that the moment such legislation passes, it just encourages more automation or exporting of jobs to other countries where a fraction of the original wage is somehow "fair".

This limit needs be adjusted, that’s all.

Neither of those even support the argument that a change from equal minimum wage would have the effect of moving jobs from adults to kids.

The first would be a good argument for a smaller displacement effect from allowing teens to work with equal minimum wage to adults conpared to not allowing them to work at all than would occur at equal effectiveness, the second semana yo be a sortear of an argument about the magnitude of effect but without a definition of what “that many” meand in context is only a sketch.

> It's all just motivated reasoning to argue against a significant minimum wage.

it's not an argument against ‘a significant minimim wage’ at all.

There's far fewer 15-18 year olds than there are 18-65 year olds. There's also fewer again that can work during school hours.

The idea that teenagers are being paid too much or have an advantage in Australians case and that therefore this should prevent changes to minimum wage laws is just a distraction. It keeps getting brought up by people desperate to push a position but who don't want to argue about the far bigger issue of adults trying to survive on minimum wage. Teenagers are an edge case in this discussion and they really shouldn't be the focus.

Isn't the point that it wouldn't fail under a raised minimum wage? It would only fail under an uncoordinated raised wage.

As a cash business I often wonder how much laundering goes on. Not just hard core drug money, but any time cash is handled I suspect there's some rounding down going on.

What are you talking about? Nearly 1 in 4 households experienced food insecurity during the pandemic.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/27/912486921/food-insecurity-in-...

I don't think millions of people are thinking "well, I could make lots of money in software ... but management pays much better if I get one of those jobs ... so I better go into [unrelated, lower paying field]".

What I'm trying to say is that software is very attractive compared to other jobs, but still we don't see everyone rushing into it. I believe that's because money isn't the factor.

that is expected, if the salary matched the value creation of an IC. There's a limit to how much work one can produce.

The reason management has a higher progression is because they do different work, and thus the ceiling is different. But a ceiling does exist.

The only "work" that has no ceiling for compensation is equity ownership.

Minimum wage absolutely prices some people out of the job market.

Raising the minimum wage is unlikely to affect employment much because of just how profitable companies are today

Mind you I think a better tslternative to a specific minimum wage is to have a guaranteed government job at a specific wage. That sets a bar that all labourers have an option, while some lower paying jobs can still exist if they're otherwise competitive in other experiences

Places that hire people at minimum wage mostly wouldn't have that problem for those positions

If there is an avenue for the market to reach equilibrium (eg, by hiring children cheaply) then the market is going to try and take it. It will just create a class of jobs that adults can't get employed in because they cost too much to hire.

It isn't a question of what the kids would like, it is a question of what choices consumers and employers will offer them. If wages were set solely by employee's incentives then they'd all be paid much more than current market wages.

I would say yes

I'm sure those farms unwilling to pay a fair wage will start investing in those expensive machines' R&D. Then do it for all other crops.

I think what I was suggesting was that perhaps restaurants as an industry have systematically under-estimated consumers' willingness to pay.

You see this in software pricing discussions a lot, actually: small shops that leave a lot of money on the table by not charging enough. Is it really so crazy to imagine that restaurants might be doing the same thing?

> That must mean a majority of the customers are very price sensitive.

It's this "must" that is always asserted but... I think might not be as true as we assume?

I am not a restaurant owner, so what do I know.

Would you say that a rock suffers "misfortune" if it topples off a cliff into the sea? Is it "difficult" for a glacier to maintain its integrity in the face of global warming? Is my car unfortunate to have been scratched in a parking lot? (OK, I do believe that last one, but I'm anthropomorphising my car to talk about my own human misfortune)

A socialist US would cease exploiting other countries (including China) and instead pursue mutually beneficial trade (much like China does). This would likely include some amount of reparations and re-building of local industry, easily funded with the vast amount of value no longer stolen from all workers.

They take on all the same risk as owners do

Jobs at more stable places are available and people will take them. The businesses need to fail or be sold.

Considering how profitable alcohol is, I wonder if that regulation isn't a major factor in hiring under 21s.

What you're saying only works if you're Driscoll's and tell farmers to pay workers more or enough consumers demand it, but I just don't see much demand for this. The most we've seen is Fairtrade chocolate, coffee, etc., but there's only limited demand for it.

Dropping out is possible, and usually 18/19 y/o don't have high school

Non-adult teens (“Teen” spans the border) are indeed children, and their labor – while in some circumstances, quantities, etc. – permitted, is regulated as part of the broader regulation of child labor (which is not a total ban, even for very young children, and is graduated by age.)

Whether it ought to be within the scope of acceptable child labor or not is a separate discussion, but it is child labor.

Do you mean "in SF, where the cost of living is extremely high", or are you suggesting that you can't have a comfortable life on $180k/year?

The solution, obviously, is to change the law so that any employee, regardless of hours, must get benefits. The other solution, in the US, is to get rid of the antiquated employer-provided private health insurance market and just give everyone health care, the way every other wealthy (and not-so-wealthy) country does.

Businesses usually don't need 40 hours per person per week, especially for things like restaurants. They also do not want to pay for health coverage. So they offer part time jobs with 20 random hours per week.

To survive, you would need to cobble together two of those jobs and hope that you don't get sick. Or you can hold out/leave immediately as soon as full time work is available.

To support terrible profit margins (relative to the risk), I also would look at the financial status of restaurant owners/operators, who by and large, aren't in the higher end of the income scale. Almost no one tells their kid to grow up and aspire to be a cook or open their own restaurant (unless they already have a a trust fund).

Sorry, I was just being snarky. I meant that there's so market is so "deep", that it surely represents the true prices.

>But I mean, if this were the case, a common failure mode for restaurants would be full tables right up until bust, right? Low prices due to unprofitable margins would mean lots of demand. Losing money on every head, but lots of heads.

They're not unprofitable margins, they're low margins. Restaurants have a high fixed cost, but low marginal cost. Every day they have to have some amount of staff and food, but once they have sold enough for the day to cover those costs, each extra doesn't cost them much at all due to the relatively low price of food and water and electricity and gas (compared to the labor).

I'm not sure on the statistics of the exact failure mode, but I do know that your run of the mill restaurant can't charge people $30 per entree and get away with it. There is a cap on how much people are willing to pay most places, with the exception being a select few that cater to the rich, have a certain ambiance, reputation, quality of food, etc.

>But, IME, in my area, restaurants that fail in the first year or two do not fail in that modality. They usually have some of the lowest prices, but empty seats none-the-less. Because the food isn't good, or the menu is weird, or they don't do marketing right, or the location is wrong, or a million other things. But in my area at least I basically never see restaurants will full tables fail.

You're right that there are many reasons for them failing, but many can't work on things like marketing location, or quality food, because they can't charge enough money for those expenses in the first place. Celebrity chefs can come out swinging with high priced menus, but not the vast majority who might be doing it because it has low start up costs and they don't need credentials.

Where I live, entrees cost $15 minimum, and with tip, you can budget at least $20 per meal per person. Even with that, I doubt the cooks are making anywhere near a desirable living, and I doubt the restaurant owners are making a decent living, especially if they're paying rent.

I do see rent control as directly comparable. Government observes a matrix of incomes and prices determined by self-interest in a market economy. Government determines some are not politically acceptable and modifies them. Now the military pays better than before, NYC rent is cheaper, and low-wage workers are more able to survive. Now people build businesses around contracting for the military, living in NYC, and hiring low-wage workers. If government later changes the payoffs to these activities, it's not the businesses' fault for relying on the prices the government set. Government set those prices to enable those businesses.

A lot of people who open businesses aren't doing so to open a business. And most of them don't even know it. A lot of them are trying to open a clubhouse they charge people to be at.

You see it often in the board game/comic/hobby sector. Someone gets it in their head that they could open a shop and it will be great and blah blah blah. But yeah, it goes south because what they really wanted was to play games for a living.

They want to be a business owner, but they don't want to run a business. If that makes sense.

No. News sources are focusing on business instead of labor's issues, because news statistically favors business interests, not labor's.

If your hypothetical business owner is unable to start a business without paying a reasonable wage, then that business should not exist. And your hypothetical business owner should invest in Apple, Facebook, or otherwise.

If this causes less business entrepreneurship, then so be it. A business that cannot pay employees is not a business that adds value to society, and nothing of value is lost. This is a fundamental tenet of capitalism, the same way we say that businesses that cannot sell their product also deserve to fail.

I think it's more than slightly higher. Cherries and peaches are both stone fruit. They're grown in similar regions, and the trees are so closely related you see hybrids commonly marketed. Cherries are regularly 2x-3x the price by weight because the smaller fruit means they're more labor intensive. Raspberries are also noticeably more expensive than strawberries, and I assume it's because they're harder to pick.

These are labor-intensive produce, so labor drives the price. Staples like wheat aren't, so an extra $5 per hour for someone driving a tractor really would be "slightly higher prices."

What about menstruation? That's pretty universal to women (not entirely especially with non-cisgendered), not really a choice (at least, not without encroaching on the same protections you'd want with pregnancy), and all those who do menstruate enter and leave it (both monthly, and at menopause)...what's your objection to discriminating against menstruating women?

that just makes the whole system inefficient - the rich pay a bunch of taxes, then try to obtain all of those benefits for having paid those taxes to try even it back out.

So why not just tax less, and let them spend the money directly?

For example, I think it's perfectly normalized to say "that Detroit Lions team suffered a crushing defeat", even though the Detroit Lions are a profit-making enterprise.

It's either pay that or get DSL in many places in the US.

And if you include health insurance--which in other countries is provided for and paid for with taxes--then it goes up. A lot.

The vast majority of businesses are small businesses, if they go broke the owner is just as broke as the employees.

Seems like we're talking about different things. I was talking about the net gain/loss from getting a job, whereas you're talking about your overall living situation.

See my reply to jolux's comment. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26996114

And the density of payday loan ads, on some stations but not others, blew my mind. I don't think I ever heard one on the classic-rock station (their stock in trade was testosterone ads, apparently), but they were at saturation density on the R&B station.

Payday loan places have always been scum, but that really opened my eyes to the deliberate exploitation aspect. This is targeted.

It's good to hear that there's financial training for the Navy. I wonder if there's anything similar out in civilian life that we could support?

For example, our digital infrastructure could pay people per second and it could instantaneously show up in a bank account; if people were never waiting for these Delta function payments, maybe they would be less prone to being exploited by systems that seek to smooth out these Delta functions.

I think making public colleges free (similar to germany) would be a massive benefit to our economy. But making all education free doesn't do anything to help remove the need for the minimum wage.

If you have an alternative to the minimum wage that isn't UBI, I would love to hear it.

* Basic groceries

* Healthcare

* Housing

I don't think these things are easy to achieve but they seem like obvious goals to societal progress. If not, what are we even progressing towards?

> Also, there are not enough executives to take from them to give to the poor. You need 100 or 1000 times more for that, so the executives theme is a straw man.

I said if a company wants to fill a role, that they should pull from executive pay. The average CEO gets 70-1 the pay of the average employee. There is absolutely a surplus of capital to pull from to increase worker pay (thus filling the role).

https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/ceo-pay

>Rent- get a roommate or rent a room instead of a one bedroom flat. Rent is reduced from $1400.

While that is an option, it is not reasonable to make that assertion for the millions of people struggling without adequate housing. How can you tell people, with a straight face, that have been sexually assaulted, robbed, or battered by previous roommates that they should continue to put themselves at risk because they can't afford the market rate for a 1br apartment? Many people that are housing insecure face discrimination in their searches as well. Landlords have countless incentives and ways to refuse renting to people who they perceive as poor. Credit checks, wage statements, large cash deposits. Then there's everything they can learn during a showing. How do they dress, are they wearing Wal-Mart clothes or Patagonia? Did they bring their same sex partner? Are they BIPOC? Do they have a nice car or no car? Is everything they own in their car? I think that I've said enough to make this point but I can continue if you want.

>Use a prepaid phone plan to reduce from $100.

Phones are still several hundred dollars, and are effectively disposable items. In conversations about poor people we cannot assume they can afford to put up several hundred dollars for a used phone. $100 might be on the high end, but I am thinking more about the amortized all-in costs of phones. Stuff like cases, chargers, screen protectors, that often get sold to people at stores under high pressure sales tactics. We also need to consider access. If someone just broke their phone and need a new one ASAP or they'll lose their job they are at the mercy of what's available to them at that moment. They may not be able to shop around or know how to do a price comparison between providers. They may get coerced into signing expensive multi year contracts by dishonest sales reps of which the total cost is not apparent for weeks.

>Use a slower speed or share internet to reduce from $100.

That's not always an option. For years, the cheapest non-dsl, option available to me was cable internet, for over $100/mo without a contact. For people with housing insecurity signing multi year contracts is scary because they have no reason to believe they will live in the same place for that long.

>Motorcycle or cheaper car to reduce from $530.

Motorcycles are not a rational option for virtually everyone. They're unsafe, and at greater risk of being stolen in the areas poor people are congregated. I'm not saying the car payment is $400, but ones either paying more upfront for a reliable vehicle or on the back end in repairs. If one gets burned enough by scam repair shops and used car sales people they'll inevitably look to cars with manufacturer warranties. Poor areas have more sketchy repair shops and high pressure used car sales lots that straddle people with high interest car payments, even if they qualify for great rates.

>These aren’t impossible problems and are things that are really common to deal with. I worked with people in Manhattan who slept three to a bed. That obviously sucks but assuming that every single person should have a one bedroom flat with their own car and luxury internet and phone is not as good an assumption that people will adjust their spending.

I think you're making wide assumptions that are not reflective of the reality poor people face. It is callous to assume that poor people have the same ability and education to know how to navigate things like loans, auto repair, comparison shopping, house hunting, etc while they're possibly homeless and probably working in excess of 40 hour weeks barely scraping by. This is my lived experience, I've seen too many families that do everything right get absolutely crushed into homelessness because the company the worked for blew up, they got scammed, or were disabled by a workplace accident. These conversations are overly reductive when we cannot focus on the specific contexts under which people fall out of 'normal' society into homelessness or near homelessness. Without this context we cannot have reasoned discussions about the factors that lead to homelessness and prevent people from escaping.

There's no major* rental market in the US where this is the case.

* - There could be some oil boom in a 300 person town I don't know about I guess.

WTH where do you live?

> Food costs are up 40%.

Dear god, what do you eat?

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/

Unless you’ve done an FSA class and you can explain me your thinking more, it’s worth appreciating there are a ton of levers that impact Corp finance. Same way you have performance trade offs for one algo vs the other.

I think spending $340/year on a decent phone is pretty dignified. I think it’s comical to assume that dignity requires $1200/year in phone service.

I’ve lived in poverty, I’ve worked and fought against extreme poverty and I’m not sure your basis of reality. Poor people live in group settings. I’m not sure what advice you would give to help them as me saying “get a roommate” and you saying “$37k is not livable” have very different levels of usefulness.

I used a lot of help when poor (and still do now) and the most frustrating part was people who expressed their sympathy but did nothing to help me. I didn’t want empathy, I wanted food and safety. Of course I’d rather have both empathy and food, but if I have to choose one, you know what I and most will choose.

Spain is worst case, but also one of the EU founding countries. Even sweden has 20%+ of youth unemployment.

It is not the land of opportunity!

I think you have a widely unorthodox defination of "force" as no one is forced to take any job at any wage.

Force in the equation would come from the government using the threat of government violence to force a wage on a business owner.

A person that voluntary accepts a job for X wage is not "forced" to do so.

What is the change of the model in case of the restaurant? I can see only one, automate the jobs away to reduce the costs, namely replace humans with robots.

But, if we consider these crappy jobs, what about people that are not qualified/able to do any more advanced jobs? People have vastly different cognitive abilities, it is not like we can teach everyone to code. It will not work.

i'm not convinced that this is true, except with very basic necessities like food and water, and even then, those require a lot of energy to produce, and those aren't free yet since science hasn't discovered cheap or free energy yet.

Vietnam made a similar choice in a similar position. In both countries working conditions and labour laws have been steadily improving. This change is only possible if the workers as a class are in control of the state.

Signing a longer lease demonstrates that the new lease isn't like the old.

Otherwise let's compare apples and oranges in the economy too.

The reasons are debatable, but I'd argue that it's mostly because the mechanisms they're using end up inflating the stock market instead of consumer goods.

There are economists terrified of any inflation, but it's an attitude that's more popular with some ideologues than with mainstream economists. You hear a lot about them on TV and the Internet, but not nearly as much in real economics talks. Those ideologues punch above their weight in Congress, but not at the Fed.

The Fed governors aim for a small, controlled level of inflation. Mostly that's to prevent people from just sitting on their money: money stuffed into a mattress doesn't grow the economy. Money in bank accounts isn't much better, since they can be withdrawn at any time. So a little inflation nudges people to either spend their money or invest it. Such is the theory.

My hunch is one big cause is the mismatch of time scales between tenure (employment) and policy outcomes. Meaning that most policy and decision makers have moved on to new roles and jobs before the consequences of their decisions become clear. So very little learning can happen.

CCP does baiting with predatory loans to lock countries in with easy money up front.

You sound like you’re biased

They found that the higher the income level, the better percentage returns the employee had on the plan. The lower, the worse performance.

The 401k plan offered several investment options.

Clearly, the higher income people were making better investment decisions. The conclusion was the company was going to offer seminars on basic investing, though who knows how that turned out.

There's a lot more to personal finance than balancing a checkbook, though many can't do that, either.

E.g.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/203233/1/1667730924....

...unless you're not paying for those because you literally don't have any money.

So yeah, food is a sunk cost, sure. But that sinking will kill you without a job.

You can't just say "they need those to live" as if that absolves you of explaining how to pay for the things they need to live.

If computer processing power becomes cheaper an cheaper, but real estate housing value double in a decade, we have 2% inflation?

Supply side economics works if you have a nation that is doing so many productive investments that it has trouble getting enough financing for everything. By cutting taxes and lowering interest rates you are making it easier for businesses to acquire enough capital to do even more investments.

The US economy is the exact opposite. It's difficult for the investment rate to catch up with the savings rate. Things like home construction are being delayed. Public infrastructure suffers from cost overruns, etc.

>It's not just that trickle-down doesn't work; it's that it doesn't seem to trickle at all.

For obvious reasons. Money doesn't trickle because consumer/worker behavior tends to lag behind business behavior. When a company has a good year, it can wait until the labor market tightens before it has to increase wages. If companies invent automation then they have a first mover advantage where they save a lot of money in the first 5 years and then once competitors join the market the margins are driven down. That delay is costing consumers money and it's costing workers money because the company doesn't employ anyone with it. Business oriented politics also tends to encourage inefficient (from a macroscopic perspective) corporations who lobby for bills that benefit them at the expense of everyone else.

>Part of it is that the government has done a weak form of the right thing, pumping money directly to consumers.

It's good enough. EU is still doing poorly.

But most apartments don't get rented through apartments.com, and the ones that don't are skewed towards the lower end of the market.

The 4-flat where the owner is renting out the other 3 places and living in one of them doesn't show up on apartments.com. I don't know where you find good comprehensive data, you tell me. But if you are looking at bad data because you can't find good data, you are the drunk looking for his keys underneath the street light not because he lost his keys there but because the light is good.

I doubt anyone has studied that rather specific question empirically, though, and even if they had it's not an easy question to study. So theory and common sense is our best bet when it comes to forming expectations here.

I'm sure there are empirical studies about how demand shifts from A to B for other examples of substitute goods, though. Maybe start there?

Finding shelter is exponential Harder now than any time in my memory.

We have a homelessness problem that it unpresidented. I would bet more people are now than anytime in history. (Pioneers could camp when they were tired. Cavemen weren't ticketed for sleeping under a ledge.)

Hell--30 years ago certain states were still offering homesteads. There's not an inch of land in the USA that live for free. (BLM land requires you to move every two weeks. Only some BLM land us open to camping.)

Try taking a nap in your closest park, or open field. You will get poked by a angry cop. You will understand loitering/trespass laws innately.

People, especially in service jobs, are living on top of each other. Why was the Corona virus so prevelant in the hispanic communities?

As to your previous statement, "We all can't be Coders." I have personally know three older Programmers. Two died because they aged out of the industry, and became homeless. The other is currently being harassed in Richardson Bay by Sausalito cops, and the coast guard, over a dispute of the seaworthiness of his sailboat.

One was Jim Fox. A huge contributor to Word Star. He ended up in San Rafael wearing a fuzzy Penguin outfit begging. He died a few years ago.

You might be one of those Service applicants in a decade?

(I'm not going to debate this guy. My biggest worry post Covid is the huge increase in homelessness we are going to see. The government needs to open up any excess federal, state, and local to to free camping. We need to put up tent cities. I feel it's going to get very ugly.)

Solar panels are quite useful in many poor countries, actually. But indeed much more is needed in terms of means of production: agricultural equipment, infrastructure, factories, etc. Expertise and technology (which are restricted by IP laws) are also needed. All of this is what the Belt and Road Initiative does.

If you look at it over time, the poor countries only get poorer over time. It may not be a zero sum game, but development is actively prevented. The only exceptions are countries where workers have at least some control over the state.

That’s where the solution lies: ending the control of capitalists over the world. The poor countries have succeeded a few times with good results, but the rich countries doing it would have a much bigger impact.

Clearly it is possible to operate McDonald's in the EU and not burn money. Thus clearly there is a fast food business model that involves paying higher wages. Does this mean that every fast food store will remain profitable with the same hours? Probably not, but it does clearly mean that some fast food stores would be able to stay open and profitable.

Someone can recognize the status quo and yet believe that the needs it creates ought to be changed. There was a time younger children needed jobs to. The reason they did was largely because the fact that they could be employed drove down wages for adult workers. One who said children didn’t need jobs at that time would be wrong, probably from privilege – children in working class families needed jobs. But they also shouldn’t have had them, and them as a class not having them also eliminated the need.

With teenagers the situation may not be precisely the same, but the divergence between perceiving what is needed now and what should be is the same.

On the other hand, I notice people who didn't have to work as kids and went straight into college and respectable white collar jobs usually have absolutely no idea how the rest of their fellow citizens actually work and live, so I'm thankful for the perspective.

Fast service restaurants have already adapted. Five Guys or Chipotle cost more for a better product. McDonalds has to remind you on the wrapper that their burger contains beef.

It can simply pay you the wage as an indirect subsidy to stimulate production.

It can employ you in the construction of infrastructure. The infrastructure of the US is dilapidated to the point of national disgrace.

It should still mandate living wages, the same way it should not allow employers to lash their employees or own them as chattel, or any number of other practices which are both immoral, and cannot find any temporary justification due to exigent circumstances (eg. literal struggle for national survival...)

How I see it, labor cost have been cut, while rent has gone up and prices have gone down.

If you increased minimum wage, it would put pressure on prices to go up and rent to go down, both would increase the value of the labor itself.

I think this whole dynamic is way way harder to model and predict how it'll play out then everyone makes it out to be. None of people's simple projection account for it all. Even economists with fancy models backed by simulations, math, and all that can't figure out the real outcome and often disagree with one another on what would happen.

It's not as easy as saying, half the restaurants are going to shut down, and leave empty all those commercial space. What happens next? Maybe some customers start to be willing to pay even more to get back some of the great restaurants they lost, or their proximity to them. Maybe landlords have to lower their rent for something else to fill in the vacancy, etc. Maybe everyone is happy with only half of the restaurants remaining, and each of those restaurant is making twice as much now allowing them to hire more staff and pay even higher. There's a lot of balancing act that could happen.

But equally is it ok for people to work hard and long hours and only barely make Or not quite make ends meet?

Sorry I should note that I am not saying you are advocating for the above(could be misread).