17
votes
Dollars on the margins - $15/hr minimum wage as a public health measure
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- The $15 Minimum Wage Doesn't Just Improve Lives. It Saves Them.
- Authors
- Matthew Desmond
- Published
- Feb 22 2019
- Word count
- 2248 words
In my opinion, under capitalism, minimum wage should be based on living costs. It's very good to have a higher minimum wage, but for example in my hometown (pop. ~500) a $15 dollar minimum wage would devastate the economy. It could be raised to around $10 and have great benefits, but in some cities that wouldn't help at all.
On the other hand, a higher minimum wage in a place with a relatively low cost of living would make it a much more attractive place to migrate to, and could reverse some of the decline in rural America. That might make the case for subsidies to business, rather than a patchwork of wages and benefits around the country.
Don't know, just speculating, but the Canadian data I'd pulled suggests that a patchwork can function too.
That’s a suboptimal way to do it, but probably the most politically realistic. If your priority is free markets rather than capitalism the distortionary effect on wages is concerning and brings all kinds of perverse incentives.
The less distortionary route is to work to decommodify the things we think of as fundamental to life. Rather than putting a floor on prices, we ought to provide a basic subsidy of nutrition, housing, healthcare, education, etc.
Lots of very capitalist countries provide ample public housing, universal healthcare, and free secondary and post-secondary education. These all work to lower the overall cost of living and let you maintain lower labor costs overall.
The next step past that would be to include input from workers in business decisions. Workplace democracy would fundamentally change how a lot of decisions about stuff like payroll get made.
It's complicated, but I think minimum wage is ultimately bad for people and the economy as a whole.
It ultimately triggers inflation. Few businesses can afford to pay higher wages, and all employees are already voluntarily working for a wage they negotiated with their employer on the free market.
To the first point, it's a 0-sum game. If wages uniformly go up, that money has to come from somewhere. It's not clear that customers will remain as loyal when prices change. Those price changes are extensive because minimum wage is extensive, and therefore all prices must rise.
To the second point, I only worked for minimum wage for my very first job ever. For every job after that, I negotiated a higher wage because I was not an un-trained, un-skilled worker anymore. I was a 17 year-old nerd with poor social skills. Literally anyone can do it. People accepting the offered wage are tacitly saying it is agreeable to them for their time. To the extent that we, as a society, should help those unable to negotiate for themselves a bit, that's great, but I don't really think that's what's going on.
I think people for the most part accept a minimum wage job because they want minimum responsibility and/or have no experience. They have no skills to offer an employer that would actually increase the profitability of the business, so the employer is not incentivized to pay them more. It's not that they're unable to negotiate for themselves; it's that they literally don't care whether or not their presence on the job increases the profitability of their company. If they're just too lazy to care, then I'm reluctant to select them as a group to target for relief with tax money.
I want what's fair for people who are in need, but I don't want to hand a bunch of money to selectively lazy people.
As someone with an econ degree, the ways people talk about this frustrate me. Here are some of the economics of what you are talking about:
Correct. But let's look at what inflation is, what this particular inflation would hit, and what you need to do about it. First, inflation is an increase in price as an impact of people's increased ability or willingness to pay. Pay people more, and yes they will be willing to spend more, that's unavoidable. But you're operating on a fundamental misconception that hits a lot of people when they think of increasing minimum wages:
When you increase the minimum wage, you do not flat increase all wages. It is bottom-heavy. Inflation will cause a feedback effect on wages in general, and people will get paid more no matter what they do. But on a % basis it acts as a de-polarising agent. You decrease the difference between someone working unskilled vs skilled labour. If you make the minimum wage $20 an hour, the person earning $10 an hour goes up to $20. The person earning $20 an hour though only goes up by the amount of inflation that occurs. That inflation is usually combated by other fiscal controls like government lending, and a) likely wouldn't be more than a 10-20% shift even if it hit insane levels, and b) is an absolute increase that happens once (though likely spread out over a few years as the effects ping-pong), rather than normal year on year inflation. So the person earning $20 is now earning up to $24.
So we've dealt with inflation. It's just not that scary. The next bit can be, and that is work that is being done only because you can find people to do it for peanuts. With minimum wage going up, suddenly it isn't economical to have anyone doing those tasks. Hours drop, unemployment goes up. But hang on - unemployment going up means inflation goes down - less people able to pay means lower basket prices. That part of the market system is more or less self-correcting. The solution for the tasks that aren't economical to pay a person to do is either do without, or somehow increase productivity (these days through automation). This is what happened to the milkman and the shoe shiner, the world moves on. The people who end up retrenched need reskilling and social safety net support, which as important as it is remains a separate issue. The other benefit of course is where you had multiple jobs being done by the same person (you can't call someone working an 80 hour week selectively lazy) now it's closer to 1:1, so unemployment drops further.
The extra time those people have is now spent doing all SORTS of things - raising their children, going to college, helping around the neighbourhood, engaging in hobbies, painting, writing, all sorts of crafts and cultural generation. This has the obvious flow-on effects of reduced crime, increased civic quality, it's almost like gentrification that takes the existing residents along for the ride.
That all paints a very rosy picture - so why isn't everyone screaming for it? There's a few issues I skipped. The first and most easily noticeable is that inflation is not spread universally (much as econ students wish it were) - if you increase costs in a bottom-heavy way, bottom-heavy products go up more than others. That means that imports generally stay the same (this is assuming a service economy like the US - you haven't increased or decreased your GDP by enough to impact international trade. For a manufacturing economy this would be suicide). What goes up are your local services, like taxis, cleaners, restaurants, supermarkets. This is limited by the fact that businesses will not just passively pass on costs, they will drop the manpower to compensate somewhat, so it's part cost increase, part quality of service decrease. Less people working in a department store, longer waits for taxis etc. This means people who are already able to afford things will be able to afford less and get less.
The other issue is that inflation self corrects in wages, it does not self correct in savings - which is why it used as a bogeyman in the first place, because boomers have a lot of retirement money and aren't working as much. Again, people who are already able to afford things afford less and get less.
So it comes down a question, fairly directly and without the (rational) ability to make excuses - how polarised do you want your economy? How big of a gap do you want to see between the haves and havenots in your country?
Now we move out of economics and into HR and psychology.
This is scientifically verified as not true - and it hits people askew depending on their gender, level (and more importantly quality) of education, age, race, etc. It also depends very heavily on whether you are applying for a job in a desperate situation - will a parent with kids to feed push for a wage increase and risk their job, or continue to work for minimum wage and know their family won't starve? Will someone who is about to become homeless push? Will someone who had crappy parents (or perhaps just busy working 3 jobs) who had a pisspoor education know you're allowed to negotiate? Will they know how? Who is going to teach them - the boss sure as shit isn't.
This is a line fed to you by people who want to alleviate the moral burden voters face when deciding on that economic question. They accept minimum wage because the alternative is starvation, lack of health insurance, early death, poor childhood for their kids, and the complete and total ignorance that it could be any different.
And that brings us to
Why on earth would they care when the business has effectively said "I value your time and effort even less than this, but it's illegal for me to pay you what I think you are worth". What loyalty exists from business to employee? If the business has a hard time, will they think twice before canning the employee? There's no motivation to do anything but the bare minimum there.
And the last and quite frankly most confusingly wrong point:
YOU ARE SPENDING MORE TAX MONEY BY NOT INCREASING THE MINIMUM WAGE.
I honestly thought everyone knew Walmart is the biggest social loafer in the US. This is not isolated, by not increasing minimum wages you drastically increase the tax burden.
Please. If you still think any of this (not just OP, but anyone who agrees with any of his points). PLEASE do your utmost to learn more about the situation. It is rooted in ignorance and is doing horrific damage to your communities even if you don't give 2 shits about the actual people earning less than you. You pay more tax, you get less infrastructure, you get lower quality (how well can someone work in their 75th hour that week?) - the impacts are so wide-reaching, generational, and embed discrimination against women and minorities. But it IS a situation you can change if enough people want to.
There's one other effect of the minimum wage hike that's fairly new and I think is going to start to have increasing effects. Raising that minimum wage is putting pressure on businesses to automate jobs away, so they don't have to pay those workers. We're pressuring fast food vendors to turn towards kiosks and robotic kitchens, and that's already started to happen. The jobs that McDonalds provides will just evaporate completely in the near term.
I don't see this as a bad thing, though. The result of the robotic economy coming into existence is going to be human-robot teams, with the humans mostly concerned with oversight, planning, and maintenance of these robotic workers. New jobs will open up, things will change. Even a lot of skilled labor will disappear as robots automate that work and just like the unskilled labor, it'll be replaced with humans who are there to handle oversight. You don't need all of the precision skilled labor training if the robots know it, you just need to tell them what to do, when, and where, and patch them up when they break down - which will just be swapping easily replaceable parts for most of it.
The future to me looks like a lot of bored humans sipping coffee while they direct groups of robots to do the real work.
Edit: @vakieh I wonder if you wouldn't mind chiming in with the effects that rising minimum wages and rising automation might have on the velocity of money. I've been rather enthralled with that concept since I first learned about it and I don't think most people know about it, or talk about it enough. I'm not even sure I understand it well enough to comment about it.
That's actually the root of one of the productivity problems in the U.S. economy.
As long as wages remain so low (and are kept that way by outsourcing threats), there's been little incentive to automate where it would make sense.
As long as the owners of capital are happy with their revenues from human labor, there's little reason to invest in the capital needed to automate.
Funnily enough, that phenomenon is broadly accepted as the reason China failed to industrialize until well after Europe and America did, it's called a high level equilibrium trap.
Understanding the velocity of money requires understanding probably my favourite 'aha' concept in macroeconomics - the multiplier effect. It's unfortunately a very difficult topic to explain in a comment, and it is totally alien to most people's understanding of how economics works (which is why my original comment makes tangential reference to it as 'ping-pong'). I had a quick look for some decent online resources for those but didn't find much, this seems mostly ok for the multiplier effect, though I didn't watch the videos, and there's a bit on the time lags that impact the processes that generate the multiplier effect. Between those 2 concepts the ideas of velocity of money should hopefully be intuitive.
The current economy is driven by need-based purchasing. Automation pushes things towards what is being (incorrectly, resources are still scarce in the economic sense) called 'post-scarcity', which by a better name would be want-based purchasing. Less staples, more luxury. The problem with our understanding of this effect on purchasing (and so the velocity of money) is we have never had the opportunity to observe it unencumbered. The velocity of money these days is INCREDIBLY fast compared to historical levels, but that is almost certainly the result of reducing payment and credit barriers. Electronic payments, instant bank transfers, the widespread proliferation of various types of loans, these things serve to directly increase the frequency of spending. Add to that increasing specialisation and you see it increase even further, with people doing more of 'their niche' and paying others to do what is required outside of that niche - like paying for a plumber instead of being a home handyman, etc. Though this effect does dangerous things to GDP-based economic analysis though, because actual productivity goes up by much less than increased GDP would indicate - GDP doesn't capture non-transactional effort/value add, so by now capturing it through specialisation it looks like productivity shoots up when it's actually a much smaller boost.
So the only honest answer anyone can give you on that is 'we're not sure' - as much as some econometrics guys might like to think otherwise, econ is a social science that we can only observe indirectly. Does want-based purchasing lower the velocity by decreasing the forces behind people spending? Or does it increase the velocity by decreasing the value people place on money in general? I would guess both simultaneously and a bunch of other effects, with the net impact being firmly in the 'I have no idea' basket.
There's no way I can unpack all of that.
The inflation thing seems short-sighted. You look at first-order effects, but then stop. When food costs go up, because the majority of the food industry is supported by minimum wage workers at the consumer level, that's going to ripple through everything in the economy.
"Scientifically untrue" - you cherry pick your data in half of it, and you are talking about one of the things that makes it complicated in the other half. Disempowered people have historically worked for lower wages, yes, but it's also historically true that this is lessening as time goes on, not due to wage laws, but due to social progress. As to the fact that some people are incapable of negotiating for themselves, then yes... I feel it's our social duty to address that. We, as a society need to be better about empowering all people to affect change in their lives. However, throwing money at the problem doesn't address the underlying problem of empowerment.
"This is a line fed to you by people who want to..." - Slow your roll, man. That's my thought based on my own life experiences. They are free people, free to make the compromises in their lives they choose to make, free to spend their time how they like. To the extent that there are awesome people who just need a boost to get up to speed and live an awesome life, yes absolutely we should help them. To the extent that a teenager working at McDonalds is not doing work commensurate with an adult processing insurance claims, then no... those people are free to negotiate different wages, and have very different needs in their employment.
Businesses should care about paying the minimum to get the quality of work they need.
Employees should care about getting the maximum value for their current ability.
This is a perfectly healthy arrangement in a free market economy.
You get kinda hysterical in the final bit. It's difficult to take any of it seriously due to the obvious emotional content. You say I'm rooted in ignorance when I feel I've devoted a lot of time trying to honestly understand the depths of the consequences of having or increasing a minimum wage. I'm engaging you in this conversation to help understand the situation more.
I'm pleased that you acknowledge a social duty here. But I'd also ask that you acknowledge you initially took a rhetorical position which presumed that the people accepting minimum wage were lazy or otherwise acting in bad faith, not that they lacked negotiating power.
The direction of social progress you reference is not a unidirectional arrow. Consolidated labor negotiating power has been strategically attacked and pushed backwards politically over the course of the past 40 years. You're also missing another factor - the consolidation of employment (monopsony) and the increasing loss of opportunity outside of extremely competitive labor markets.
I didn't really want to get into the deeper complexities of macroecomics in that post, because then you start getting into school arguments that are the reason I use my compsci major day to day and not my econ major. However - I did explicitly talk about the different impacts to different sectors:
So long as government subsidies and social safety net payments are tied to minimum wage, and so long as minimum wage is indexed to the CPI basket, this self-corrects. But again, in a way that disproportionally benefits the bottom half of society.
It is scientifically true that women and minorities do worse when wage negotiation is used. This cannot be disputed, the research is clear. The obvious conclusion to that (which admittedly is speculative rather than proven) is that negotiating power is tied to social status. While an unequal society exists, the idea that 'everyone can negotiate' is simply false. If and when we have an equal society (we won't) this can be revisited.
Why are you stuck on seeing an increase in the minimum wage as throwing money at a problem? This is not a tax subsidy or bailout, this is paid by businesses who want labour.
Most countries with decent minimum wages also scale them down for juniors (people under ~20) to capture this.
This assumes equal negotiating power between the business and the employee, which in the absence of strong unions is a farce. One employee need employment to live. Businesses need one employee for marginal profit per hire. This frames any negotiation and places the power squarely in the business's side.
The last part is indeed emotional - because once you leave 'this is the impact of the decisions' territory the choice becomes a moral one, which is tied to emotional responses. I wouldn't characterise it as hysterical though, because nowhere is it irrational. The 'rooted in ignorance' part was directed at the reaction to an increase in minimum wage you see in the US, because the arguments against them aren't rational.
I would be (at least a little bit more) ok with the pushback against minimum wage if it was done so intellectually honestly - with the discussion based on how society values certain work and certain classes of people. But because that sort of discussion is politically toxic people instead make up bullshit false economics and try to push the discussion there. It's in the same class as antivax and flat earth.
Interested in your take on my spew below. I'm a complete amateur at economics; I've only had a couple of classes (macro, and a healthcare economics grad review, a long time ago), everything else is due to the curiosity beast.
It covers something I skipped in my first comment (mostly because I didn't care to hear the answer to the question) - the polarisation argument becomes 'moral' in people's heads when they rationalise it based on the relative importance or difficulty of the work being done. By dehumanising minimum wage workers and belittling the work they do it becomes ok to pay them next to nothing (even though if they didn't do it society would literally collapse, we're not even close to that point of automation yet).
The other details about inflation are important - though it's important to note that just because inflation didn't go up doesn't mean there wasn't an increase in inflationary pressures. There are other fiscal controls used to manage inflation up or down, usually tied to managing unemployment up or down. In modern developed world economies it is usually leveraged on interest rates, which hits the segment of the economy with a mortgage, increasing or decreasing that segment's willingness to spend.
Every time someone denigrates low-skill or minimum wage jobs, I'm reminded of this useful piece of history.
On the inflation thing - I wasn't even going to touch monetary policy and the duality of the role of the U.S. Federal Reserve - currency stability and minimizing unemployment.
On the practical level, I'm fond of Green New Deal solutions. Humanity currently has a maximum long-term sustainable energy budget of about 120 petawatts/year (solar input at the earth's surface). Even if we gradually quit extracting and exploiting the stored value of millions of years of solar input, energy alone isn't yet a hard cap on increasing productivity per person.
If the gains were distributed more equitably, we could still substantially increase the quality of life for all citizens without remotely touching the limits of the sustainable cap. The key is avoiding price shocks, like the 1970's oil crisis (which arose from cartel control, not genuine scarcity - we keep talking about peak oil, and routing around it, though the carbon budget is another item altogether.
Most of the $15 minimum wage proposals have a 5 - 7 year phase-in period, indexed to inflation thereafter. The costs are, by and large, redistributive, not necessarily broadly inflationary.
I'm going to start off with the TL;DR rebuttal.
If you'd like to understand further, please read on.
There are a number of incorrect assumptions here, which I'll address as follows:
Inflation
Inflation isn't solely driven by labor costs. Labor is a (PDF warning) variable fraction of the cost of production for any given good or service. Typically, it varies from 5% for the most automated manufacturing, to 50% for direct personal services (e.g. health care). There are goods with extremely low marginal cost of production versus potential profit, like software and publishable writing.
So, cost of labor is only one of the inputs that drives inflation. Aside from the material and energy inputs, the cost of labor is offset by productivity - the efficiency with which labor is deployed.
In 1973, energy price shocks drove up inflation drastically, but the resulting policy changes aimed at driving down the cost of labor instead of the energy input cost. We're still seeing the effects of this wage stagnation.
Moreover, there are two major drivers of inflation: cost-push, and demand-pull. Globally, most developed economies are still in a period of weak demand (the demand-pull), which I'll expand on below.
U.S. Productivity
The Bureau of Labor Statistics graphs referenced above also reflect productivity changes. As a general rule, U.S. wage labor costs tracked productivity growth until 1973, without, apparently, increasing inflation.
If minimum wages had kept up with productivity growth, the current minimum wage would be $18.42 per hour.
Note that U.S. productivity growth has been slowing since 2004, and there's a longer-term trend in productivity slowdown around the developed world. There are legitimate arguments about whether GDP measurements actually capture all kinds of productive activity, whether innovation has slowed down, or whether population growth decline is to blame.
There is an argument that higher wages would support productivity growth.
However, productivity primarily depends on investments in both capital and labor quality, and both are declining in the U.S.
U.S. per-pupil public spending on K-12 education has declined in inflation-adjusted dollars since 2008, and distribution is wildly uneven. The rise in overall education spending is largely for post-secondary schooling - not necessarily uniformly useful for improving productivity. I'll just gloss over the education requirements for wellbeing and good citizenship, beyond making good workers.)
Good general nutrition, safe housing, transportation, environmental factors, raising children, and health care are other potential avenues of investment in labor productivity. [Not to mention improving everyone's quality of life and the ability to be human. The assumption that "productivity" only involves what we do at wage work is a distortion in economic reasoning.]
We can talk about all these factors in national labor productivity as social investment or social spending.
Yet the majority of people also want the freedom and self-respect of being able to purchase at least some of these amenities directly, with their own labor, based on their own needs, to grow their capacities according to their own desires.
What businesses can "afford" to pay
This depends on how businesses allocate costs of the factors of production (e.g. automation vs manual labor), the demand for their products, and where profit is distributed. As noted above, there's been ongoing growth in productivity, but the bulk of national income has increasingly gone to the owners of capital, not workers.
There are small service-sector businesses (often involving food service, caregiving, the arts) that function on tiny margins. It's worth asking the question, though, are business models that depend on below-living wages worth maintaining? If so, which ones, and how much public support should we give them?
The Zero-Sum Fallacy
When you talk about minimum wages being a zero-sum game, you're ignoring the complexity of the game-theory trap most low-wage workers are in. They're working as many hours as possible for mere survival, and as a result, driving down wages for all.
There's substantial research evidence that longer hours are not required for equivalent productivity. We have 40-hour work weeks, overtime rules (not that they're observed), and other measures both to help ensure that there are sufficient jobs for all willing workers, and to discourage employers from extractive abuse.
There's the "lump of labor" fallacy, which assumes the the amount of work to be done is relatively fixed - thus, adding workers or increasing hours just increases unemployment. This has been used to argue against immigration, automation, womens' entry to the workplace, and older workers' labor. And yet, we're still working 40+ hour weeks or multiple jobs. Clearly, the amount of work available has increased, many workers are immiserated by the number of hours they have to work to live, and we haven't reached the point where we can all slack off in automated luxury.
Interesting manuscript here, if you want to read further. Among other things, it makes a compelling case that long hours and low wages are directly harming national productivity, thus making us all a little more miserable.
In 1913, Henry Ford notably increased the potential wage and bonuses for his workers to $5/day, nearly double the market rate. This wasn't simply so that his workers could afford to buy the cars they made, but because the turnover and loss of trained workers in a competitive job market was cutting productivity. Higher wages meant keeping efficient staff, production and sales boomed, creating more jobs, and a positive result was had by all. Ford also instituted an 8-hour day'40-hour week in 1914, finding that productivity did not improve with longer hours, and other detrimental factors (injuries, defects) increased. (The stage was set by widespread social reform and labor organizing starting in the late 1800's. Ford was also prone to disturbing paternalism and racism along with the progressive measures, but he did acknowledge that workers were entitled to some leisure.)
Even the McDonald's job you despised required a certain amount of training, and as a customer service business, high turnover still negatively impacts productivity. We can reasonably assume this also impacts profitability of the business - McDonald's is paying and training a greater number of workers, but they're producing less.
The assumption that raising wages automatically cuts profits and jobs is largely disproven. For instance, the existence of living wage policies does not appear to have crippled the Canadian economy.
There's a potential "negative-sum" game where everyone loses.
If wages are so low that aggregate demand is inadequate, oversupply of production can lead to a deflationary spiral, with a diminishing number of jobs and further loss of demand. There's substantial evidence this was a major cause of the 1929 Great Depression. Long-term weak demand also diminishes productivity, as economies of scale are lost, and unemployed workers go stale or are unable to relocate.
After the 2007 global financial crisis, most Western nations dropped interest rates to near zero, to encourage demand through buying on credit. This was of little help to most wage workers, who were already in debt and not making enough to consume more.
Finally, it's worth acknowledging that where you're born and any number of other factors (monopsony, employment biases, community ties, etc.), influence opportunity.
I've gone on too long and vaguely (I really, really need a post preview) as usual, but there's more out there if you look for it.
If you're offered a job by a company in a country that has no minimum wage, do you take that job for a lower wage than you'd take it if it was an American company? If you do so, it's for other reasons, and not some minimum wage law.
The law has nothing to do with your ability to earn enough to not only survive, but to live.
"the amount of money that you are paid has nothing to do with your ability to live in a capitalist system" is really not a take i thought i'd see on tildes because it's just an awful fucking take to be honest, but here we are. i think we can pretty safely say that, when there is literally a ten year gap in lifespan for women and a fifteen year gap in lifespan for men between the poorest 1% of households and the richest 1% of people with our existing minimum wage laws and regulations surrounding pay (data here), this idea that the law doesn't have a direct impact on whether or not you are able to even have good outlooks in life--much less to survive and live--is fucking ridiculous. i'd hate to see what this looks like when corporations can pay you however they want and you have no recourse but to hope other corporations aren't colluding or artificially keeping wages as low as they can go since they also know you have no recourse.
What you have in quotes is not what I said, and the rest of your post is running off that tangent which is antithetical to the context of the thing you misquoted to begin with.
Correlation is not causation. The data you present does not indicate the conclusions you're drawing from it. That gap is in favor of women, historically lower wage earners - which directly undermines your correlation, anyway.
Did you read your own link?
"Differences in life expectancy among the poor are not strongly associated with differences in access to health care or levels of income inequality."
bold added for emphasis
a famous cry among people, but it is quite well established that the rich tend to live longer than the poor, so that's not really relevant here.
spoiler: this is because women live longer than men as a whole and always have. there is a natural life expectancy gap between the two sexes. your point is basically irrelevant and quibbling at something that doesn't matter and has no bearing on the validity of my point because the same drop in life expectancy on the basis of income is observable in women as in men.
this is also stupid quibbling. you'll notice that they find places with higher life expectancies across the board have three factors which make them so: better health practices among the population, better educational attainment, and high government expenditure--and, if you know anything about even basic socioeconomic factors, you'll recognize that the former two of these are disproportionately more common among those who have a higher income. just because income inequality specifically is not literally the defining factor in life expectancy does not mean that wealth is not a factor in life expectancy. almost all of the factors which play into the gap in life expectancy are because of factors that are influenced by the existence--or lack thereof--of wealth within a household or to an individual.
"Much of the variation in life expectancy across areas is explained by differences in health behaviors, such as smoking and exercise. Differences in life expectancy among the poor are not strongly associated with differences in access to health care or levels of income inequality. Instead, the poor live longest in affluent cities with highly educated populations and high levels of local government expenditures, such as New York and San Francisco."
If you're drawing any conclusions contrary to this, then you're misinterpreting the data.
judging by your complete dodge here, i'm going to go ahead and assume you don't really recognize (and, just going off of the beliefs you've stated you hold in this thread, have probably never considered in any way) the underlying socioeconomics of what you're quoting and leave it at that.
I do. My position is that each individual is in a better position to determine what they need than the government is. A teenager working a summer job does not have the same needs as a single mom, and their work ethic and skills should reflect that. Each of them is able to negotiate a wage they think is "good" for them in their situation, and free to seek other employers if they don't like the way the negotiation went with one.
This is simply a free market in action.
Yes, under the assumption what those people want from that job is being paid enough to survive.
Those jobs can't exist if they can't support workers to create a product that consumers want. If the business can't find a way to be profitable (enough) for all parties involved, then it's doomed to fail, anyway.
I'm in favor of UBI, but that's not the topic of this thread.
If the workforce is saturated, then new innovations and new jobs are needed. Entrepreneurs need to jump in and create new, different jobs all the time. Most businesses are not huge corporations, they're local stores and mom-n-pop operations.
Increasing minimum wage directly undercuts these small business owners specifically, while having little effect on the largest corporations whom are able to adjust.
What would be your preferred outcome when a person is unable to successfully negotiate an amount sufficient to support themself and their direct dependants?
The three possibilities I see are that the government makes this impossible (by setting a livable minimum), the government pays their living costs directly, or the family is potentially left without food and shelter.
Wow. That is an incredibly narrow minded view. You're saying that people who work minimum wage jobs are lazy? It's amazing that anyone could possibly come to that conclusion.
It seems like a lot of what you say is predicated on the assumption that companies will pay a worker what they can afford to, however that hasn't been the case, on the whole, for over 50 years. The shareholders and executives have been rewarded disproportionately for success compared to the workers, and increasing the minimum wage is one approach to redress that balance. For what it's worth, I'd prefer a maximum multiple between highest and lowest pay within an organisation, but that's much more complex to enact from both a political and an economic standpoint.
Fairness used to be my ultimate driving factor, above all else, but something I have come to realise is that most situations are too complex to easily define what actually is fair. Class mobility is comparatively low, so the idea that the wealthy "fairly deserve" what they have is questionable. Is it fair for those born rich to be comfortably lazy but not those born poor? What about those who go above and beyond in their minimum wage jobs (but do not have the knowledge, confidence, or leverage to ask for more money) vs those who coast along doing a not-quite-fireable job in higher management?
I'd consider myself more of a utilitarian now, and in this situation for me that means giving an extra $1000 to 1000 low wage workers generates more overall benefits than giving an extra $1,000,000 to one already wealthy person.
You're talking as if inflation is inherently bad. If wages uniformly go up, prices will go up, and if prices go up, wages will have to go up, and so on. What this will do is reduce the value of assets and liabilities as compared to current income, but that's only bad if you're, for instance, a company sitting on a giant pile of untaxed cash, and great if you've got a bunch of student loans. Functionally, inflation is a transfer of value from asset-holders to the indebted, and this doesn't seem like it's actually a bad thing given the current levels of inequality.