Why not make it $20/hr? What about $50/hr? What about $100/hr? Why is your argument not equally applicable to any and every possible increase in minimum wage?
I guess it would be.
But what I was trying to touch on is what the human reasons are for lawmakers, human beings, to do that. Pity is an emotional heuristic, and as such, it's served us more or less well for tens of thousands of years. And pity is increasingly likely to prompt a policy change at $15/hr, while unlikely to bring about that kind of policy change at a rate much higher than that. Then along with pity, our other emotional heuristics come into play as they relate to ideas like the subjective valuation of goods, social privilege attached to certain occupations, etc.
We could bore each other with purportedly quantitative analysis of labor markets and commodity prices, which we don't even have the quantitative data for anyway, or we could use common sense. Raising minimum wage to $X/hr would help out people making less than that, and people making less than $15 need help. Raising it to $50/hr, not so much.
I'm not asking for a "quantitative" analysis of anything. I'm asking people to use logical reasoning to support their arguments. That's what I'm characterizing as an "economic argument" here. Break down your reasoning into logical steps that can be discussed and debated in a meaningful way.
Your implicit assumption that emotional heuristics will lead to good policy is very, deeply flawed. First, emotional heuristics evolved in small societies as traits that determine individual behavior. So-called "common sense" can be very wrong when applied to uncommon scenarios, such as society-wide policy. Second, emotional heuristics can lead us to do bad things just as readily as they can lead us to do good things. Pity is an emotional heuristic, but so is greed, so is envy, so is xenophobia and racism. These are all survival heuristics that we developed a long time ago. You're committing the naturalistic fallacy by assuming our natural heuristics are inherently "good."
Finally,if we could raise the minimum wage to $50/hr why shouldn't we do it? Those people making $10/hr right now, wouldn't raising their income to $50/hr be much more helpful than just raising it to $15/hr? You say it's common sense, but common sense tells me that $50/hr is better than $15/hr. Is my common sense wrong?
Well, I didn't precisely say that emotional heuristics would always lead to good policy. I am only saying that they prompt policy, whether good or bad, and that at least they deserve some acknowledgement that they have this effect. They are the best predictors of human behavior, better even than economics. People are not number machines, and if they think a policy is fair they will defend it regardless, and if they think it's unfair, likewise. And at the end of the day, the reason wealth distribution is so concentrated at the top is best explained by social factors, because people are socially preprogrammed to deal with power. On the other end, the income at the low social strata wouldn't be this bad without the social programming that work done in janitorial, retail, service industry, etc, was not "worth" as much as other lines of work, and that it's "fair" in some academic, economic sense that they earn this little. I'm not arguing that emotional heuristics always make good policy, but I do think it's a mistake when people allow their human emotions to be countermanded by some concept of an infallible, monolithic body of "science". Even when a situation is partly a result of policy, as the numbers might show, the policy itself was prompted by emotional considerations like charity, pity, etc. So, to understand the drive for a higher minimum wage it's only necessary to understand the social idea of fairness and how it's understood in contemporary society. Whether it's good or bad policy in some objective sense by some vague measure, that aspect shouldn't have more effect than a collective sense of fairness, because we will still implement policy that people think is fair.
On the counterexample of racism, xenophobia and greed, sure, they can shape policy. But the difference is that people consciously choose fairness and charity in policy over racism, greed, etc, insofar as they are perceiving these influences correctly. I mean, that's not to say that fairness leads to better policy. In fact, it's distantly, theoretically possible that policy motivated by greed may better policy, objectively, in terms of however you measure strength of policy. But people choose fairness over unfairness, charity over greed. That's our social makeup. Whether we are infallible in understanding our own motivations is a separate issue, and could be argued as an intractable problem.
All this is really to just cut to the line of "It looks like a good idea to everyone, but it's really not because data, graphs, and tables." I am saying that this line puts the cart before the horse, because it's not what the tables and graphs show that matters, it's what we think is fair that is both the beginning and the end of the debate. When people replace their own common sense judgment with the idea that authority or "science" serves them better, then that authority is empowered, and the very result is that authority can succeed more often in justifying self-serving policies. Even if someone consciously thinks that those self-serving policies are "better" in some monetary sense, I'd still argue that they're not because anything we perceive as unfair is automatically worse on that basis alone.
And $15/hr, most people think is fair. $50/hr, that's reductio ad absurdum.
I haven't had the opportunity to read Picketty's work at all, I have heard references to it and that it is hated by rightists. Overall, this is a reaction to some of the particular failures with Reaganism and we're about at that point whenever the old New Deal Coalition died out respectively was about 30 years longevity. We're at that point now with the Reagan Coalition and Reagan's effect on government. We're in an age where people are trying to figure out how "the system works." And that's taking time, and the rules by which we play this new game have yet to be written. Most of these questions will not be answered easily until the 2020's.
Perhaps instead of fighting for increased wages, people should be asking why the purchasing power of their wages has dropped by so much. When you get paid in fiat currency that rapidly depreciates, it should come as no surprise that you have work harder for less.
Gold undulates based on market pressures, whenever we consider loans to people if you took out a loan in "cheap" gold years you win. If you took out a gold loan during "expensive" gold years, you lose as a debtor. That mechanism encourages market instability when it comes to loans and insurance. Equally, fiat doesn't naturally "rapidly depreciates" rather it depreciates over time and only rapidly depreciates during times of rapid inflation.
The issue with the wage problem as compared to other countries with similar economic growth, has been that the US model that most of the wealth has gone to the top and less has been distributed out to employees of specific companies over the years as a cost control measure. The stagnation in wages and the upsurge in upper class wealth distribution is a part of the problem with compensation packages with corporations that fail to tie talent to pay. Which is why countries such as the Asian tigers or Canada or Britain or Germany are doing economically better. There's more of an understanding of what goes into a singular employee than a singular theory about the "great man." Few CEO's are Steve Jobs, most are just mediocre people who earn a lot of money as compared to their fellow cohort. That's simple 80/20 rule. And some corporate raiders/activist stockholders are taking note on the ROI for corporate executives relative to direct research and development, higher dividends, stock buybacks, or just hiring better talent in weaker areas within the company.
The key is both a lack of new business start ups, lack of good regulatory framework of which Pfizer is moving it's headquarters over to Europe, tax code issues, as well as a lack of infrastructure spending and over investment into war. This returns back more towards the other aspects as seen in Fiat Money Inflation in France by White than just "fiat money is bad." It's a lot more complex than it is simple.
Well, I didn't precisely say that emotional heuristics would always lead to good policy. I am only saying that they prompt policy, whether good or bad, and that at least they deserve some acknowledgement that they have this effect. They are the best predictors of human behavior, better even than economics. People are not number machines, and if they think a policy is fair they will defend it regardless, and if they think it's unfair, likewise. And at the end of the day, the reason wealth distribution is so concentrated at the top is best explained by social factors, because people are socially preprogrammed to deal with power. On the other end, the income at the low social strata wouldn't be this bad without the social programming that work done in janitorial, retail, service industry, etc, was not "worth" as much as other lines of work, and that it's "fair" in some academic, economic sense that they earn this little. I'm not arguing that emotional heuristics always make good policy, but I do think it's a mistake when people allow their human emotions to be countermanded by some concept of an infallible, monolithic body of "science". Even when a situation is partly a result of policy, as the numbers might show, the policy itself was prompted by emotional considerations like charity, pity, etc. So, to understand the drive for a higher minimum wage it's only necessary to understand the social idea of fairness and how it's understood in contemporary society. Whether it's good or bad policy in some objective sense by some vague measure, that aspect shouldn't have more effect than a collective sense of fairness, because we will still implement policy that people think is fair.
On the counterexample of racism, xenophobia and greed, sure, they can shape policy. But the difference is that people consciously choose fairness and charity in policy over racism, greed, etc, insofar as they are perceiving these influences correctly. I mean, that's not to say that fairness leads to better policy. In fact, it's distantly, theoretically possible that policy motivated by greed may better policy, objectively, in terms of however you measure strength of policy. But people choose fairness over unfairness, charity over greed. That's our social makeup. Whether we are infallible in understanding our own motivations is a separate issue, and could be argued as an intractable problem.
All this is really to just cut to the line of "It looks like a good idea to everyone, but it's really not because data, graphs, and tables." I am saying that this line puts the cart before the horse, because it's not what the tables and graphs show that matters, it's what we think is fair that is both the beginning and the end of the debate. When people replace their own common sense judgment with the idea that authority or "science" serves them better, then that authority is empowered, and the very result is that authority can succeed more often in justifying self-serving policies. Even if someone consciously thinks that those self-serving policies are "better" in some monetary sense, I'd still argue that they're not because anything we perceive as unfair is automatically worse on that basis alone.
And $15/hr, most people think is fair. $50/hr, that's reductio ad absurdum.
Gold undulates based on market pressures, whenever we consider loans to people if you took out a loan in "cheap" gold years you win. If you took out a gold loan during "expensive" gold years, you lose as a debtor. That mechanism encourages market instability when it comes to loans and insurance. Equally, fiat doesn't naturally "rapidly depreciates" rather it depreciates over time and only rapidly depreciates during times of rapid inflation.
The issue with the wage problem as compared to other countries with similar economic growth, has been that the US model that most of the wealth has gone to the top and less has been distributed out to employees of specific companies over the years as a cost control measure. The stagnation in wages and the upsurge in upper class wealth distribution is a part of the problem with compensation packages with corporations that fail to tie talent to pay. Which is why countries such as the Asian tigers or Canada or Britain or Germany are doing economically better. There's more of an understanding of what goes into a singular employee than a singular theory about the "great man." Few CEO's are Steve Jobs, most are just mediocre people who earn a lot of money as compared to their fellow cohort. That's simple 80/20 rule. And some corporate raiders/activist stockholders are taking note on the ROI for corporate executives relative to direct research and development, higher dividends, stock buybacks, or just hiring better talent in weaker areas within the company.
The key is both a lack of new business start ups, lack of good regulatory framework of which Pfizer is moving it's headquarters over to Europe, tax code issues, as well as a lack of infrastructure spending and over investment into war. This returns back more towards the other aspects as seen in Fiat Money Inflation in France by White than just "fiat money is bad." It's a lot more complex than it is simple.
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