On the other hand, you can have no minimum wage, and end up with a class of working poor who have no time to educate themselves, thus condemning them to a life of constant work with no hope of social mobility.
I don't see how a minimum wage is harmful.
>On the other hand, you can have no minimum wage, and end up with a class of working poor who have no time to educate themselves, thus condemning them to a life of constant work with no hope of social mobility.
The minimum wage can also create cycles of poverty by pricing people out of work. Some portion of the people who are "least hireable" are unable to get jobs because nobody would pay them $15/hour, so their only option is living permanently on welfare, which has a demoralising effect, and is associated with poor outcomes for their children. Imagine for instance the stereotypical Frankston junkie.
I'd like to see data comparing minimum wage to drug abuse, but there's a few problems with trying to make that correlation. E.g., social welfare measures would largely factor in here, but I imagine that both minimum wage and welfare measures typically go hand in hand. But by naive comparison, just this wiki article seems to show that opiates abuse is about 5 times greater in the US vs Australia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_prevalenc...
Those numbers don't look all that different from the US. Are people pursuing minimum wage jobs after graduating high school or university? Even high school graduates with no intention of pursuing higher schooling seem to pursue a vocation at something higher than minimum wage.
>Are people pursuing minimum wage jobs after graduating high school or university? Even high school graduates with no intention of pursuing higher schooling seem to pursue a vocation at something higher than minimum wage.
Not everybody is able to find a higher-paying job, that's why we still see people at age thirty working in checkouts or McDonalds. Try not to think of the average person; instead imagine the worst behaved, most disruptive, academically failing students at your high school, and consider what kind of jobs are available to them. It's the least hireable people that are affected by minimum wage laws, not anybody who's capable of getting a better job.
I was looking over the past 10-20 years (I have no idea how long Australia has had a high minimum wage...I figured that wasn't a recent development). Around 2008 the discrepancy had the US 10% higher.
> Not everybody is able to find a higher-paying job, that's why we still see people at age thirty working in checkouts or McDonalds.
I agree. What I had (incorrectly) drawn from your statement was graduating implied they were pursuing a field--not the average person. I just saw that the US has 44% working low-wage jobs.