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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

Look at it from the other direction.

Is working 40 hours per week but not being able to afford a 1 or 2 bedroom apartment a goal we want to set? If so, we have achieved it!

I think most of us like the idea that if you put in 40 hours of work every week, regardless of the specific job, you are able to afford a basic standard of living.

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I don't think most of think this. It doesn't scale. That would mean you could have households of one people with another rent to afford 4 houses. Thats 1.2 billion units of housing just in case people want to live alone.

Even if you only do half thats a crazy stat. 600 million units and having to hit that right on the head in terms of the distribution of humans at all time.

You’re begging the question. Is having your own 1BR apartment a “basic standard of living”? When did we decide that? Is that a goal other developed countries have set and achieved? Those are the pertinent questions, not what ideas “we like.”

According to the study, that standard would require a $30-40 minimum wage in places like New York. Is that something any country has done?

Why wouldn't we want that? Isn't the point of progress to improve life for everyone?

This is completely subjective. In many countries it's very common to have multiple generations living under one roof all supporting each other.

Higher wages in an industry are good for workers who make the cut, but bad for everyone else.

Since local zoning laws effectively rule out boarding houses (or other affordable living spaces) in most of North America, 1BR is essentially the entry level in most jurisdictions.

Hence minimum wage workers are homeless

Or forced to share a place with roommates

Your argument here seems very circular to me.

You ask "when did we decide that?". That implies that there is some discrete point in time in the past when societal decisions are made. But that's not how societies work, not how politics work. The way it works is that we are continuously "deciding" things like this, through conversations like the one here, and articles like the one we're talking about. It doesn't make sense to say, "this article is reaching for abstract targets that we haven't decided on", because there is no decision point in the past like that, we're discussing what we want right now, in this moment, and the article is part of that discussion.

You claim that ideas "we like" are not what is pertinent. But that's also not the way societies and politics work. If we as a society decide that this is a good thing to strive for, that "we like" the idea, we can do that. We can decide we want to do that and discuss it and brainstorm ways to achieve it. Looking at what other countries have done is definitely an interesting input in that discussion, but it certainly isn't the only thing that is pertinent.

I think you should just say "I am unconvinced that this should be a goal we have as a society". You seem to be trying to appeal to some larger power, some discrete ledger of things we have decided on, but really I think what you're saying is that you are personally skeptical of this, and perhaps that you believe many others in the society are skeptical of it. Which is cool (I may even agree with that, I'm not sure yet), but it would be more clear to just say that.

No, the framing of the article is disingenuous. If you want to make an argument that someone working minimum wage should be able to live in a separate 1BR, go ahead and make that argument. But that’s not what the article does. It claims there is a “housing affordability crisis” because minimum wage workers can’t afford an average 1 or 2 bedroom apartment. That isn’t an argument for raising the standard. It acts like we have already decided on that higher standard.

Ah, see, the way I read the article is that it is saying that they have already decided that this is the standard for a crisis, not that we have decided. Where "they" in this case is the National Low Income Housing Coalition, and perhaps also the author and maybe by implication the editorial voice of CNBC. I don't see an attempt being made to put words in my mouth; I see an author using their own words to make an argument mostly based on a study by another institution.

You're right that articles and studies often use terms like "housing crisis" that don't have objective definitions in a way that fits their subjective definition without doing any throat-clearing to call that out. But I don't think there is any real way around that, it seems like you just have to read things with that in mind. Maybe I'm wrong though. Should every article say things like, "there is no objective definition of a housing crisis, but the NLIHC believes this should be considered one". Perhaps they should!

Not all 40-hour-a-week jobs are valuable enough to support a high adult standard of living. If adults are still doing those jobs, it’s not a problem with the jobs.

This is the real issue. Imo: there's not enough upwards mobility in jobs because people are retiring later in life. We need to make it cheaper to retire and for workforces to move up the ladder. I know this sounds elitist, but when I worked in a shop, I didn't expect to be able to afford a house.

This is an interesting point I have not contemplated in my musings on the issue so far. Something I should have thought of earlier since my dad came out of retirement and thus is taking up a position that otherwise could have been occupied by the promotion of someone who graduate more recently.

Thanks for sharing it.

It’s a long article but if you just skip along and read around the graphs you get a lot of context on this situation. I also found it fascinating when I first stumbled upon it .

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Boswort...

Just musing a bit further, there are multiple ways you could attack this. For instance, you could also encourage people to work shorter hours—we've all become much more productive in the past century, so why are we still working 40 hours a week at minimum?

Because we don't sell units of productivity - we're selling units of labour. If I don't sell 40 hours per week, somebody else will.

Where do you believe the problem lies?

The people who can’t perform labor worth more than a few dollars an hour.

Does the problem really lie in those people, themselves, or in the circumstances that led to their labor being worth so little?

This is a purely moral judgement - you can argue, in the most extremal case, that every aspect of a person's behavior is purely "circumstantial". After all, your personality and capabilities are entirely shaped by circumstances like genetics and life experience.

Of course, we understand this is a pretty useless way of looking at things.

From a consequentialist standpoint, the incentives work out the best when we use the heuristic of assigning responsibility for low labor value to the person performing the labor, so that's the approximation I choose to use. You could choose to think that e.g. being very stupid is no one's fault, so a very stupid person should get paid as much as a brilliant doctor, but the net social consequences of this are pretty well explored and pretty bad.

No. It is a problem with the pay.

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