Comment by hpoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hpoe | Hacker News Reader

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And I disagree that everyone should get paid a loving wage.

Let's take 2 identical twins Juan and Jamal (because if you've seen Juan you've seen Jamal). In school Jamal works hard, studies, and puts his efforts first. Juan on the other hand decides football is the way to go and along with that partying, drinking and at one point gets a gal pregnant.

They graduate Jamal gets several scholarships and goes to school while working part time to try and avoid debt. Juan only qualifies for community college but spends several years "finding himself" aka partying, drinking and generally not doing much.

4 years later Jamal graduates from school and gets a successful software engineering gig making a decent salary with which he is able to afford a decent house for him, his wife and his 2 children.

Meanwhile Juan has just finished his latest stint in jail for another DUI and it is a wake up call to him. He decides to get his life in order so he cuts out the drugs and the bad friends and tries to find a job. Unfortunately he's unqualified for anything decent because it turns out shotgunning a beer is a useless skill.

For many years Juan has made poor decisions, he has been a drain on society and it's resources, but now wants to change. That is good however to claim that he should get the same privileges and standing as his brother who spent years working hard giving back and making better long term choices is asinine.

EDIT:

There have been a lot of great and informative comments. Several people have been calling this out as a strawman. I'd like to point out this isn't a strawman this is actually remarkably close to what happenned in my own family, it isn't a fantastic out of this world scenario, it's one I lived. Dismissing this as a strawman, is to dismiss hte point without engaging with it.

If you need to spend several paragraphs designing a pair of strawmen to illustrate your point, consider widening your view on this.

> That is good however to claim that he should get the same privileges and standing as his brother who spent years working hard giving back and making better long term choices is asinine.

Nobody is complaining that minimum wage isn't the same as a software engineering salary. Just that the floor is too low.

Unless you think all minimum wage earners are ne'er-do-well convicts with multiple DUIs?

the counter point is that minimum wage is artificial. if you aren't actually providing that much value, businesses will just cut the job altogether. if you are trying to raise a large family on minimum wage, well then that's obviously a big problem, but it's highly likely to be a problem you created with your life choices.

on the other hand, if you are in high school or college, minimum wage is likely fine as it's just extra spending money. raising minimum wage significantly more than likely just kills these jobs in favor of a kiosk that can do the job just as well.

if we want to make it so that everyone can live, that is a job for gov't with things like universal healthcare, universal basic income, social safety nets. forcing businesses to pay people more for a job than the job creates in value is not a solution. in the long term those jobs will just go away completely to a technology solution.

give people a safety net so that they can not be in poverty, but don't force businesses to pay more than the market says a job is worth. kind of a silly argument on a post about amazon anyways, since they pay well above minimum wage, and in fact have campaigned on raising it (not out of the goodness of their hearts mind you, they want to put small competitors out of business and they know they can't afford a large min wage hike like amazon can)

> if you are trying to raise a large family on minimum wage, well then that's obviously a big problem, but it's highly likely to be a problem you created with your life choices.

This is true, but becoming less and less true. Today there are all sorts of jobs that used to provide a living wage, that don't anymore. With no college and limited training, you could hire on at an assembly plant and make enough to support yourself. These types of jobs are getting scarcer and scarcer.

It's not always bad life choices. Sometimes it's choices life has made for you. Meaning: you were born in the wrong ZIP code, with the wrong parent(s), and sent to the wrong school. Choices other people made for you, rather than decisions you took the wrong path on.

> on the other hand, if you are in high school or college, minimum wage is likely fine as it's just extra spending money. raising minimum wage significantly more than likely just kills these jobs in favor of a kiosk that can do the job just as well.

This is a really hard aspect to design for. I agree that we can't require that all jobs pay enough to support a single earner's ability to rent an apartment, feed themselves, pay for a car, auto insurance, healthcare, etc. If that were the case, I would never have found work in my teens and early 20s.

> if we want to make it so that everyone can live, that is a job for gov't with things like universal healthcare, universal basic income, social safety nets. forcing businesses to pay people more for a job than the job creates in value is not a solution. in the long term those jobs will just go away completely to a technology solution.

I could not agree more. The labor market become so much freer when these things are taken out of the employment equation. My employer should not be anywhere near my healthcare. The way we allowed ourselves to tie those 2 things together is one of the greatest drags on our economy, and for labor mobility and opportunity.

If we had a UBI along with healthcare, I could see minimum wage being thrown out altogether. Employers would offer what the job is worth, and workers would work for what they value their own time at.

>This is true, but becoming less and less true. Today there are all sorts of jobs that used to provide a living wage, that don't anymore. With no college and limited training, you could hire on at an assembly plant and make enough to support yourself. These types of jobs are getting scarcer and scarcer.

raising minimum wage makes this worse, not better. even more jobs will be automated by technology removing even more unskilled labor jobs

>This is a really hard aspect to design for. I agree that we can't require that all jobs pay enough to support a single earner's ability to rent an apartment, feed themselves, pay for a car, auto insurance, healthcare, etc. If that were the case, I would never have found work in my teens and early 20s.

yup

>I could not agree more. The labor market become so much freer when these things are taken out of the employment equation. My employer should not be anywhere near my healthcare. The way we allowed ourselves to tie those 2 things together is one of the greatest drags on our economy, and for labor mobility and opportunity. If we had a UBI along with healthcare, I could see minimum wage being thrown out altogether. Employers would offer what the job is worth, and workers would work for what they value their own time at.

yup. absolutely.

Your post is the very incarnation of the term "strawman". Less of this, please

(although I have to say that I found that part: "but spends several years "finding himself" aka partying, drinking and generally not doing much" kinda funny...)

Nobody is saying that Jamal should not be paid more, they're just saying the floor should be enough to live.

What does that even mean? Live entirely alone in a 1 bedroom apartment? A studio? Live with roommates? What do their meals look like?

A "living wage" means absolutely nothing unless you define the expectations.

When I first moved to San Francisco in 2011, I was living on less than $300/month or so for 8 months or so. I slept on an air mattress and ate rice and beans prepared weekly from 25lb bags because it was cheaper that way. I spent less than a dollar a meal.

What expectations do we have that people learn to be frugal? Here's someone who lives in the SF Bay Area for $7000/year:

https://earlyretirementextreme.com/how-i-live-on-7000-per-ye...

It's actually not hard to live on these wages if you're smart about how you spend your money. The only cost you can't really escape without moving is the cost of housing, and if you don't fix that problem, any increase in wages it just going to be temporary relief until housing prices correct.

A "living wage" doesn't mean "middle class". A living wage means that a person is able to afford someplace relatively clean to live, feed themselves, afford heat in winter, etc.

> A "living wage" doesn't mean "middle class". A living wage means that a person is able to afford someplace relatively clean to live, feed themselves, afford heat in winter, etc.

That's not middle class in traditional class terms (petit bourgeois) based on the manner of interaction with the capitalist economy, but it's pretty much requires being “middle class” by the modern American broad income categories standards, where middle class is the middle income category.

Are you seriously arguing that whatever fraction of Americans are below "middle income category" should should be ok with not being able to house, feed, cloth, heat themselves - and somehow this would work out ok for the country as a whole?

That seems extreme.

> Are you seriously arguing that whatever fraction of Americans are below "middle income category" should should be ok with not being able to house, feed, cloth, heat themselves

No, I'm saying that people who are below the middle income category (as that adjusts locally) often cannot reliably, securely "afford someplace relatively clean to live, feed themselves, afford heat in winter, etc.". I'm not saying that they should accept that, just that if you are advocating for a living wage, you are, in fact, advocating to move the floor up to something that fits what is commonly styled "middle class" income currently.

Ok, I misread you. I'm not confident your assertion is true, but I don't know enough about the "living wage" analysis to be sure.

I guess one factor here is "middle income range", if well defined, will move if the floor is moved. In things like this, distribution is also very important.

There's a world of difference between saying that Juan shouldn't have the same privileges and standing as Jamal, and saying that Juan shouldn't get a living wage.

Do you have any statistics that can tell us how many "Jamals" actually exist in the US labour force? Because it feels like you are exaggerating a tiny tiny minority.

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