Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfblah | Hacker News Reader

I don't fully understand why so many people can't accept the notion that people have different levels of capability to succeed. Maybe most folks who are poor just don't have the mental capacity to do much more than they're doing. If that's true, then definitionally nothing will really "help" short of something like UBI. And even that might fail since recipients will get swindled out of the money.

To me, it's unfortunate that the notion of different levels of capability has been transmuted into some kind of social ill that "must" be solved. It'd be like reading articles about why not everyone can run a 5 minute mile and what can be done about it. Not everyone can run a 5 minute mile! It's not fixable!

View on HN

I actually don’t think UBI will help much either.

Minimum wage hikes are counterproductive - it’s a ban on jobs for people whose skills are worth less than the minimum wage, which are the poorest people who need the jobs most.

It’s a terrible thing to say to someone - “The best you can do is $6/hr, so we as a society have decided you’re not allowed to work to support or feed yourself.”

But we can make our society more functional to penalise poor people less. The people who can only run a 10 minute mile shouldn’t be forced to do it with a weighted vest. The people who can only run a 15 minute mile shouldn’t be banned from running at all.

Is it actually possible to support and feed oneself for $5/hr and less? If it's too hard, plus considering people unable to do better jobs also have harder time saving money - why would you want to inflict that to anyone?

It probably isn't possible, but maybe if you combined that wage with various assistance programs, it could provide a path out of poverty for those who want to try. I'd much rather be able to get a job and start my journey than be prohibited from working.

The proposed minimum wage hike was $15/hr.

If a job is worth $10/hr to get done, nobody will ever pay anyone $15 to do it. They will just not do it at all - so that’s 10/hr somebody could’ve earned that is just burned.

You have to think of it like that: congressman standing in front of poor single mother, telling her “you’re not allowed to have this job, it’s for your own good”, and then lighting 60% of her desired salary on fire as she looks on in dismay.

Eventually somebody will invent a robot or outsourcing solution that gets the job done for $10/hr.

At no point was any of this ever helpful to that person who was willing to do the job.

Why must we paint everythign in terms of "evil politicians want to forbid people doing things"? You deny there's some underlying logic why democracies decided to implement minimal wages, why?

So you assert labor demand is completely inflexible. Is this supported by evidence? Perhaps $15 is really too much, I don't know, but to help decide by now we should have hundred year worth of data no?

We should want mothers to have some time and energy left to care for children when they come home. Are there any such $5-$10/hour jobs?

This is a straw man. Nobody is saying everyone should be genius Olympian.

The argument is that the janitor, the fast food worker, the cashier deserve a livable wage. They don't deserve to have decades slashed off their life expectancy because they're poor. They shouldn't have to ration insulin because they're poor. They shouldn't have to commute for 2 hours because they're poor.

> deserve a livable wage

Is a "market wage", supplemented by payments from public money to reach decent living standards, acceptable? That's what UBI would be, in theory at least.

A better solution imo would be a society where necessities are free, and people can work for anything above that. But really, anything other than what we have right now would be an improvement.

It's not at all a straw man. Large swaths of the political spectrum in the US now reject the notion that there are different levels of intellectual capability.

Nah dude, almost nobody thinks that. You're letting your biases cloud your judgement. You see one person saying some stupid thing and you assume that's representative of a larger group. It's not.

Outside of pretty narrow specializations, research into IQ is extremely touchy. Am I missing something here? How is this a result of my bias?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com