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Comment by foxglacier | Hacker News Reader

No. One required component is plain old fashioned oversupply of labor. America doesn't have that because all employable people are too rich. China also has an oversupply of skilled labor like engineers, in part because the threat of poverty is a strong motivator to get rich. America also lacks that which you can see in capable young people doing arts degrees with no thought to their future income because it doesn't matter - they'll still live comfortably even on minimum wage.

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    > they'll still live comfortably even on minimum wage.

You made a few good points until this one. No one in the US is living comfortably on minimum wage.

It's relative. Relative to the rest of the world (and China), you can still live comfortably on minimum wage.

You can still live comfortably on US minimum wage if your cost of living is like in China?

What question is this? With a US minimum wage with China CoL you are rich.

Definitely not in the major cities, like Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Guangzhou.

$7.25 minimum wage per hour at fed level. 40 hour per week and 50 working week you have 14,500 USD, or 105K RMB roughly based on exchange rate today.

105K RMB yearly is close to or above average even in the above cities.

for some state the minimum wage can be $15 or higher, this is wayyyy better than China.

It depends on where you are. Metropolitans and provincial capitals are expensive, but some smaller cities are cheaper. But then the public service is worse and you kinda want to live closer to bigger cities. I don't know how much $$ you are talking about, but it's easy to figure that out if you can give me a city in mind and I can check the cost for you.

Not just cost of living is lower, but standard of living is too. I know people in China who had full-time jobs but would recover meat from other people's rubbish to eat, or who lived illegally in a garage. That's homeless-level lifestyle for America and doesn't require any job at all.

Comfortable enough to not be worth undergoing extreme pressure to succeed like people do in China and India. Even a skilled tradesman is a highly paid career in America but it's poverty in China.

It's not that life on minimal wage is comfortable, it's that we have been told for a generation now that 'just get a college degree and it will be fine'. Happily amplified by for-profit education investing a lot of money lying to young people (ads).

Ask your local waiter with a college degree if they would have studied something else if they got the chance. My experience is that many would.

> Ask your local waiter with a college degree if they would have studied something else if they got the chance. My experience is that many would.

The problem of bad choices is orthogonal to the problem you are describing.

In high school the administration specifically stated that just going to college was good enough. They encouraged people to get English, philosophy, history degrees if that’s what they wanted. If you’re 17 and like history class it seems like a logical next step. They didn’t tell you you won’t be able to find work.

still a bad choice. The US is not USSR, one can choose what they want to study or even don't study at all.

Sure, but it’s a choice heavily influenced by authority figures in your life. But yes strictly binary it is a choice. Thankfully the world is more nuanced.

My point is that it's an information problem, leading to (more) bad choices. OPs claim that people live happily enough on minimum wage is actually another example, hopefully no 17 year old reads it and thinks 'ohh so I can live comfortable on minimum wage'. If there is 17 year old reading this thread then I hope to be a counterweight:

'HEY 17 YEAR OLD! Get a sellable skill! English literature is probably not enough! Working for minimum wage sucks!'

There is an estimation of 11-30 million undocumented immigrants in the US. The biggest difference is that in the US they are working on fast food jobs, house cleaning, babysitting. Different priorities.

That’s an easy enough problem to solve if we had the appetite to solve it, why couldn’t we legitimize the roles illegal immigrants currently do right now with a Singapore style migrant worker program?

To be clear, I think that there is an existing, legal migrant worker programme. They do most of the non-automated farm work in Central Valley California. Also, the Singapore system is a bit ugly if you look closely. I hope the US can do better.

Probably because the average Chinese is far more skilled than your average illegal immigrant.

It's not just raw labor force. It's capable engineers, designers, architects, etc. How is illegal immigration going to solve this?

The amount of skilled people wanting to migrate to the US is almost infinite (unfortunately). If the US decided to open 20million green card spots, they would be filled.

If you bring in 20 million skilled workers, you'd have to bring in 200 million unskilled workers to support them.

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