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> Like if a job doesn't pay enough for people to comfortably have a family and leasure time, to me it's somewhere in spectrum of slavery, indentured servitude, and poverty trap, and not compatible with a society of equals and representative government.

So should a teenager, just entering the workforce, should be paid enough to support a family?

I’d rather sacrifice a living wage for the opportunity of upward job mobility, that’s the metric I really care about. It’s not the job you start with that matters, it’s the job you end with, and how long it takes to get there.

I don't think people expect one income to support a family anymore. Two working parents has become the norm for all but the highest earners.

But yes, two teenagers may very well need to support a family. All it takes is one broken condom and being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There's not a lot of upward job mobility for most people. We can't all be CEOs. Even if that teenager has aspirations for a bigger career, they'll have expenses like college tuition, books, and travel.

>Low wages have massive negative externalities for society.

The alternative to low wages isn't necessarily high wages. It could also be zero wages, as the study in the OP demonstrates.

Which goes to show that rather than minimum wage we ought to have a welbeing floor, perhaps with UBI, perhaps based on keeping key costs, like food, housing, healthcare, and education minimal.

Having lost a job suddenly, any employment is better than none. A perfect job that provides everything you need is pretty far detached from "this is sufficient", or even "this will slow my fall while I work something else out", and this kind of bitter resentment towards anything less than a job that pays out an idyllic American existence is what causes them to be priced out by legislative fiat like the minimum wage.

More to the point, not every skill level or job is _worth_ that kind of compensation (as uncomfortable as it might be to entertain), and attempts to circumvent market forces by making lower wages illegal at some arbitrary point have substantially more damaging externalities than 'low wages' -- which are as much a system of slavery as gravity or magnetism, and just as resilient to ideation.

> More to the point, not every skill level or job is _worth_ that kind of compensation ...

This is a fair stance to take, but you need to accept the consequences of the stance when people get desperate.

> attempts to circumvent market forces by making lower wages illegal at some arbitrary point have substantially more damaging externalities than 'low wages'

A population of people who can not feed themselves are going to kill you on the street for the canned tuna you might have in your bag.

> Having lost a job suddenly, any employment is better than none.

While this is true for you it is not true for the society as a whole.

This entire comment seems be written with a complete disrespect for macro dynamics and taken right out of a hunter gather society.

It completely ignores everything modern governance - and it is quite frightening.

In catastrophic circumstances perhaps, but the metric for actual starvation in the US is so low that finding a solid figure is difficult. Malnutrition, while higher, seems strongly correlated to child/elder abuse/neglect, and not homelessness. Street muggings for nourishment by a starving underclass is a fantastical and disingenuous narrative. And, surely, you see the dissonance in suggesting that poverty leads to crime, while also suggesting criminalizing low-wage labor?

> While this is true for you it is not true for the society as a whole...

Why isn't it? What about using the legal, practical market means at your disposal is exclusive to some privileged section of society, and why does it include me and nobody else in hard times?

Your 'rebuttal' is just a broad, dismissive gesture to theory and platitudinous insults.

I agree everything people might want done isn't worth the cost of having a human do it. But I don't see why such jobs should exist. I also don't think the base level of welfare needs to "idyllic," but enough for everyone to act as good citizens without being trapped in cursed doom cycles of impoverishment.

In general, though, it wouldn't matter what the minimum wage is if everyone had a sufficient level of general welfare without working...

Which goes to show that rather than minimum wage we ought to have a welbeing floor, perhaps with UBI, perhaps based on keeping key costs, like food, housing, healthcare, and education minimal.

You find it weird people don't want to starve? It may feel weird to you in your ivory towers but people still want to live no matter how demeaning their life gets.

Jobs are a product of the economy. In the end their prices (wages) move with market forces. The only way you deal with scarcity is by increasing supply (i.e. boosting industry), but alas there's always "intellectuals" like you sneering down on it as if people should just choose to die instead.