The Kenya Financial Diaries Project

In addition, the best "do-ers" to execute pilot programs aren't always (perhaps even are rarely) good educators for the next round of specialists to scale up the program. They'd rather be on the ground than writing documents about best practices. So a lot of institutional knowledge from the pilot programs are lost.

There's probably a good opportunity for an app/service/startup that makes recording this institutional knowledge more seamless for the on-the-ground "do-ers," but I'm not sure what the business model would be.

Change wages, there's always a period of adjustment. Some jobs do disappear. Others get more work to do. Then prices adjust, and things settle down.

I am not sure how you can make the statement that higher minimum wages don't equate to job losses. Do you have proof? It's common sense that if you wage the price of something you buy less of it. Unfortunately for the poor, minimum wage jobs are rather elastic. In France, with a relatively high minimum wage, unemployment is double digits and places like McDonald's have gone to digital order machines as opposed to hiring more cashiers. While that might increase demand for computer machine manufacturing and services, the minimum wage students and unskilled persons aren't likely to have the skills needed to gain those jobs.

You also have the chronically unemployed in both the U.S. as well as places like France where it's livable to simply collect the government check.

Minimum wage shouldn't be a career. I have little sympathy for those who haves worked minimum wage for ten years or more. That suggests a lack of ambition, intelligence or both. Even the pimple faced 16 year old at Chick fil'a eventually gets promoted to team leader potentially in a matter of months or a year. Those who have worked minimum wage for 5 years or more, I'd be very interested in their work history, their criminal record, their tardiness, their productivity.

At a place like McDonalds, if you just show up on time consistently, you get raises. If you're a hard worker and express the desire there are plenty of assistant manager trainee tracks available.

Raising minimum wage isn't the answer -- taking away the incentive to be lazy would do more than throwing people an extra $2 per hour. The same bad decisions that got them in that situation are still the same bad decisions that they will keep making; unless there is incentive to stop.

Someone right now could go to North Dakota and get a job doing local truck deliveries paying up to $100k per year, some positions will even train. Working in the oil patch down in Texas and Louisiana offers high paying entry level positions that quickly end up paying over $100k.

My point is that there is always a way out of a minimum wage existence, the problem is that many people are content getting their free Medicaid, EBT cards and subsidized housing; so there is less incentive to move across the country or take a class somewhere or join a union apprentice program.

I am not saying end welfare or anything like that, but a safety net ought not become a way of life as it has for millions of people.

What's with the union hate? Unions are corporations for workers. They are trying to maximize their compensation from the amount of value that their workers create, just as business owners are trying to maximize the profit they scrape off their workers.

They are fighting for a fairer wage for their constituents, and if such organizations existed for the majority of laborers, we wouldn't need a minimum wage.

But that's beside the point. A fair minimum wage is important because in 2013, 88.7% of American workers did not have a union to negotiate just compensation for them.

The value of a person is not equal to their wage. That is exactly my point! All people, in my belief, have AT LEAST the right to earn enough money to live off of without government assistance if they work 40 hours a week. They should have a safe place to live, clothes, enough quality food to eat, and enough to afford their other basic living expenses. It would be tight. But I'm not advocating everyone should have 10s of thousands in disposable income, just that they shouldn't need any government assistance to get by. That is simply valuing them as a person. That means stop exploiting people. There is a difference between free market and exploitation. And guess what... the exploited are tired, very tired... and that is why minimum wage reform is becoming an issue... because the problem is REAL. Try living it sometime... helps add perspective.

Real estate costs have risen - thats a huge undercounted cost. I remember reading that at one point the avg house price was 3-4 times annual household income. In many economic hotspots around the West today that seems like a fable from a mythical past.

The big reason was that from 1945 until the late 70s, America had a huge wealth gap compared the rest of the world. Half of Europe was communist, the other half recovering from a major war. Asia was still poor and technological backwards AND was recovering from war.

Western Europe's heavy handed socialism wasn't as competitive as their light socialism is now.

America was the undisputed leader of the economically free world.

All the sudden by the 1970's, the US had to start competing more and more with the rest of the world. Our super high wages for unskilled labor just weren't competitive on a global scale.

Also, women moving in the job market actually lowers wages because the worker supply expanded greatly.

I'd agree. There are some jobs which are not profitable and need supplementary funding to be done.

But in our modern capitalist system, if you're working for someone, you have a job because more value can be extracted from the work you do than what you're paid. The same holds true if the business you work for is being subsidized by the government. Your employer is still skimming off a profit from the subsidy.

The worker and employer should decide what fair wage is, but this means that they should have an equal ground to negotiate on. Large groups of organized well-funded and well-lawyered people are setting the compensation rules for an unorganized and financially desperate pool of labor. Negotiations for fair pay cannot happen in those circumstances. Labor has all the cards stacked against them. Laws that limit the ability of or outright ban organized labor need to be repealed to that end.

Voting with your wallet might have a small effect, but that requires consumers to be well versed in how each business runs and compensates their workers. When the trend is that the majority of workers and yourself have been consistently given the shaft for decades, it is difficult to enact change solely through educated consumption.