47 karma · joined March 24, 2015
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.16...
So at least one study seems to support the hypothesis (interesting that it also showed increased substance abuse, which was also discussed as one of the culprit's of the higher death rate for white men).
I found an article about this:
http://business.time.com/2011/07/26/great-recession-drives-f...
Suicide, drug use, and alcoholism have deeper cultural ties. I have no idea what those ties are, but it likely won't be fixed by a 4% annual increase in wages.
I can't help but wonder if perhaps this increase in self destructive behavior is due to an increase in secularism. Blacks and Hispanics are more religious than whites, and with that religiosity comes greater church attendance which likely brings greater community support (a generalization, I know, but I'm guessing that this is probably more true than not).
After researching more into the subject I have come to the following conclusion:
Raising Minimum Wages marginally has no effect on employment rates, only when the increase in pay can be tolerated by employers by absorbing the increased cost by increasing prices, reducing higher paid employee's wages, reducing employee turnover costs, and reducing profitability.
The end result is a smattering of higher priced goods, lower paid managers, and less incentive to start a business relying on low skilled workers. Also, you can throw in some lower job turnover as well, since the cost of losing your job is greater.
Of course, the next question is, when is "marginal", no longer "marginal"? Is it $15/hr, $20, $50? At some point, alternative methods to manual labor will become cheaper (such as dropping $100k upfront for a burger making robot). Once we hit that point, things will get ugly fast.
So this is the report that was supposed to show that minimum wage increases don't affect employment rate (infact, they actually might improve it), however, when you look at the data presented within the study itself, you find that indeed, the NJ employment rate seemed to increase, and the PA employment rate seemed to decrease slightly. However, when you look at the number of employees per fast food restaurant, you'll see that the NJ restaurants started at a much lower number per restaurant than the PA restaurants, and then that employees per restaurant metric raises up by the end of the study but it never reaches the same number as the PA restaurants.
What that study actually seemed to show to me, is given the ample notice that business owners had about the minimum wage increase, they thinned out their workforce. Then the minimum wage increase came (the study actually started shortly after the increase had already been put in place, I believe), and the business owners realized they over thinned out the workforce, hired a few more people to get to the right number which was still less than the PA number with lower labor costs.
And since we don't exist in a vacuum, once a business owner realizes their store in NJ can run on 18 people, why should they run their store in PA with 20? It could probably make due with 19.
However, no one ever brings up the point that per restaurant, NJ never had as many employees as PA, essentially stating that PA was using more employees to accomplish the same job as NJ, which is exactly what you would expect to happen from an increase in labor cost.
Instead, everyone only focuses on the jobs added/lost during the short time of the study. It's like I'm the only person in the world who actually looked at the data in the report, instead of just reading the author's findings. Very Frustrating to consistently seeing this study shown as proof that minimum wage doesn't affect employment numbers.
It infuriated me working for half a day on an assignment and then watching these other kids come into the lab, knock out the assignment in 20 minutes and laugh about how easy the assignment was.
After college, I taught myself how to build websites, which led to javascript, then PHP, then databases. Teaching myself on real world projects was enjoyable because there was no comparison to anyone next to me, it was just me trying to figure out how to get something to work. And when it worked, that felt great, not horrible because it took me 10 times as long as someone else.
Hollywood complained that these companies were illegally making copies, so the mom and pop rental stores started to include the original copy as well with the edited copy, to prove that they were not making illegal copies.
Ultimately, all of these companies were put out of business because the courts ruled that just because you bought a DVD, you don't have the rights to modify it because it causes "irreparable injury to the creative artistic expression in the copyrighted movies". I find it interesting that the issue was harming the creative artistic expression, not financial at all, since, they were not pirating the films, so in truth, Hollywood was selling more DVD's since people who wouldn't normally watch a movie with 75 f-words in it, might actually watch the edited version.
Of course, in today's world, there's not many products that we can buy that did not have artistic expression involved in building that product. My house was artistically designed by an architect, if I don't like the kitchen, would I offend his artistic expression by remodeling? My phone was definitely "designed", but maybe I don't like showing off the apple logo on the back, so I put a cover on it, am I offending the artistic expression? If I'm not able to modify a product, do I really own it at all?
He was shocked to find, that of these marriages that were the least happy, something like 20% went ahead and got a divorce anyways, but, of the other 80%, their happiness scores were no different from the general population.
Moral of the story, perhaps people are a little too quick to pull the plug on a marriage.