Push for $15 minimum wage

[JSt0rm]

We don't need free education for those that wish to learn the finer things in life when they aren't going to apply them being productive for society. I would suggest the education would need to be free for those wanting to be doctors, scientists and engineers... Those are the jobs that will still exist.

I dont think so. Yes to an extent these positions will still be there but in much smaller numbers. Once computers start to design computers its gonna be over for engineers.

 

[Spungo]

These are very good points for today. But in the future with automation doing most of everything what are people going to do? Capitalism breaks down at the point when there is a certain % of people who did everything right but there are no jobs for them.

Do you have any evidence for this assertion? Up until now, all progress in automation has caused people to have jobs but work fewer hours. There was a time when being a house wife was a full time job. Wake up, kill a chicken, take its feathers off, rip the bones out, wash it, cook it for a few hours, and it's ready to eat. Today - taken chicken out the freezer, put it in the oven, and come back when it beeps. The work week is so short that the average American watches 4 hours of TV per day. Most people only work 5 days per week, and lots of people work fewer than 5 days. If we're lucky, we'll see 4 day work weeks before I'm dead.

 

[JSt0rm]

If the people who are working end up working less dont you think less people will be working? No company is going to keep people on that they dont need. The whole point to creating automation efficiency is to remove labor from the equation.

I think in the next 5 years we will see automated vehicles moving you and products around. All of the companies are racing towards this goal at this point and it will happen. This is going to remove 480 billion (with a B) in wages from the us economy.

 

[Spungo]

If the people who are working end up working less dont you think less people will be working?

No?

No company is going to keep people on that they dont need. The whole point to creating automation efficiency is to remove labor from the equation.

Correct. Those people are forced to find other jobs. In the year 1800, most men were farmers. In the year 1970, most working women were secretaries. Despite secretary jobs vanishing, female labor participation is higher today than it was in 1970.

All of the companies are racing towards this goal at this point and it will happen. This is going to remove 480 billion (with a B) in wages from the us economy.

But it will add as much as $480B in consumer spending. You and certain Keynesian economists might spend less when prices fall, but most people spend more. When cell phones were expensive, nobody owned one. Now that anyone can afford a cell phone, it's a billion dollar industry. The cost of international shipping has dropped dramatically over the past few decades, so international shipping is huge these days. I buy stuff from Amazon all the time, and I get stuff from all over the world. The postage might say it came from California, it might say it came from China, it might say it came from Germany. Because the cost of trade has gone down, the volume of trade has gone up. The total number of dollars involved in trade has gone up even though the price has gone down.

This is a very well understood effect called Jevon's Paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand.[1]

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Do you have any evidence for this assertion? Up until now, all progress in automation has caused people to have jobs but work fewer hours. There was a time when being a house wife was a full time job. Wake up, kill a chicken, take its feathers off, rip the bones out, wash it, cook it for a few hours, and it's ready to eat. Today - taken chicken out the freezer, put it in the oven, and come back when it beeps. The work week is so short that the average American watches 4 hours of TV per day. Most people only work 5 days per week, and lots of people work fewer than 5 days. If we're lucky, we'll see 4 day work weeks before I'm dead.

And you used to be able to support a family on one income until the mid 80's.

 

[JSt0rm]

No?


Correct. Those people are forced to find other jobs. In the year 1800, most men were farmers. In the year 1970, most working women were secretaries. Despite secretary jobs vanishing, female labor participation is higher today than it was in 1970.

But it will add as much as $480B in consumer spending. You and certain Keynesian economists might spend less when prices fall, but most people spend more. When cell phones were expensive, nobody owned one. Now that anyone can afford a cell phone, it's a billion dollar industry. The cost of international shipping has dropped dramatically over the past few decades, so international shipping is huge these days. I buy stuff from Amazon all the time, and I get stuff from all over the world. The postage might say it came from California, it might say it came from China, it might say it came from Germany. Because the cost of trade has gone down, the volume of trade has gone up. The total number of dollars involved in trade has gone up even though the price has gone down.

This is a very well understood effect called Jevon's Paradox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I appreciate the effort you have put into this post and again you bring up a lot of good points. I also think once ta semi truck driver job goes away it will be filled with something else. What we are going to see is a mental inflation and its going to leave people behind because a lot of people just dont have that capability either from the gene pool or enviroment they gre up in. What do you do with a truck driver who was making 70k a year with benefits?

I think all of that stuff breaks down once we get to a point where business can function with only a certain % of the humans working. And then as we move forward it will become less and less of a %.

 

[BoberFett]

Educated labor market is in the 15 range? Damn that's sad.

Any sadder than the fact that some people think the uneducated labor market demands $15/hr? High school burger flippers need a "living wage"?

 

[Victorian Gray]

May I ask you what your skill set is?

Insulting people less fortunate than himself.

 

[soundforbjt]

Any sadder than the fact that some people think the uneducated labor market demands $15/hr? High school burger flippers need a "living wage"?

Most burger joints in my area have nearly zero teenagers, most are retirees or working poor.

 

[BoberFett]

And you used to be able to support a family on one income until the mid 80's.

http://economics.mit.edu/files/571

And before any loons accuse me of hating women, I'm just injecting facts. There's evidence that dual income families are part of the reason that it now seems to require two incomes just to get by. Something of a self fulfilling prophecy. At it's most basic, it's just common sense. Women going to work increased labor supply, and devalued the supply that already existed. I'm not saying women need to get back in the kitchen, there's probably a lot of men who would be happy to let their wife bring home the bacon. I for one would love to have a sugar mama. But untangling this mess won't be easy. It's a game of chicken. How do you convince people to stay home in order to decrease the labor supply thereby increasing the average value of labor in the long term, when the short term affect is a drastic decrease in individual household income?

This brings us back to discussions about basic income. If a parent could earn $15K a year staying at home with the kids, they might choose not to work. And given the future of automation, basic income may be inevitable.

 

[BoberFett]

Most burger joints in my area have nearly zero teenagers, most are retirees or working poor.

I'm not sure where you live, but my anecdotal evidence cancels yours out. I can take a picture the next time at the McDonald's near my house. Last time I was in there, everyone looked to be about 16.

 

[Spungo]

What we are going to see is a mental inflation and its going to leave people behind because a lot of people just dont have that capability either from the gene pool or enviroment they gre up in.

I would disagree with this point as well. In many ways, life is becoming a lot easier and less technical. Before computers, cashiers had to manually count change. They try to teach minimum wage cashier math in elementary school these days, and modern adults struggle to understand it.

An item costs $3.87 and you give me $5. To determine the amount of money to give to you, I count up from $3.87 to $5. Start with the largest denomination then work down to pennies. Giving you $1 brings the amount up to $4.87, adding a dime brings it to $4.97, and 3 pennies up to $5. If you add up the $1, the $0.10, and the $0.03, you know how much change I gave you. In 1960, teens getting paid minimum wage were expected to know this. If you were not smart enough to do this, you could not work as a cashier. It was a rough world back then. Anyone with any kind of disability was virtually unemployable. Every job seemed to require 2 hands, motor skills, and mental abilities.

The bar today is much lower. Someone who can't add or subtract numbers can still work as a cashier because the machine does all of the math. I've even seen cash registers that dispense correct change. It's not at all unusual to see a mentally handicapped person working as a cashier.

What do you do with a truck driver who was making 70k a year with benefits?

That's a good question. My guess is that warehousing will be big in the future. Retail is dying, but goods still come from somewhere. If I'm buying something on Amazon, it's probably coming from a warehouse. Eventually warehouses will be automated as well, almost like giant vending machines. We will need people selling, installing, and building those machines.

I think all of that stuff breaks down once we get to a point where business can function with only a certain % of the humans working. And then as we move forward it will become less and less of a %.

Absolutely. We can look forward to a future that is much cheaper, faster, more reliable, and safer. I have placed online stock orders in the middle of the night when no stock broker would be awake, and the transaction fee was only $10 or less (calling a broker is much more expensive than $10). I have never had to talk to a human to buy airline tickets or to figure out which flights can be chained together to reach my destination. I have never had to talk to a travel agent. Everything is all automated and fast.

 

[BoberFett]

That's a good question. My guess is that warehousing will be big in the future. Retail is dying, but goods still come from somewhere. If I'm buying something on Amazon, it's probably coming from a warehouse. Eventually warehouses will be automated as well, almost like giant vending machines. We will need people selling, installing, and building those machines.

That's a common argument, but the labor required for installing and maintaining automated systems is drastically lower than the labor required to do the work that the machines are doing, otherwise it wouldn't have been automated.

Eventually, we as a species will largely put ourselves out of a job. Which is great, but we also don't know how to deal with it yet.

 

[Spungo]

Women going to work increased labor supply, and devalued the supply that already existed.

The "more workers = lower pay" fallacy assumes there is a fixed amount of work to be done. This is simply not the case. Humans always want more.

When more value is added to a system, the cost of everything in that system declines in real terms. This is why falling prices, in real terms, are a good thing. It means people can buy more stuff. 1 farmer in America is probably more productive than 10 farmers in Kenya due to the differences in equipment, fertilizer, access to water, type of soil, etc. If you ask the American farmer if food is cheap, he will probably say yes. If you ask a Kenyan farmer the same question, they will say no; food is very expensive. That's the difference productivity makes. Increased efficiency and increased production drive prices down in real terms, and that allows us to consume more.

Adding women to the labor force might drive wages down, but it also drives costs down. Since value is being added to the system, one can expect the cost of goods to fall faster than the wages. If we revert back to a system where only men work, you can expect your wage to go up 10% but the cost of everything goes up 20%, and society ends up poorer.

Shoes are a good example of this. Is it true that Chinese labor has driven wages through the floor? Yes. Is it true that shoes are much cheaper than before due to that Chinese labor being added to the system? Yes. Are shoes more affordable today or less affordable today? More affordable. Nobody fixes shoes anymore. Why bother? Just throw them out and buy new ones. They're so cheap, they practically grow on trees. That's the good type of deflation. That's what women bring to the American economy.

 

[soundforbjt]

I'm not sure where you live, but my anecdotal evidence cancels yours out. I can take a picture the next time at the McDonald's near my house. Last time I was in there, everyone looked to be about 16.

Please do and go there during the day. I want to see all these teens working when they should be in school. The only teens I see working are part-time after school when I do see them.

 

[BoberFett]

Please do and go there during the day. I want to see all these teens working when they should be in school. The only teens I see working are part-time after school when I do see them.

Oh, so those teenagers working there don't count as employees if they're working there in the afternoon and evening?

You said there were nearly zero teenagers at every place near you, now you're backtracking and saying they're not there during the day, so they must not exist at all. You know there are these days of the week called the weekend too, right?

Get lost.

 

[ivwshane]

I appreciate the effort you have put into this post and again you bring up a lot of good points. I also think once ta semi truck driver job goes away it will be filled with something else. What we are going to see is a mental inflation and its going to leave people behind because a lot of people just dont have that capability either from the gene pool or enviroment they gre up in. What do you do with a truck driver who was making 70k a year with benefits?

I think all of that stuff breaks down once we get to a point where business can function with only a certain % of the humans working. And then as we move forward it will become less and less of a %.

In the past the promise was that automation and computers would lead to people having to work less which would lead to increased consumption of goods and services. Instead what we got was longer hours and less pay.

Until the supply of workers changes the balance of power which is currently in the hands of business I don't see anything changing and we will continue the race towards the bottom.

 

[soundforbjt]

Oh, so those teenagers working there don't count as employees if they're working there in the afternoon and evening?

You said there were nearly zero teenagers at every place near you, now you're backtracking and saying they're not there during the day, so they must not exist at all. You know there are these days of the week called the weekend too, right?

Get lost.

No, I'm countering the "line" that burger flippers are all teens working part-time therefore don't need higher wages that's always trotted out everytime there's talk of minimum wage increases. For many people it's their main income.

 

[zinfamous]

http://economics.mit.edu/files/571

And before any loons accuse me of hating women, I'm just injecting facts. There's evidence that dual income families are part of the reason that it now seems to require two incomes just to get by. Something of a self fulfilling prophecy. At it's most basic, it's just common sense. Women going to work increased labor supply, and devalued the supply that already existed. I'm not saying women need to get back in the kitchen, there's probably a lot of men who would be happy to let their wife bring home the bacon. I for one would love to have a sugar mama. But untangling this mess won't be easy. It's a game of chicken. How do you convince people to stay home in order to decrease the labor supply thereby increasing the average value of labor in the long term, when the short term affect is a drastic decrease in individual household income?

This brings us back to discussions about basic income. If a parent could earn $15K a year staying at home with the kids, they might choose not to work. And given the future of automation, basic income may be inevitable.

you and me man. I'd much rather cook and troll the internet all day.

 

[OCNewbie]

This free college idea, would it be like high school, where anyone could go, or would you still have to qualify, academically, for college?

 

[Sonikku]

I think at this point I've about given up on the notion of Americans ever being able to get a $7.25+ wage without taking on crippling college debt. We'll always have tax money for more wars but we'll never have it for higher college education.

At this point I'd be happy just to try to guide our country to embracing free trade schools. Not Masters and Doctorate type affairs or liberal arts or gender studies degrees or even classes in philosophy or Shakespeare, but an ultra lean 2 year cert or at the very most 4 year schools teaching nothing but economical skills in roles the economy is suffering shortages from.

 

[fskimospy]

I think at this point I've about given up on the notion of Americans ever being able to get a $7.25+ wage without taking on crippling college debt. At this point I'd be happy just to try to guide our country to embracing free trade schools. Not Masters and Doctorate type affairs or liberal arts or gender studies degrees or even classes in philosophy or Shakespeare, but an ultra lean 2 year cert or at the very most 4 year schools teaching nothing but economical skills in roles the economy is suffering shortages from.

Did you know that philosophy is actually a pretty high earning degree? Also, a surprisingly large number of CEOs and such were philosophy majors. It gives you the ability to think critically in a logical and structured manner which is actually a super useful skill.

 

[Spungo]

This free college idea, would it be like high school, where anyone could go, or would you still have to qualify, academically, for college?

College is already free.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#womens-and-gender-studies
What Bernie is talking about is free certification. You only pay for university if you want certification. It's not good enough to just read about feminism on the internet and join tumblr. You can't be a professional feminist unless you have a degree.

How about this. Let's completely stop all funding to non-STEM majors. Put all of that funding into medicine. We need doctors, we need nurses, we need oral surgeons. We don't need more baristas.

Did you know that philosophy is actually a pretty high earning degree? Also, a surprisingly large number of CEOs and such were philosophy majors. It gives you the ability to think critically in a logical and structured manner which is actually a super useful skill.

That's certainly an interesting oddity. We think of psychology as real and philosophy as bullshit, but the people who take philosophy tend to be a lot smarter and more successful than the people taking psychology.

Notice where philosophy is on the graph. It's in the physics and math region, upper left.

 

[Sonikku]

Did you know that philosophy is actually a pretty high earning degree? Also, a surprisingly large number of CEOs and such were philosophy majors. It gives you the ability to think critically in a logical and structured manner which is actually a super useful skill.

Oh I don't doubt it. There are benefits to classes like English, Philosophy, Science etc. But if you're going to "sell" conservatives on an idea like this you basically have to gut anything that has a value that can't be quantified on a spreadsheet. It would be a serious long shot even passing free trade schools as it is, much less college with all the fixin's.

 

[soundforbjt]

College is already free.
http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/#womens-and-gender-studies
What Bernie is talking about is free certification. You only pay for university if you want certification. It's not good enough to just read about feminism on the internet and join tumblr. You can't be a professional feminist unless you have a degree.

How about this. Let's completely stop all funding to non-STEM majors. Put all of that funding into medicine. We need doctors, we need nurses, we need oral surgeons. We don't need more baristas.


That's certainly an interesting oddity. We think of psychology as real and philosophy as bullshit, but the people who take philosophy tend to be a lot smarter and more successful than the people taking psychology.

Notice where philosophy is on the graph. It's in the physics and math region, upper left.

Good luck getting more doctors or surgeons, you'll first have to get the AMA to agree. They've kept the numbers low to keep prices up.