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I have to agree with jacquesm here. You're right that many homeless individuals can't produce a minimum wage's worth of value for an employer, and you're right

I have to agree with jacquesm here. You're right that many homeless individuals can't produce a minimum wage's worth of value for an employer, and you're right that the requirement of a minimum wage then makes it nearly impossible for them to get work that has any chance of improving their situation. However, jacquesm is right that the minimum wage exists as a lower threshold that prevents the exploitation of workers, and that's as true today as it was in the 1920s. Reducing or abolishing the minimum wage would certainly lead to powerful economic deflation, and while that looks great on paper, in reality it leads to lots more homeless and poor people. In practice, game theory does not apply to economics as often as theorists think it does. For example, you'd think that if some employer wasn't offering a decent wage, then they'd be unable to get workers, so they're forced to maintain the same wages as everyone else. However, eventually there will be an economic depression like the one we have now, and that will result in huge numbers of able employees, and a ripe opportunity for would-be employers to exploit that situation in a way that wouldn't fix itself for decades. I am an employer. And, yes, although my margins are ridiculously thin after you count up all the money that goes in to everything, the truth still is that I do make sure I get multiples of value from my employees (or contractors); otherwise, I simply wouldn't bother having them. Homelessness and the problems of the poor are something that I think about a lot, and as I said, I have no idea what the solutions are. I do know that merely reducing or eliminating minimum wage requirements -- even only for their specific case -- is not a viable solution.

thaumaturgy 16y ago
> I have no idea what the solutions are. ...actually, that's not quite true. I think I know of one solution, I just don't talk about it much because it's unrealistic. But here goes: the real colonization of space. I think that extreme poverty and conflict are symptoms of a deeper problem in human societies. Unfortunately, at this stage of our technological development, human economies must be continually and steadily growing in order to be "healthy" (low rates of unemployment, reasonable consumer price indexes, low homelessness, etc.). Further, while it's theoretically possible that the planet could support vastly greater human populations, you must take into account human territorialism, cultural divides, and other social-psychological factors. So, in practice, it's hard to imagine the planet supporting, say, twice as many humans, in peaceful conditions, at our current moral and psychological development. So, there's a kind of "rebound" effect in population growth: rather than trying to grow in the most efficient, compact manner possible, human populations tend instead to grow and explore as quickly as possible, until some barrier stops the growth. When that happens, two interesting effects seem to occur: the barrier area tends to develop denser populations, and the original population centers tend to decay. Also, you have individuals (and groups of individuals) that tend to vastly out-produce the rest of their society. This is one of the parts of the engine that causes human population growth. However, it also has a tendency to create greater efficiency, which both takes advantage of the poor as well as creates more poor people. (There is a counter-argument that this also leads to better living conditions for the poor, and it's true, but that doesn't resolve the much greater economic divide between the various socio-economic classes.) If these industrialists don't have some kind of frontier to grow into, then they inadvertently magnify the problems of barrier growth: they create lots of wealth for a small group, at the expense of a much larger group. This is a very poor, hasty description, but the basic essence of it all is that at this point humans simply need some frontier to expand into in order to maintain reasonably healthy societies, and we don't have one. I don't think we'll be getting one anytime soon, so I expect the human condition to get a little grim for the next century or so.
- arghnoname 16y ago
  Why not colonize the ocean floor instead or as well? I'd be as excited as anyone if we were colonizing space. If humanity survives long enough and manages to avoid too many dark ages, it is an inevitability, but at the present time, doing so would be terribly expensive. I'm not sure if you could honestly classify spending trillions of dollars on space colonization is the best way to allocate resources for a poverty reduction program. In some distant future where such things _are_ financial feasible or necessary, I would imagine that economic opportunities would be traded to the earlier pioneers who would suffer under what would surely be difficult and dangerous circumstances.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    The engineering challenges of colonizing the ocean floor are probably as great or greater than those of colonizing space. Weird but true. Some go so far as to call the ocean floor 'inner space'. http://isc.gso.uri.edu/ http://isc.gso.uri.edu/
  - thaumaturgy 16y ago
    > I'm not sure if you could honestly classify spending trillions of dollars on space colonization is the best way to allocate resources for a poverty reduction program. Historically, this has always been the case though, and the initial up-front expense has always benefited the society willing to fund the exploration. (Or, almost always; I think I recall a case where one civilization went exploring, bumped into a another much more warlike civilization, and was all but wiped out. I don't recall which specific example I'm thinking of though, and there are probably a few anyway.)
- jazzdev 16y ago
  they create lots of wealth for a small group, at the expense of a much larger group. PG does a good job of explaining why this is not true in his essay, "Mind the Gap" http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html The poor get richer too. Just at a slower rate.
  - 16y ago

thaumaturgy 16y ago

> I have no idea what the solutions are. ...actually, that's not quite true. I think I know of one solution, I just don't talk about it much because it's unrealistic. But here goes: the real colonization of space. I think that extreme poverty and conflict are symptoms of a deeper problem in human societies. Unfortunately, at this stage of our technological development, human economies must be continually and steadily growing in order to be "healthy" (low rates of unemployment, reasonable consumer price indexes, low homelessness, etc.). Further, while it's theoretically possible that the planet could support vastly greater human populations, you must take into account human territorialism, cultural divides, and other social-psychological factors. So, in practice, it's hard to imagine the planet supporting, say, twice as many humans, in peaceful conditions, at our current moral and psychological development. So, there's a kind of "rebound" effect in population growth: rather than trying to grow in the most efficient, compact manner possible, human populations tend instead to grow and explore as quickly as possible, until some barrier stops the growth. When that happens, two interesting effects seem to occur: the barrier area tends to develop denser populations, and the original population centers tend to decay. Also, you have individuals (and groups of individuals) that tend to vastly out-produce the rest of their society. This is one of the parts of the engine that causes human population growth. However, it also has a tendency to create greater efficiency, which both takes advantage of the poor as well as creates more poor people. (There is a counter-argument that this also leads to better living conditions for the poor, and it's true, but that doesn't resolve the much greater economic divide between the various socio-economic classes.) If these industrialists don't have some kind of frontier to grow into, then they inadvertently magnify the problems of barrier growth: they create lots of wealth for a small group, at the expense of a much larger group. This is a very poor, hasty description, but the basic essence of it all is that at this point humans simply need some frontier to expand into in order to maintain reasonably healthy societies, and we don't have one. I don't think we'll be getting one anytime soon, so I expect the human condition to get a little grim for the next century or so.

arghnoname 16y ago
Why not colonize the ocean floor instead or as well? I'd be as excited as anyone if we were colonizing space. If humanity survives long enough and manages to avoid too many dark ages, it is an inevitability, but at the present time, doing so would be terribly expensive. I'm not sure if you could honestly classify spending trillions of dollars on space colonization is the best way to allocate resources for a poverty reduction program. In some distant future where such things _are_ financial feasible or necessary, I would imagine that economic opportunities would be traded to the earlier pioneers who would suffer under what would surely be difficult and dangerous circumstances.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  The engineering challenges of colonizing the ocean floor are probably as great or greater than those of colonizing space. Weird but true. Some go so far as to call the ocean floor 'inner space'. http://isc.gso.uri.edu/ http://isc.gso.uri.edu/
- thaumaturgy 16y ago
  > I'm not sure if you could honestly classify spending trillions of dollars on space colonization is the best way to allocate resources for a poverty reduction program. Historically, this has always been the case though, and the initial up-front expense has always benefited the society willing to fund the exploration. (Or, almost always; I think I recall a case where one civilization went exploring, bumped into a another much more warlike civilization, and was all but wiped out. I don't recall which specific example I'm thinking of though, and there are probably a few anyway.)
jazzdev 16y ago
they create lots of wealth for a small group, at the expense of a much larger group. PG does a good job of explaining why this is not true in his essay, "Mind the Gap" http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html http://www.paulgraham.com/gap.html The poor get richer too. Just at a slower rate.
- 16y ago