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At the time, the labor pool wasn't truly global yet. It's one argument to pay living wages inside a closed-ish economy, it's another when low skilled jobs, espe

by gdilla 8y ago

At the time, the labor pool wasn't truly global yet. It's one argument to pay living wages inside a closed-ish economy, it's another when low skilled jobs, especially in manufacturing, are done for pennies on the dollar across the globe. There's always tradeoffs.

thebradbain 8y ago
Across the globe, in countries where they're paid pennies on the dollar, the cost of living is also a magnitude lower than it is here. We should be paying our workers here a wage that keeps up with the cost of living. That's the human thing to do. Otherwise, we're the cartoon evil economists in a "See why these two lines don't intersect? That's why the poor people must starve" type of situation.
- gdilla 8y ago
  The problem is, the Corporations building sneakers, toasters, and clothing aren't going to have ANY jobs here to pay living wages for. They're gonna ship the jobs overseas cuz, you know, profit.
  - thebradbain 8y ago
    Let them. The US already doesn't manufacture nearly at the capacity it once did for this same reason. The US can implement trade policy to either disincentive producers from leaving or incentivize manufacturers to stay if they really have to. The specific solutions to that are probably outside both our realms of expertise. Profits are not people, so why do we care about the bottom line more than fellow human beings?
- closeparen 8y ago
  What kind of degenerate society listens to economists with their intersecting lines espousing their regressive views on supply and demand? Probably the same cesspool that pays chemists with their arrows and triangles to stand up in front of impressionable children and preach their wantonly destructive opinions on fire. Joking aside, scarcity is real. It works the same no matter how you feel about it. Descriptions of scarcity and related dynamics are just that, descriptive, not normative. You can distribute scarce things in more equitable ways, but prices generally reflect physical realities that can't be waved away by a sufficiently woke fiat. Set the maximum rent at $500 and the minimum wage at $5,000,000 and we still can't all live in San Francisco's current housing stock.
  - thebradbain 8y ago
    I’m minoring in economics from a top 5 school. I understand the fundamentals of how the economy works. I respect the tools economics gives us for modeling our world. But economics is just that— a tool. We mustn’t follow it blindly, especially in the case the “optimal” configuration is one that leaves many more persons impoverished, homeless, and even dead who may have been able to been saved from such a fate. Externalities, by their definition, are hard to quantify. And unfortunately, too often economists discount the pricelessness of human life.

by gdilla 8y ago

thebradbain 8y ago

Across the globe, in countries where they're paid pennies on the dollar, the cost of living is also a magnitude lower than it is here. We should be paying our workers here a wage that keeps up with the cost of living. That's the human thing to do. Otherwise, we're the cartoon evil economists in a "See why these two lines don't intersect? That's why the poor people must starve" type of situation.

gdilla 8y ago
The problem is, the Corporations building sneakers, toasters, and clothing aren't going to have ANY jobs here to pay living wages for. They're gonna ship the jobs overseas cuz, you know, profit.
- thebradbain 8y ago
  Let them. The US already doesn't manufacture nearly at the capacity it once did for this same reason. The US can implement trade policy to either disincentive producers from leaving or incentivize manufacturers to stay if they really have to. The specific solutions to that are probably outside both our realms of expertise. Profits are not people, so why do we care about the bottom line more than fellow human beings?
closeparen 8y ago
What kind of degenerate society listens to economists with their intersecting lines espousing their regressive views on supply and demand? Probably the same cesspool that pays chemists with their arrows and triangles to stand up in front of impressionable children and preach their wantonly destructive opinions on fire. Joking aside, scarcity is real. It works the same no matter how you feel about it. Descriptions of scarcity and related dynamics are just that, descriptive, not normative. You can distribute scarce things in more equitable ways, but prices generally reflect physical realities that can't be waved away by a sufficiently woke fiat. Set the maximum rent at $500 and the minimum wage at $5,000,000 and we still can't all live in San Francisco's current housing stock.
- thebradbain 8y ago
  I’m minoring in economics from a top 5 school. I understand the fundamentals of how the economy works. I respect the tools economics gives us for modeling our world. But economics is just that— a tool. We mustn’t follow it blindly, especially in the case the “optimal” configuration is one that leaves many more persons impoverished, homeless, and even dead who may have been able to been saved from such a fate. Externalities, by their definition, are hard to quantify. And unfortunately, too often economists discount the pricelessness of human life.