9 ms·

Because I don't want to starve.

by kork__ 8y ago

Symmetry 8y ago
The reason that, back in the progressive era, all the eugenicists were on board with the idea of the minimum wage was that they thought that at a high enough wage "undesirables" wouldn't be able to a job and so couldn't compete away jobs from "desirable" workers. Thankfully these days we have a social safety net that generally prevents people from starving whether they could get a job or not but making people starve was part of the reason for the original support for minimum wage laws back at the turn of the last century.
- pjc50 8y ago
  [citation needed]
  - Symmetry 8y ago
    During the second half of the Progressive Era, beginning roughly in 1908, progressive economists and their reform allies achieved many statutory victories, including state laws that regulated working conditions, banned child labor, instituted “mothers’ pensions,” capped working hours and, the sine qua non, fixed minimum wages. In using eugenics to justify exclusionary immigration legislation, the race-suicide theorists offered a model to economists advocating labor reforms, notably those affiliated with the American Association for Labor Legislation, the organization of academic economists that Orloff and Skocpol (1984, p. 726) call the “leading association of U.S. social reform advocates in the Progressive Era.” Progressive economists, like their neoclassical critics, believed that binding minimum wages would cause job losses. However, the progressive economists also believed that the job loss induced by minimum wages was a social benefit, as it 212 Journal of Economic Perspectives performed the eugenic service ridding the labor force of the “unemployable.” Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1897 [1920], p. 785) put it plainly: “With regard to certain sections of the population [the “unemployable”], this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.” “[O]f all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,” Sidney Webb (1912, p. 992) opined in the Journal of Political Economy, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them to unrestrainedly compete as wage earners.” A minimum wage was seen to operate eugenically through two channels: by deterring prospective immigrants (Henderson, 1900) and also by removing from employment the “unemployable,” who, thus identified, could be, for example, segregated in rural communities or sterilized. https://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pd...
ttoinou 8y ago
Are you really going to starve ? Why aren't the products you need to buy to not starve cheaper ? Maybe because of this kind of laws
- codedokode 8y ago
  In a free market without minimum salary, it would be difficult for people living alone and having kids (so they have to pay rent and for kindergarten or school), to compete with someone living with parents (and not paying any rent) or with immigrants living 8 people in a room.
  - ttoinou 8y ago
    And of course, in minimum wage societies money, resource, wealth just fall from the sky and all the people you described have kids, nannies, multiple houses just like that. We should just ban poverty it will solve everything
    - codedokode 8y ago
      Resources, houses and other nice things are created by people who work. It is not like everyone stops working after setting minimum wage. Business owners might get little less profit, but somehow I don't feel sorry for them.
      - ttoinou 8y ago
        You example was rather extreme so le met take an extreme example : put the minimum wage at 1 million USD / month. What happens ? but somehow I don't feel sorry for them Of course you don't. But do you for people who weren't able to work because of the minimum wage law and its enforcement ?
- joh6nn 8y ago
  Kraft-Heinz had $26.2B in sales in 2017, of which $9B was profit. They had 39K employees. If we naively assume that all 39K are minimum wage employees working full time all year, that comes out to a payroll cost of $1.2B. that's approximately 5% of their total revenues, meaning if it had to be paid for exclusively through new sales, the price increase per item sold would likely be 5%. In reality, it would be much lower than that because Kraft-Heinz is already paying a large portion of that $1.2B in its existing payroll costs and not all of its 39K employees are minimum wage workers. So the argument that food is expensive because of employee wages is provably false.
dang 8y ago
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18124049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18124049. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18121317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18121317.

Because I don't want to starve.

by kork__ 8y ago

Because I don't want to starve.

The reason that, back in the progressive era, all the eugenicists were on board with the idea of the minimum wage was that they thought that at a high enough wage "undesirables" wouldn't be able to a job and so couldn't compete away jobs from "desirable" workers. Thankfully these days we have a social safety net that generally prevents people from starving whether they could get a job or not but making people starve was part of the reason for the original support for minimum wage laws back at the turn of the last century.

pjc50 8y ago
[citation needed]
- Symmetry 8y ago
  During the second half of the Progressive Era, beginning roughly in 1908, progressive economists and their reform allies achieved many statutory victories, including state laws that regulated working conditions, banned child labor, instituted “mothers’ pensions,” capped working hours and, the sine qua non, fixed minimum wages. In using eugenics to justify exclusionary immigration legislation, the race-suicide theorists offered a model to economists advocating labor reforms, notably those affiliated with the American Association for Labor Legislation, the organization of academic economists that Orloff and Skocpol (1984, p. 726) call the “leading association of U.S. social reform advocates in the Progressive Era.” Progressive economists, like their neoclassical critics, believed that binding minimum wages would cause job losses. However, the progressive economists also believed that the job loss induced by minimum wages was a social benefit, as it 212 Journal of Economic Perspectives performed the eugenic service ridding the labor force of the “unemployable.” Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1897 [1920], p. 785) put it plainly: “With regard to certain sections of the population [the “unemployable”], this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.” “[O]f all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,” Sidney Webb (1912, p. 992) opined in the Journal of Political Economy, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them to unrestrainedly compete as wage earners.” A minimum wage was seen to operate eugenically through two channels: by deterring prospective immigrants (Henderson, 1900) and also by removing from employment the “unemployable,” who, thus identified, could be, for example, segregated in rural communities or sterilized. https://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pdf https://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pd...

ttoinou 8y ago

Are you really going to starve ? Why aren't the products you need to buy to not starve cheaper ? Maybe because of this kind of laws

codedokode 8y ago
In a free market without minimum salary, it would be difficult for people living alone and having kids (so they have to pay rent and for kindergarten or school), to compete with someone living with parents (and not paying any rent) or with immigrants living 8 people in a room.
- ttoinou 8y ago
  And of course, in minimum wage societies money, resource, wealth just fall from the sky and all the people you described have kids, nannies, multiple houses just like that. We should just ban poverty it will solve everything
  - codedokode 8y ago
    Resources, houses and other nice things are created by people who work. It is not like everyone stops working after setting minimum wage. Business owners might get little less profit, but somehow I don't feel sorry for them.
    - ttoinou 8y ago
      You example was rather extreme so le met take an extreme example : put the minimum wage at 1 million USD / month. What happens ? but somehow I don't feel sorry for them Of course you don't. But do you for people who weren't able to work because of the minimum wage law and its enforcement ?
joh6nn 8y ago
Kraft-Heinz had $26.2B in sales in 2017, of which $9B was profit. They had 39K employees. If we naively assume that all 39K are minimum wage employees working full time all year, that comes out to a payroll cost of $1.2B. that's approximately 5% of their total revenues, meaning if it had to be paid for exclusively through new sales, the price increase per item sold would likely be 5%. In reality, it would be much lower than that because Kraft-Heinz is already paying a large portion of that $1.2B in its existing payroll costs and not all of its 39K employees are minimum wage workers. So the argument that food is expensive because of employee wages is provably false.

dang 8y ago

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18124049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18124049. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18121317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18121317.