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All these comparisons miss one thing: after WWII America had a monopoly. We had destroyed our competitors factories in Asia as well as in Europe. It took a wh

• martin_bech 6y ago
  Hi from Scandinavia, we dont have a monopoly on anything, and no actual minimum wage, yet people make about $20+ at the lowest paying jobs, enjoy 5 weeks paid vacation, free healthcare and cheap childcare..
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • friedman23 6y ago
    Scandinavia isn't a country
    • Daishiman 6y ago
      We are all aware of that. Doesn't change that their policies are extremely similar by all accounts.
      • friedman23 6y ago
        The point is that I can't determine where his country's wealth comes from if he doesn't state his country. Also I'm skeptical f this person actually even being from the region. For example, if he is from Norway most of his wealth is derived from oil.
        • martin_bech 6y ago
          Im from Denmark, none of the money is derived from oil.
          • rightbyte 6y ago
            Denmark is selfsufficient in oil production. It helps ... but so is the US.
            • ashtonkem 6y ago
              Thanks to fracking, the US is actually a marginal net exporter of oil, depending on the average price of oil (traditional wells can squeeze out frackers with their lower production cost) As you said, oil helps, but it’s not determinative. Norway is interesting in that they’ve used their oil money very wisely, but it seems pretty clear that other policies are necessary in order to ensure that economic prosperity is well distributed.
    • curtis3389 6y ago
      Perhaps they mean Denmark+Norway+Sweden collectively? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavia#Use_of_Nordic_countries_vs._Scandinavia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavia#Use_of_Nordic_coun...
      • hombre_fatal 6y ago
        I kinda agree with GP: when someone isn't specific about where they're from, then nobody can really respond to them. It's like when people say they're from Europe or how great things are from them there. Even if you wanted to look up how your argument applies to their country or how their country addresses your point, you cannot.
        • jacobush 6y ago
          It works when where they are from is used as a counter-example. I may be jaded, but I often find people from the US say, "this would be impossible". Then it's often interesting to point to various places in the world where in fact, the thing is possible.
  • burntoutfire 6y ago
    Don't you have industry-wide agreements, negotiated with unions, on minimum wages in these industries though?
    • infinite8s 6y ago
      Yeah and that has nothing to do with the monopoly that the gp comment is talking about.
    • claudeganon 6y ago
      Yes they do, which is why the US made that in impossible in the 30s. Making it so that unions can only form on the basis of company level votes, along with myriad other restrictions, made it so that the labor movement could never have as much power as it does in Europe.
      • DuskStar 6y ago
        Don't multi-company unions exist, though? The UAW is a pretty famous example. Unless you're saying that the problem is that the US doesn't make every new auto manufacturer a UAW shop with no opt-out?
        • martin_bech 6y ago
          yes unions are mostly big and exists across companies. However you are also free to join any union you like or none at all. For jobs a restaurants, factories etc. salary is mostly the product of Employer - Union negotiation. As a software dev, you negotiate yourself (unless you work a gov job).
        • claudeganon 6y ago
          In parts of Europe, individual workers choose their unions. You don’t necessarily join a union simply because it’s the one that is exclusive to the company. Instead of fighting myriad individual battles to unionize workplaces, workers join independent unions, the unions collaborate to bargain in a sector, and set things like wage floors and working conditions across the industry. The US specifically did not want this to happen, which is why it made unionization only valid on the basis of the adversarial, shop-vote model, but grandfathering in some unions that already functioned along similar, sectoral lines, such as the Hollywood unions.
  • mortenjorck 6y ago
    The wild thing is that even if you were to apply Scandinavia's highest tax bracket of 57% to this (which someone in the lowest tax bracket would never pay), you'd still come out above the US national minimum wage, out of which one is also expected to pay for healthcare and budget for unpaid time off.
    • martin_bech 6y ago
      By my very limited calculations, you would be paying effictively about 33% tax, because of baseline deductions, and beeing in the lowest tax bracket. remember you still have free healthcare, education, paid vacation, paid maternity leave etc.
  • BingoAhoy 6y ago
    Wealth availability and spreading is a multidimensional problem. More wealth can be made available to the average person (median) in a variety of manners. Having more wealth producing centers like intact factories not destroyed by world war 2 bombing is one way to give a locality more average wealth and higher minimum wages. This increases the mean and total wealth. Another manner of increasing the median wealth is through managing income distribution and inequality. Socialist policies, labor unions, etc etc, will raise the median amount of wealth even if the mean stays the same.
  • geodel 6y ago
    Wouldn't it be great if you let in a million people from countries where people make lot less than $20. It would be fastest way to raise standard for those people
    • coldtea 6y ago
      Yeah, and pressure their system and degrade their standards, they've build over years themselves (in 1900 Sweden was not much different than a third world country today). Why do those other people get some automatic raise?
      • geodel 6y ago
        > Why do those other people get some automatic raise? Because other people are constantly told how great Europe/Scandinavia is. So these 'other people' just want to have good life by moving there.
        • coldtea 6y ago
          This is understandable (wanting it). Getting it is another thing. I want some of Bezos' money too, but my chances are slim :-)
    • pas 6y ago
      Sweden and Germany did just that.
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• danans 6y ago
  > Give America back the monopoly it had in the fifties and sixties and minimum wage would be $24 an hour. It would take a lot more than that. Remember that the gains labor made after world war II were built upon decades of struggle by labor, including frequently being targets of violence by armed militia hired by corporations [1]. Despite that, America desperately needed labor for world war II (where the alternative was defeat at the hands of the Nazis), so for that moment in history capital and labor found themselves in a obvious win-win scenario. Most of the gains made by labor in America were made during this period. The minimum wage does not naturally rise - it is a policy decision, one implemented under pressure from labor. And as labor's political power has waned and capital's political power has increased, minimum wage has stagnated. Under our current system that heavily favors returning productivity gains to capital instead of labor, returning America to that global monopoly (which would require the highly improbable destruction the industrial capacity of the rest of the world while leaving America's untouched) would just turn the hypothetical gains of that monopoly over to the owners of capital. Realistically, any attempt to return to the prior American monopoly would result in a massive regression in the American standard of living, through the destruction of purchasing power abroad for American goods and services (remember, we have a lot more people today than we did back then, and many of them - especially farmers - work in occupations that sell to other countries). 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
  • gridlockd 6y ago
    > The minimum wage does not naturally rise The minimum amount of money you have to pay for someone to show up for any job rises (and falls) alongside demand for labor in the broader economy. > Under our current system that heavily favors returning productivity gains to capital instead of labor... If you look at the profit margins of those companies that employ a lot of low-end labor, you will find that they're generally in the single digit percentages. I think that's a pretty fair deal for organizing all that labor and taking on the capital risk. Profits aren't guaranteed, after all. There just isn't that much money to redistribute here, you would have to raise prices, which can make you uncompetitive.
    • 6y ago
• content_sesh 6y ago
  How would giving workers few places to sell their labor-power result in increased wages?
• matthewdgreen 6y ago
  This story would be more convincing if revenues and profit margin for US firms were correlated with wages. But insofar as they’re not, then all you’re saying is “firms chose to spend less on labor because there was more of it thanks to globalization”.
• camgunz 6y ago
  Nah, it’s entirely income inequality. Here’s US GDP per capita since 1960, adjusted for inflation: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-per-capita https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-per-capita
• Jedd 6y ago
  > Everything peaked in 1973 and has been on a slow decline ever since. Sure there have been booms but the long term trend has been down. There were a few potential inflection points / events that happened around then. 1971 saw the perhaps ill-considered abandonment of Bretton Woods - arguably this ineluctably led to an ongoing boom / bust cycle. (Can recommend John Ralston Saul's discussion around this in his book 'The Collapse of Globalism'.)
• andrewjl 6y ago
  Why were American firms not able to use their advantage to compete against the upstarts? This comment reads to me as implying American companies are uncompetitive compared foreign firms and are doomed to lose simply by being subject to competitive forces. What are these other companies doing that we are not? What can we do to make ourselves more competitive such that each employee has enough productive capacity to easily receive $24/hr or equivalent? The peak of 1973 is gone and not coming back, we have to look to the future now.
  • jonkho 6y ago
    From the macroeconomic perspective, since the US dollar had reserve status and unlimited foreign demand, it just becomes more efficient to print and export dollar bills and import real goods than to actually exert physical labor to produce goods to export and balance trade. Once this realization sets in, the optimal game theory outcome is to reorganize the economy around this structure of print-and-export-dollars debt-based system. Debt only becomes a problem when other people don’t want to hold it anymore.
    • andrewjl 6y ago
      That's true. The US dollar reserve status is a contingent factor however. How do we maintain it? An obvious factor is our military capacity. That means defense spending. Under a capitalist system that also requires a competitive commercial defense sector and also a strong economy capable of sustaining such a sector via tax revenue. Most tax revenue comes from individuals. In an era of mobile capital, corporate taxation is sub-optimal. So the economy's health is linked to the prosperity of individuals, in aggregate. Prosperity can come from competition, but the most durable forms of prosperity are tied to increasing productivity. Continuing on this first principles trajectory should lead to a stable structure. It's not one that is dominated by "print-and-export-dollars"-style industries.
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    Arguably American firms have been incredibly competitive since the 1970s; its American labor that hasn’t been. And/or the fruits of globalism have not been fairly shared. Depending on whom you ask.