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I understand your point, but how does minimum wage for unskilled workers factor? For example, in the US you could pay some $8/hour to 500 teenagers to achieve t

I understand your point, but how does minimum wage for unskilled workers factor? For example, in the US you could pay some $8/hour to 500 teenagers to achieve the same net result. No?

bobthepanda 6y ago
$8/hr gets pretty expensive pretty quick. It‘s why, for example, middle class households in the US don‘t have live in maids, because rising living standards made that unaffordable at a middle class income level.
setr 6y ago
It makes it worse — if the job only makes sense (produces value at least at) $7.50/hr, you simply can’t execute it — even if you had people willing to work at that wage (because no better alternative exists) An interesting aspect of poorer economy I’ve noted but haven’t seen anyone discuss otherwise is you can live a much better life being poor in India, than you can in the US — the really low income economy is far healthier (the quality of everything degrades continuously). I’m sure it’s not a novel insight, but I don’t know what others would call it. In the US you pass under the minimum wage bar of value production and you’re immediately in a tent under an LA bridge — with everyone else ranging from $7.99/hr to $0.01/hr. Of course an economy exists to support them anyways, but it’s largely underground, illegal (bypassing safety and regulations, e.g. selling very old cars; selling cigarettes individually) and actively zoned into oblivion