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Raise the wages -> food prices rise. Rinse and repeat.
by f6v 6y ago
Raise the wages -> food prices rise. Rinse and repeat.
- danbruc 6y agoNo, the price increase will be much smaller than the wage increase because the wage increase only goes to the fraction of the population that does the work while the price increase applies to the entire population.
- pitaj 6y agoIf you raise the base cost of production in a low margin case like agriculture, then the price of the good must increase or they would be running at a loss.
- notfromhere 6y agoAgriculture is incredibly subsidized, which means cost of production and cost at point of sale do not have a tight relationship
- erikpukinskis 6y agoYes, but the amounts are tiny. Would you pay an extra 10 cents a pound for your produce? That amount would be life changing for farmers. But the market will always find the place where the work is unbearable and stop just shy of that.
- f6v 6y ago> Yes, but the amounts are tiny. Would you pay an extra 10 cents a pound for your produce? That amount would be life changing for farmers. You underestimate the percentage of the income some people spend on food. That's why agriculture is heavily subsidised.
- erikpukinskis 6y agoI didn’t estimate that.
- danbruc 6y agoOf course, but if everyone pays $1 more then the wages can increase by $10 assuming 10% of the population works in agriculture which still leaves them $9 better off. My point was just that a wage increase is not nullified by the price increase as long as not everyone is working in the fields.
- chongli 6y agoif everyone pays $1 more That’s a collective action problem. You can’t get everyone to pay $1 more. If your strawberries (for example) cost $1 more per pint then your sales will drop accordingly. It doesn’t matter if all strawberry farms agree to pay more to their strawberry pickers. You aren’t only competing against other strawberry farms, you’re competing against all other food. If strawberries are too expensive, people will eat candy or potato chips instead.
- danbruc 6y agoSo it turn out that people or not willing to pay what it costs to produce strawberries at a wage level at which people are willing to do the hard work. That's fine. The farmer should try to lower the costs by automation or switch to producing potatoes for those potato chips.
- colinmhayes 6y agoPeople would import food.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoIts funny, I've lived most of my life not too far from fields growing food. But when I go to the grocery store, most of the produce there is imported. In 2019, California agriculture produced about $50B in receipts, with almost $22B in exports. Our water goes with those exports too.
- f6v 6y ago> Our water goes with those exports too. Now, that kind of nationalism is very uncalifornian.
- annoyingnoob 6y agoNot following you. We've had drought in CA for years now. There are fights over where water goes, and a lot goes to farming. Then a bunch of those farm products are exported. Do we focus on serving the people in CA or the exports from CA when we talk about water regulation? My original point is that even though we produce a crazy amount of farmed goods in CA, we still import things that we grow here and export. Always seems odd to me to see produce from Ecuador in the grocery store when I can buy better quality down the road from a local farm stand.
- colinmhayes 6y agoThe Ecuadorian produce is cheaper. If you want local produce buy it from the stand. The water rights stuff is pretty messed up anyway, because the us is essentially stealing water that used to go to Mexico.