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> The truth is that when you cut people out of the market you will replace people with machines and concentrate wealth in the hands of the machine owners. Is i
by geofft 4y ago
> The truth is that when you cut people out of the market you will replace people with machines and concentrate wealth in the hands of the machine owners.
Is it not economically rational to replace people with machines and concentrate wealth in the hands of the machine owners regardless of minimum wage policy?
Like, the Luddites didn't get mad during an increase in minimum wage - there was no minimum wage at the time, at all! It would be about a hundred years until England established one. They got mad during an increase in industrialization and mechanization. Marx didn't talk about ownership of the means of production, i.e., machines and who owns them, during an increase in minimum wage. This has been happening for centuries, and from a quick look around this very forum, there seems like no sign of automation slowing down or even settling at some baseline level of expense where $X/hour workers are worth paying but $Y/hour are not for any $X > 0.
There are only two long-term sustainable ways to solve this problem (and it is a problem!). One is to hope for, and work towards, technological improvements where each stage just brings more work to be done. There were more serious fears of computer programmers automating themselves out of a job a few decades ago than there were last year when GitHub Copilot was released, and that's certainly not because Copilot is unimpressive. We're just confident there's plenty more code to write and plenty more problems to solve. The other is to hope for and work towards a world where technological progress means we are post-scarcity and we can afford to pay people the same inflation-adjusted daily wages for increasingly small amounts of labor and eventually none at all.
Any plan that says that we need to maintain a low minimum wage for the sake of keeping workers employed is one that very soon will end up compromising that low value all the way to $0/hour.
- BirAdam 4y ago> Is it not economically rational to replace people with machines and concentrate wealth in the hands of the machine owners regardless of minimum wage policy? No. Automating a person's job away makes sense only if the cost to automate is equivalent to or less than the cost of a person, and also if the automaton does work of equal value or higher value. Otherwise, it is not worth it. There are also situations in which a automaton is never the correct answer. For example, a barista: the culture of a coffeehouse is such that a human is preferred. This is likewise true for a pub, and myriad other situations. The only way that these jobs get automated is if the economics of them becomes otherwise impossible.
- geofft 4y agoBut automation gets more efficient over time. Twenty years ago, an automaton that could drive you around city streets required a whole university research lab and barely worked. Today, it's very realistically possible. Twenty years from now, it's hard to imagine it being more expensive than a taxi driver. Twenty years ago, we had drip coffee makers and early Keurig machines. Today, we have latte art printers. Twenty years from now, vending machines that produce Instagram-worthy iced lattes with whipped cream and caramel drizzles will likely be commonplace. If your minimum wage plan is taking automation into account, your plan would have to be to slowly lower minimum wage over time so that, as robots get more efficient, humans are always paid a little less than them. That would be a coherent policy - for a few years. But eventually that leaves you with a minimum wage under a penny. What's your plan then?