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The economy will not function if everyone is optimized into poverty.

• charcircuit 4y ago
  That doesn't contradict my point. The minimum rate someone is willing to work factors in that they do not want to live in poverty.
  • chomp 4y ago
    Maybe in the fantasy land of an economics text book. In reality, minimum rate is a maximizing function of availability, capability, conditions and the wage. People will usually choose the highest wage job with the best conditions that they can obtain and perform, Dunning-Kruger aside. If the only jobs around pay poverty wages, people will take those. GP is saying that the economy no longer functions when businesses minimize wage. There has to be fat in the wage, or our economy becomes an economy of only basic life sustaining staples.
  • saghm 4y ago
    Poverty isn't a single state; it's a spectrum. If every company making maximally efficient decisions causes people to only have the option to take a wage that isn't enough to lift them from poverty or no wage at all, people will still take it. I'm not saying that I think you're wrong or right compared to the parent comment that responded to you; I just don't think it's obvious that something being more efficient inherently implies that it should be legal. Maybe I'm incorrectly inferring that you're stating that "trying to make this illegal would make the economy less efficient than it could be" is implying that this means that it would be bad to make it illegal, but it definitely sounds like that to me.