PPP is one of those things that sounds good but isn't meaningful by itself (to be fair, a raw comparison of minimum wages wasn't either). When discussing compa

PPP is one of those things that sounds good but isn't meaningful by itself (to be fair, a raw comparison of minimum wages wasn't either). When discussing comparative minimum wages, you're often trying to reason about something like subjective quality of life. An index of goods doesn't quite represent that though, because (a) in the place of external financial constraints consumers can be very happy choosing one good vs another, and (b) different consumers naturally have different purchasing needs. (a) Includes ideas like eating more onions and potatoes in places where they're cheap and more rice and scallions in places where those are cheap. An index including both biases strongly toward countries able to provide both reasonably cheaply -- a noble goal, but at a minimum wage level the existence of a $0.30/lb potato and a $1.00/lb onion is much more impactful than both being at $0.45/lb. (b) Different people have different constraints. At an extreme, a single person living in their car is able to be much better off in much of CA than a single person living in their car in Germany. Looking at minimum wage being "better" or "better when adjusted for PPP" misses a bit of nuance that I think is usually important here -- can minimum wage help somebody who works hard make ends meet, what if they're supporting a family, what if they only want to work 40hrs/week, ...? Just a few buckets of "types" of people can help us not talk past each other when arguing for some policy or another, getting to the root of our potential disagreements more quickly. I mostly agree with the conclusion by the way, but appealing to an authority like the oecd (PPP) when the statistic they publish isn't at all applicable is a mistake that happens frequently, on all sides, and it leads to poor discourse without actually improving anyone's knowledge of the situation.