7 ms·
It's not a choice between living wage and minimum wage, it's a choice between minimum wage and unemployment. Some people do not produce more value in an hour t
by dantheman 13y ago
It's not a choice between living wage and minimum wage, it's a choice between minimum wage and unemployment. Some people do not produce more value in an hour than the living wage, so if the wage goes up they will lose their job.
- UK-AL 13y agoSurely its the way you think about it. Do products/service dictate wages, or is salaries of workers that dictate the cost of a product/service.
- mjn 13y agoThe empirical evidence on a relationship between minimum wages and economy-wide unemployment is extremely mixed. How you describe it is how things work in toy economic models, but any model with a hope of being realistic would at least have to account for the fact that employment demand isn't external and static. Other complexities include how it interacts with automation: in some jobs, artificially raising the cost of low-end manual labor just moves forward a few years the point at which it becomes cheaper to automate the job, which may be good or bad for overall employment.