OT: $15/hour minimum wage coming to Seattle

One of the most interesting failures of economics is that nobody categorically knows whether minimum wage is good or bad.

So people make up a story that suits them on the subject.

Most economic discussions ignore the time response. Short term, $15 is good for workers. Long term, it will cost jobs.

It is hard to say. The majority of people who work for minimum wage are at highly entrenched incumbents like WalMart or McDonalds.

WalMart's labor habits grew up in rural farm towns, where there was a supply of married women ( many who were married to farmers ) for whom even a low wage was pretty good. Mr. Sam was obsessed with giving the rural people the best deal possible.

McDonalds grew up wanting "freshly scrubbed smiling faces" as a strategic good. Ray Kroc designed that in; they arguably could have had much higher levels of automation.

Both companies look like retail/retail food service but as corporations are more into real estate.

I'd say there are two theories on whether it would cost jobs or not. They disagree. And there appears to be very little empirical work concerning which to choose from.

The literature (centered on Card and Kruger) seems to support "no effect":

The eminent Tim Worstall has what I'd consider the best critique of Card and Kruger:

So we are back to "it depends".

Running, say, a hardware store used to be a middle class living, but it's less so than it used to be as productivity has advanced.

I think a maximum wage would be beter. Except where someone actually owns a company, the ones with stock holders and maybe some others should limit the CEO and others to some percentage of the lowest paid worker , say 10 to 50 times. If the company does well, the minimum paid worker wages will go up along with the CEO.

I think letting the market work would be better. Government messing with economics is the history of unintended consequences.

Isn't that true of everything?

Yes, and the Free Market is *so* much better -- not!

What's missing from the debate is that the minimum wage has usually managed to remain lower than the current market-clearing wage, and so had no effect on employment. This is how the politicians have been able to satisfy both sides - raise the wage, but not enough to cause reduced employment.

However, if the minimum wage is raised above the local market clearing wage for such as WalMart and McDonalds, the effect will suddenly become all to measurable, even if not instantaneous. For one thing, this makes automation more attractive, and even if the wages later go down, automated jobs are gone forever.

As for Seattle, I have no idea what the market-clearing wage is, but we will soon find out.

Joe Gwinn

Well, go buy some toilet paper in Venezuela.

why exclude the owner?

If the company does well it will spin off the low-paid workers and outsource the low-paid work to the company which employs them.

You sound as if the government and market are separate -- they aren't -- you, too, can *buy* your own senator for a modest sum!

Tim

The minimum wage was never meant to be a living wage. It was meant to be a wage paid to students, and others needing a little extra money for school, the household etc.

We are being manipulated into supporting folks who have zero skills, zero education and want to raise a family. So many flooding into the U.S.A.

Unfortunately businesses who send jobs overseas are a big part of the problem. There are far fewer skilled labor positions now.

The states and feds are also contributing to the problem. California is loosing business left and right. So what is left, fast food. But not for long. Many skill based businesses are going to Texas and other places, including overseas, where incentives and taxes are more appropriate.

Anyway, stand by for the $15 burger. That's not include the fries and drink either. We will see automated burger places too. Place an order, Sari or equivalent, and watch the wheels turn. Out comes your burger.

Typically in California we are now paying around $9.00 per hour (fast food).

Places like Walmart will soon be using robots. The robot's oil change will be less than $15 per year. Wait and see, but you won't have to wait too long!

I am not sure why I have not seen the changeover from fluorescents to LEDs but I have not yet. Consumer dimmable 60W equivalent LEDs are available for less that $5.00 each. An outdoor spot 90w equivalent LED is only $12.00. Save businesses money so they can pay employees more!

So how far is it from Seattle to the nearest burger joint outside the city limits?

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Not so long term:

minimum-wage-increase/

Oh boy! Borderland books' owner Allen Beatts was too goddamned greedy all these years to start with if you ask me.

A goddamned book store, and especially one that big makes HUGE profits, and the greedy bastard would have had to take a personal pay cut from a number he should have never made to start with.

And now the bastard can "comfortably" close up and retire, abandoning ALL of those employees, all the while complaining that it was the min wage increase that caused it.

I call TOTAL BULLSHIT!

"Beatts said he made a mere $28,000 in gross salary last year."

Absolute lie.

But the demand for Senators doesn't create more Senators. So the price keeps going up.

Well, you are the expert on TOTAL BULLSHIT.

Absinthe in SF has the best burger I've experienced. It's $15, but that includes fries. The rum&coke is extra.

Zuni is, I think, $16 and almost as good, but you have to order the shoestring fries separately.

We were driving down 26th Street this afternoon, and there was a parking spot, about as common as a solar eclipse, so we parked. This being Pi day, Mission Pie was impossible; geeks in a line half the block long. So we went to La Tacqueria, possibly the best burrito in the USA. A mere 20 minite wait for a $9 Carnitas Super Burrito.

I made my own banana cream pie last night, to beat the rush.

A $15 min wage will especially kill off bookstores, who are struggling already.

If a free market without any government intervention is such a great idea, why does nobody have it except failed states?

Well; tautologically, if there is no goverment intervention, there is no state which can even succeed or fail.

The other truth would seem to be that it is in ones' self-interest to construct or persuade a government to provide benefits to onesself and to the exclusion of competitors. Which has been proven quite true and effective over the last however long -- evolution always finds a way.

I guess the real question that should concern people is: a matter of definition. If both corporations and governments can be bought and sold (merely one more explicitly than the other), then there's no such thing as controls; it's all one big market, and there are no rules.

Locally (i.e., within a given sub-market), one should expect difficulty (i.e., non-free markets), but is such a specific condition really what's being referred to with the concept of "free market"?

A direct evolutionary analogy: there is freedom for basically anything and everything to live on the planet. Somewhere. But you don't see tigers at the bottom of the sea, and you don't see slugs crawling the desert. Therefore, must one conclude that the world, in a state of absolute nature, is non-free? That seems counter to the meanings of the words, so I shouldn't think so. Yet, that seems to be what people refer to with it, so it sounds like a definition error to me.

Tim