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 redleger wrote:
I am no expert, and I have read this thread for some education and thought provocation. I have had the same job for 20 years but before that I was a bus boy and burger flipper in high school. There was a minimum wage increase when I worked at Whataburger and I think it went up to $4.75 or something like that, many many years ago. the immediate response was to raise prices. I don't remember anyone being laid off. However the thought that went through my head then was if prices go up, all that extra money Im making is just going to purchase the same stuff at a higher price, so I'm really not gaining anything.

There seem to be some smart people here, so explain to me how that is wrong?

Think of it this way. Would you have been as well off and happy if the company had reduced your pay to 1 cent an hour, because this would have caused prices to be reduced?

 redleger wrote:
I am no expert, and I have read this thread for some education and thought provocation. I have had the same job for 20 years but before that I was a bus boy and burger flipper in high school. There was a minimum wage increase when I worked at Whataburger and I think it went up to $4.75 or something like that, many many years ago. the immediate response was to raise prices. I don't remember anyone being laid off. However the thought that went through my head then was if prices go up, all that extra money Im making is just going to purchase the same stuff at a higher price, so I'm really not gaining anything.

There seem to be some smart people here, so explain to me how that is wrong?

You end up chasing your tail with minimum wage raises. You raise minimum wage, so stores raise prices, so your dollar doesn't go as far and your living conditions don't really improve much. The things that go up in price tend to be essentials, rent, booze. You also end up being less competitive with foreign markets, so your local currency has to devalue otherwise exporting gets harder and importing gets easier.

But it's not like it makes NO difference, it does tend to bridge the wage gap somewhat, with the working class earning more relatively speaking. But whether that's a good thing or not is debatable, with an engineering degree in Australia (where we have a reasonably high minimum wage) you don't earn a hell of a lot more than a semi-skilled factory worker (there's a difference, but the gap is small enough to make you wonder if it's worth studying for an extra 4 years ).

Then on the flip side, if you have to pay your factory workers a lot of money, there's less incentive to make things locally and it becomes harder to get a job as a factory worker in the first place.

The Aussie dollar has dropped more recently, but even when the Aussie dollar was up around parity with the US dollar it was still better off being an engineer in the USA because you earned a similar amount of money but your money went further.

Most minimum wage jobs are grunt level -- kitchen porter, pizza delivery, waiting on tables at cheap places, cleaner -- that kind of thing.

These jobs are a very small component of the prices the employers charge for their product/service overall.

To make an extreme example, a multi-billion dollar bank still needs its floors swept and lavatories cleaned. How much do you think an extra 50 cents an hour for those workers is going to impact on the bottom line?

ahh the good ole days when I could get me Candy bars for .05 or .10 each, bottle of soda was about the same price too and sadly while minimum wage has tripled or so since then, the cost of products have gone up 10 times, and don't see them staying the same when minimum wage goes up.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Most minimum wage jobs are grunt level -- kitchen porter, pizza delivery, waiting on tables at cheap places, cleaner -- that kind of thing.

These jobs are a very small component of the prices the employers charge for their product/service overall.

To make an extreme example, a multi-billion dollar bank still needs its floors swept and lavatories cleaned. How much do you think an extra 50 cents an hour for those workers is going to impact on the bottom line?

actually Bank Janitors make good money much more then minimum wage.

also would these be the same banks the government had to bail out because they were broke?

Asterios wrote:
ahh the good ole days when I could get me Candy bars for .05 or .10 each, bottle of soda was about the same price too and sadly while minimum wage has tripled or so since then, the cost of products have gone up 10 times, and don't see them staying the same when minimum wage goes up.

depends on how much labor makes up their operating costs.

Ultimately, lots of industries wont aee much change, some will see massive change, it all depends on how much sub $15 wages compose their operating costs. For something like a fast food joint that only employs a cook, counter person, and a runner, they cant really cut people and are gonna have to pass that cost on, but it may only be a ~5% increase averaged out over the menu since labor wasnt a huge cost center to begin with. For a low end factory employing hundreds of people for $9/hr with almost zero material costs, a minimum wage increase to $15 may require a 60% price increase to cover, which may not be sustainable, though such industry is likely to have already moved overseas or be in imminent danger of it anyway.

The variables in these things are huge.

The technology exists to replace cook, the counter person, and the runner now.

 Vaktathi wrote:

Asterios wrote:
ahh the good ole days when I could get me Candy bars for .05 or .10 each, bottle of soda was about the same price too and sadly while minimum wage has tripled or so since then, the cost of products have gone up 10 times, and don't see them staying the same when minimum wage goes up.

depends on how much labor makes up their operating costs.

Ultimately, lots of industries wont aee much change, some will see massive change, it all depends on how much sub $15 wages compose their operating costs. For something like a fast food joint that only employs a cook, counter person, and a runner, they cant really cut people and are gonna have to pass that cost on, but it may only be a ~5% increase averaged out over the menu since labor wasnt a huge cost center to begin with. For a low end factory employing hundreds of people for $9/hr with almost zero material costs, a minimum wage increase to $15 may require a 60% price increase to cover, which may not be sustainable, though such industry is likely to have already moved overseas or be in imminent danger of it anyway.

The variables in these things are huge.

around here fast food places usually have like 20 people working in them, when I worked fast food oh so many decades ago yeah there were 3 people and can see them reducing the number of employees down to that, but then we are faced with the inevitability of a run away unemployment rate.

also i've already seen a 10% or more increase in fast food product and thats only after a $1 increase in minimum wage, we still have $5 more to go.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Most minimum wage jobs are grunt level -- kitchen porter, pizza delivery, waiting on tables at cheap places, cleaner -- that kind of thing.

These jobs are a very small component of the prices the employers charge for their product/service overall.

To make an extreme example, a multi-billion dollar bank still needs its floors swept and lavatories cleaned. How much do you think an extra 50 cents an hour for those workers is going to impact on the bottom line?

But it does end up scaling the higher paying jobs as well. You don't just raise minimum wage and end up with more people on minimum wage as their wages get swallowed up by whatever the minimum is. I'd have to double check but my understanding is a factory workers in both Australia and the US earn more than minimum wage.... but they earn a similar % more than minimum wage. Again I'd have to double check, but that's what my factory worker mates have told me, because you have to pay your semi-skilled workers more than the dude who mops the floors.

Then the cost of essentials goes up along with minimum wage. The standard of living doesn't magically get twice as good if you double minimum wage.

Even though minimum wage in Australia is much higher, I'm not sure the standard of living is much higher for people on minimum wage, you still won't be able to afford to rent a place by yourself either way. You can barely survive on minimum wage in either country, it seems the main difference is people earning a bit above minimum wage (semi-skilled workers) seem to have a bit more disposable income and people in positions that require qualifications seem to have a bit less.

But there's obviously a balance. If you take the minimum wage argument to either extreme then it gets stupid, there's a sweet spot somewhere.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Most minimum wage jobs are grunt level -- kitchen porter, pizza delivery, waiting on tables at cheap places, cleaner -- that kind of thing.

These jobs are a very small component of the prices the employers charge for their product/service overall.

To make an extreme example, a multi-billion dollar bank still needs its floors swept and lavatories cleaned. How much do you think an extra 50 cents an hour for those workers is going to impact on the bottom line?

But it does end up scaling the higher paying jobs as well. You don't just raise minimum wage and end up with more people on minimum wage as their wages get swallowed up by whatever the minimum is. I'd have to double check but my understanding is a factory workers in both Australia and the US earn more than minimum wage.... but they earn a similar % more than minimum wage. Again I'd have to double check, but that's what my factory worker mates have told me, because you have to pay your semi-skilled workers more than the dude who mops the floors.

you will have to excuse KilKrazy he thinks if minimum wage is increased only those making minimum wage will get increases.

Asterios wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

Asterios wrote:
ahh the good ole days when I could get me Candy bars for .05 or .10 each, bottle of soda was about the same price too and sadly while minimum wage has tripled or so since then, the cost of products have gone up 10 times, and don't see them staying the same when minimum wage goes up.

depends on how much labor makes up their operating costs.

Ultimately, lots of industries wont aee much change, some will see massive change, it all depends on how much sub $15 wages compose their operating costs. For something like a fast food joint that only employs a cook, counter person, and a runner, they cant really cut people and are gonna have to pass that cost on, but it may only be a ~5% increase averaged out over the menu since labor wasnt a huge cost center to begin with. For a low end factory employing hundreds of people for $9/hr with almost zero material costs, a minimum wage increase to $15 may require a 60% price increase to cover, which may not be sustainable, though such industry is likely to have already moved overseas or be in imminent danger of it anyway.

The variables in these things are huge.

around here fast food places usually have like 20 people working in them, when I worked fast food oh so many decades ago yeah there were 3 people and can see them reducing the number of employees down to that, but then we are faced with the inevitability of a run away unemployment rate.

even when I worked in fast food like 13 years ago as a high schooler, we had may 7 or 8 tops at peak rush times, I dont think ive ever seen a place with 20 people. That said, yeah its likely they may scale back some of this, but you need someone to flip burgers, someone to take the orders, and someone to deliver them, theres a limit to how much can be cut.

Now, therea some automation potential, but thatll likely happen regardless of minimum wages, I saw my first order kiosk in a Jack In The Box back in 2011 over five years ago, so I imagine if they catch on theyll replace people regardless.

also i've already seen a 10% or more increase in fast food product and thats only after a $1 increase in minimum wage, we still have $5 more to go.

there are likely to be other factors in that beyond just wages. Rent, inputs (e.g. beef which has become dramatically more expensive over the last 15 years), etc all factor in. It's also sometimes just a convenient excuse for some businesses to raise prices that people will accept when otherwise they wouldn't haven

 Vaktathi wrote:
It's also sometimes just a convenient excuse for some businesses to raise prices that people will accept when otherwise they wouldn't haven

Indeed, I well remember businesses raising prices after the ACA was passed and claiming that was the reason, well before any of them had actually felt even a cent of impact.

 Monkey Tamer wrote:
I've always wondered what the absolute breaking point is for fast food when automation becomes the more attractive option. It's not like the workers are paid much to begin with. It isn't like the high costs of unionized manufacturing.

It's cheaper from the get go. Labor that doesn't take a wage, need HR, healthcare, can sue you, or any number of other things, will always be cheaper. The sheer benefit of not having to manage a workforce of people probably innately out weighs any source of cheap human labor that isn't sweat shop level labor. A machine doesn't need maternity leave. It doesn't need time off. It doesn't take vacations. It can't break a leg. It can't steal from you. You don't have to pay it overtime, or hire extra ones when one wants to be at its kids soccer game.

It's not, and never has been, and issue of "are machines cheaper." The machine was better from the beginning as a mere concept. It's an issue of "does the machine exist, and is it reliable enough that I can replace workers with it."

We're pretty much at the edge of the later questions being "yes, it exists and it is reliable" which really makes this whole idea that "we have to keep wages down or machines will replace people" utterly moot and pointless. Machines are already poised to do. That boat sailed years ago.

Asterios wrote:

yeah well me I'm remembering recently when the State Union (CalPers) here made bad investments and expected the Tax Payers to pay for their mistakes when they lost their retirement funds.

CalPERS is part of the California government, its operating costs are paid for by tax payers as a matter of course. It is not a union.

 Ouze wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:
It's also sometimes just a convenient excuse for some businesses to raise prices that people will accept when otherwise they wouldn't haven

Indeed, I well remember businesses raising prices after the ACA was passed and claiming that was the reason, well before any of them had actually felt even a cent of impact.

yeah, I remember a lot of that going on. It's sadly a fairly common tactic. Blame some political thing you dont like to enhance yourself at the expense of others while feeding the outrage machine. Sadly not uncommon, especially with small businesses and franchises.

 LordofHats wrote:


We're pretty much at the edge of the later questions being "yes, it exists and it is reliable" which really makes this whole idea that "we have to keep wages down or machines will replace people" utterly moot and pointless. Machines are already poised to do. That boat sailed years ago.

This is applying more and more to white-collar and professional jobs and is only accelerating for blue-collar/working class jobs.

Yes, the only real question is, how long will it take society to adapt to the fact that not everyone can be gainfully employed anymore? I have a feeling culturally in the US it is still long ways off!

 Easy E wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:


We're pretty much at the edge of the later questions being "yes, it exists and it is reliable" which really makes this whole idea that "we have to keep wages down or machines will replace people" utterly moot and pointless. Machines are already poised to do. That boat sailed years ago.

This is applying more and more to white-collar and professional jobs and is only accelerating for blue-collar/working class jobs.

Yes, the only real question is, how long will it take society to adapt to the fact that not everyone can be gainfully employed anymore? I have a feeling culturally in the US it is still long ways off!

I see this increasingly in white collar jobs. Accounting depts at places like mine used to have something like 12 accountants. Now they have 3 with 6 "accounting clerks" that usually dont have a degree and are paid hourly, and the computers do everything else. Accounting, which was once a huge staple of business employment, is becoming increasingly automated and I see a lot of accountants having hard times coping.

It was kinda awkward watching some dude in IT write a sql query in two days that took 12 minutes to execute, to do what we paid someone $80k/year to do previously full tim

I'd be more optimistic. Much like the Great Depression, it's very hard for a democracy to ignore 1/3 of the population being completely and utterly out of work, and the future we're looking at is closer to 1/2 to a point (depending on how far you want to take technology, it's feasible for the entire human workforce, as in workers doing work for day to day business operations, to achieve obsolescence.

I'm sure plenty of people will be bitching though.

 LordofHats wrote:
I'd be more optimistic. Much like the Great Depression, it's very hard for a democracy to ignore 1/3 of the population being completely and utterly out of work, and the future we're looking at is closer to 1/2 to a point (depending on how far you want to take technology, it's feasible for the entire human workforce, as in workers doing work for day to day business operations, to achieve obsolescence.

I'm sure plenty of people will be bitching though.

The Great Depression resulted in the spread of communism throughout Europe, then the spread of fascism.
Then that whole WWII thing, followed by that Cold War thing.

I am down with the increased minimum wage. Automation will replace them as soon as possible anyway, regardless of the minimum wage.

 Frazzled wrote:
The Great Depression resulted in the spread of communism throughout Europe, then the spread of fascism.

There so much about that statement that needs to be qualified it would take an entire research thesis to cover it all

Er no. We almost had it here too.

Why do you think so many things are occurring now? Its because of the Great Recession the economies of the world never got fixed.

 Frazzled wrote:
Er no. We almost had it here too.

There was also Imperialism, a First World War, the Great Recession is not remotely comparable to the Great Depression, and I could go on and on and on, but the base point is so incorrect I can't help but fee like it would be a huge waste of my time to make the attempt.

Just because two periods of time look similar, doesn't mean they are. Historical Parallelism is a dubious practice at the best of times.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Er no. We almost had it here too.

There was also Imperialism, a First World War,

You betcha. However Weimar Republic crumpled in the Depression. Germany was mayhaps the country hardest hit.

the Great Recession is not remotely comparable to the Great Depression, and I could go on and on and on, but the base point is so incorrect I can't help but fee like it would be a huge waste of my time to make the attempt.

You weren't involved seeing the Fed and the Central Banks attempting to stop the utter dissolution of the financial industry. I was. Whatever you want to believe is based on....nothing.

Just because two periods of time look similar, doesn't mean they are. Historical Parallelism is a dubious practice at the best of times.

Live longer. Read a book.

Read history and follow the trends of history. In every great cultural and political shift there is social and economic dislocation. In the 1800s it was "panics." The Depression created the greatest blood bath the world had ever known.

The Great Recession destroyed the lives of millions of people in the US and worldwide. The EU can't handle it and is now breaking up.
Automation will continue to accelerate that (automation being a parallel leading to the Depression as well).

 Frazzled wrote:

 LordofHats wrote:
I'd be more optimistic. Much like the Great Depression, it's very hard for a democracy to ignore 1/3 of the population being completely and utterly out of work, and the future we're looking at is closer to 1/2 to a point (depending on how far you want to take technology, it's feasible for the entire human workforce, as in workers doing work for day to day business operations, to achieve obsolescence.

I'm sure plenty of people will be bitching though.

The Great Depression resulted in the spread of communism throughout Europe, then the spread of fascism.
Then that whole WWII thing, followed by that Cold War thing.

I am down with the increased minimum wage. Automation will replace them as soon as possible anyway, regardless of the minimum wage.

Well, I don't know about all that, but I think we can all agree that the pace of automation will lead to instability and potential labor/class turmoil in the coming 50 years.

Just like the last 50 years!

 Frazzled wrote:
Read history and follow the trends of history.

I'm a historian. Reading books is pretty much 75% of what I do (the other 25% is formatting citations ). I've learned two things; 1) historical events are infinitely complex, bordering on the mystical at times, in how they elude our understanding. 2) 90% of everything is crud, and all those books written by shill experts to pander to people with historical BS fall into the 90%. Yes. Every great shift of history comes with social and economic dislocation, but that things are shifting should be the first clue that assuming previous circumstances will repeat in the same way now is fallacious, and that's without even touching the issue of blaming events of Fascism, Communism, and WWII solely on the Great Depression, as if Great Depression were some bubble in which a bunch of stuff happened.

There's a saying; "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there."* Have we really reached the point where people can no longer see the difference between a recession and a depression? No matter how similar, two events will never be the same, and the similarity your calling for is little more than hyperbole because the "Great Recession" wasn't even the "greatest" recession of the last 30 years. Even it's high unemployment rate, which was higher than most of the other recessions of the later 20th century, wasn't the highest.

These two things aren't the same. They're not even all that similar beyond being economic down turns. Even if your riddle with problems hypothesis had meat behind it, it still wouldn't support your conclusion. If that's not a good reason to spend no more time on the discussion I don't know what is. Sometimes something is so wrong, that its mere utterence is a message from the universe that there will be no point

*Curiously invented by a fiction writer, but I'll be damned. It works pretty well for illustrating that projecting our own lives onto the past is a surefire way to end up being wildly wrong (vice versa applies) and repeated to me so much I hate it, and I hate this thread for making me repeat it further damn it!

Read better?

 Frazzled wrote:
Read better?

Usually I find it has nothing to do with how well one reads, but what one is reading. No amount of "read better" will make the likes of Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man anything but dribble. Might I suggest;

Voices of Protest: Hughey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression by Alan Brinkly. Wonderful book for American politics in the 1930s, particularly as it relates to the briefly lived American Fascism movement of the period (Coughlin) and good ol' American Populism (Long). EDIT: Also wonderfully topical given this past primary season. It's interesting looking at Long and Coughlin's roles in the 1936 election, and the journey through the primaries of Trump and Sanders (respectively).

There's so many books on the Great Depression it's impossible to ever read all of them. Robert McElvaine however published in 2009 what has quickly become the new definitive text for general Depression history; The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941. Most books on the period focus way too much on the New Deal. McElvaine goes beyond it too look at the entire decade (and change). Gerald Nash's The Crucial Era: The Great Depression and World War II 1929-1945 is commonly used as a text book on the formative years of the Depression and the World War. It's a little out of date being published in 98 and all, but it's still valid.

Joseph Maiolo's Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941 as the title suggests is primarily focused on the arms race of the interwar years, and the authors primary argument is that the arms race was the foremost issue that produced the Second World War. He takes his argument too far imo, but he does delve into the politics and economics of the great powers and how those factors influenced their decision making, so its a useful work even if the author tries to stretch his evidence farther than it can take him.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
Read better?

Usually I find it has nothing to do with how well one reads, but what one is reading. No amount of "read better" will make the likes of Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man anything but dribble. Might I suggest;

Voices of Protest: Hughey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression by Alan Brinkly. Wonderful book for American politics in the 1930s, particularly as it relates to the briefly lived American Fascism movement of the period (Coughlin) and good ol' American Populism (Long).

There's so many books on the Great Depression it's impossible to ever read all of them. Robert McElvaine however published in 2009 what has quickly become the new definitive text for general Depression history; The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941. Most books on the period focus way too much on the New Deal. McElvaine goes beyond it too look at the entire decade (and change). Gerald Nash's The Crucial Era: The Great Depression and World War II 1929-1945 is commonly used as a text book on the formative years of the Depression and the World War. It's a little out of date being published in 98 and all, but it's still valid.

Joseph Maiolo's Cry Havoc: How the Arms Race Drove the World to War, 1931-1941 as the title suggests is primarily focused on the arms race of the interwar years, and the authors primary argument is that the arms race was the foremost issue that produced the Second World War. He takes his argument too far imo, but he does delve into the politics and economics of the great powers and how those factors influenced their decision making, so its a useful work even if the author tries to stretch his evidence farther than it can take him.

I'll admit, these look very interesting. I may add one after I finish With the Old Breed.

Now I will see you this and challenge you to read Zaloga's Panther vs. Sherman Battle of the Bulge. Excellent.

When everything is automated, what will humans do?

What use will there be for humans?

 Ashiraya wrote:
When everything is automated, what will humans do?

What use will there be for humans?

Walking around and play Pokemon Go?

EDIT: or be like the 'umies in Wall-E?

 Ashiraya wrote:
When everything is automated, what will humans do?

What use will there be for humans?

I like to think we'll finally get warp drive off the ground.

Though for all I know Past Tense (STDS9 S3E11-12) will be prophetic




Damnit Whembly. Now I want to watch Wall-E