Income Inequality?

[lilpixieofterror]

A good point. If none of the employers offers enough bread, why, just dot on down the road to those employers who offer cake instead! How obvious!

You act as though that is an impossible thing to do. It isn't impossible because I've done it and so have other people.

[Cow Poke]

Than find somebody or someway to get a better pay check. I did it and so did several other people I know. It isn't that hard to accomplish and can be done in many different ways.

That's what I'm teaching in our Jobs for Life class... you draw up a "career map", and realize that your CURRENT job is simply a stepping stone to your career GOAL. IF you can reach your career goal by "working your way up" in your current job -- that's GREAT. If NOT, you use the skills and experience you gain in that job to equip you to take "the next step".

[lilpixieofterror]

Are minimum wage workers today worth over $2/hour less than minimum wage workers in the 1960s? No measure of worker productivity has even made the claim, let alone supported it with evidence. Yet, minimum wage earners today make over $2/hour less than minimum wage workers did in the 1960s. Somehow, "proving value" hasn't even kept these wages constant, let alone increased them. For some inscrutable reason, textile manufacturing moved from low-wage jobs in American cities to even lower-wage jobs overseas. Was production in Bangladesh that much better than production in Los Angeles or does "value" actually actually mean something closer to "most return on capital"?

It's an odd sort of schizophrenia that touts capitalism, which is premised on building shareholder wealth (capital), as the best economic model and then turns around to argue that practical application of the model will preference labor over capital.

Most people do not make min wage to start with Sam. The average wage for a retail employee isn't 7.25 an hour, but a tad over 11 dollars an hour. Fast food workers sit at about 7.73 an hour, so it is obvious that a fast food worker is not the best way to earn a living. Find an employer that pays you better if you think you are worth it. It isn't impossible and has been done before. I did it and so have many others.

[lilpixieofterror]

Here is the OP, lest anybody forget....


Liberals seem to think the "fix" is to use the government as a hammer to force some people to give more of their own money to other people. One of those hammer strikes is the "minimum wage". It's NOT based on merit, or work, or value --- the lazy guy who is just barely doing what is necessary to stay employed gets the same "bump" as the guy who's putting forth effort.

Where is the justice or morality in that?

They just want to drive thousands more people out of work and into the employment lines as companies replace their flesh and blood workers with computers and more robots.

[Paprika]

you liberals want to use the government to FORCE people to give, even to those who do NOT work.

It would be enlightening if you could point out where Spart has expressed this view.

[Paprika]

and Spart hasn't been doign that himself Sparko was just showing folks what Spart was doing.

[Paprika]

I guess you just have a hard time understanding an example versus a claim.

So when you expressed the opinion that "wanting $15/hour to flip burgers in an entry level job is being greedy", you were not making a claim about actual people who actually do want that wage?

[Darth Executor]

I REALLY hate it when I have to amen DE!

(Ummmm... I amen'd it before the second comment was added. )

My second comment is just as accurate as the first.

[lilpixieofterror]

That's what I'm teaching in our Jobs for Life class... you draw up a "career map", and realize that your CURRENT job is simply a stepping stone to your career GOAL. IF you can reach your career goal by "working your way up" in your current job -- that's GREAT. If NOT, you use the skills and experience you gain in that job to equip you to take "the next step".

Yeah, but you can't complain and make excuses for your situation if you do things, such as that.

[Jedidiah]

So, moving back to the topic, here's a chart of worker productivity over time and the real minimum wage, over the same period:

.

I am curious as to how productivity is measured in this graph. Got any info on that?

[Sam]

I am curious as to how productivity is measured in this graph. Got any info on that?

I do not; it's not the graph I wanted to use, where productivity is modeled separately (this is just an indirect graph of productivity by showing what a minimum wage tied to productivity would be) but the principle is true across pretty much any measure of productivity using BLS data: the graphs all show increasing productivity over time. BLS, I believe, measures labor output per hour, along with other metrics, when determining productivity.

[Jedidiah]

So who can explain to me exactly what is measured when we measure productivity? How do you measure labor output per hour, and what does it actually mean?

[Sam]

So who can explain to me exactly what is measured when we measure productivity? How do you measure labor output per hour, and what does it actually mean?

Here is the BLS FAQ page for productivity measurement.

[Truthseeker]

So who can explain to me exactly what is measured when we measure productivity? How do you measure labor output per hour, and what does it actually mean?

It's as you may suspect a rather complicated task involving voluminous disparate data. Here's an example anyway. A widget company one year produces 1 million widgets. The next year the company has fewer workers but still produces 1.1 million widgets. So, the first year we have 100,000 widgets produced per worker. The next year it's 120,000 widgets per worker. That seems simple, but many companies each may produce widgets of slightly different design and quality than each other. And we have other products, such as bread, cars, trucks, bottled water, etc. The statisticians are crazy if they think they can intelligently account for the differences in all those products. Sawn lumber, hospital services, furniture, etc. But one hopes what the statisticians produce makes some sort of sense--is realistic enough. Again, I think Sam relies too much on data to make his arguments.


Sam, to properly interpret data, one must have a good theory in the first place. Sure, induction from a long series of observations can suggest a theory. However, it's usually the case that theoreticians guess a theory and make predictions from it. Empiricists then gleefully test the predictions, hoping to "falsify" them. A simplistic view of the scientific enterprise, to be sure, though.

Anyway, economics, or more generally, praxeology (the study of human action), is not the same as physics, at least in my view.

[Jedidiah]

There are so many variables here it does not look like a very useful calculation.