I wonder what would happen to the suicide rate with medicare for all, and creating a max-wage that is (avg of contractors + employees * 150), or something similar, w/ additional 'bonus' multipliers for increasing # of U.S. hired.
UBI would also probably help. As a freelancer I've had some really slim months and depression hits hard when money is tight.
There's a very direct correlation between income security, insecurity, stress, depression, and suicidal thoughts.
my guess is an effective system of healthcare and/or UBI would decrease the suicide rate somewhat, because people wouldn't feel so helpless.
I'm not sure that max wage algorithm creates a healthy incentive though. it would seem to encourage hiring more employees than necessary just to increase the executive's compensation. I think people can often tell when their job isn't really necessary and it probably doesn't feel very good.
I meant some claim CEO pay tied to worker might encourage layoffs.
If you have 10 workers average pay 100k and you last off your lowest paid worker the average goes up, and you're paying less out of pocket.
By having bonuses showing that you're not trying to game the system by laying people off it encourages job growth.
That and the idea of pay cap is to ensure business growth over CEO enrichment. How does it hurt the companies bottom line if the CEO can only earn 10 Mill not 50m? When it gives 40 surplus for new devs or r and d people to grow new products and income opportunities.
yeah, it would actually decrease the number of employees if employee cost is significant enough to not be absorbed by raising the price. It might also decrease it by forcing a robustness check on existing businesses. A lot of them manage but couldn't absorb a financial hit; this would be a minor crisis but one that could just push marginal businesses over the edge.
Suicidal ideation is a mental health illness. Financial desperation is stressful, but that stress is not an indication of mental health distress. I don’t see these two things as having any correlation and I am not aware of any related evidence adjoining those two.
If finances are a factor in suicidal ideation then it’s a secondary consideration in addition to more prominent concerns.
False correlation. Take this damning quote from your second link:
> Data analysis from a 2013 study published in the journal Clinical Psychology Review shows that those who died by suicide were eight times more likely to be in debt.
Correlation does not imply causation. To illustrate the silliness when the related items are transposed the statement becomes absurdly false even though the logic remains identical: persons in debt are 8 times more likely to be suicidal. Nobody is claiming that because it’s preposterous and there is no such data.
Stress is not a mental health illness. Having debt is also not a mental health illness.
Having debt may not be a mental health illness, but mental health illnesses are significantly exacerbated by debt.
I was discharged from a mental health ward 3 weeks ago after an unsuccessful suicide attempt. My brother was murdered a year ago and I've been struggling with depression since.
I lose my job a few months ago and money has been tight in my household, to the point where I began to see myself as nothing buta financial anchor weighing down my partner.
Freeing her from having to manage my debts was the primary justification for my suicide attempt. My mental health illness (mixed anxiety and Depressive disorder) is not caused by debt, but the affective symptoms (in this case suicidal ideation) were.
Or to put it another way: the easy way out of debt allows people to rationalize an an otherwise irrational decision. (°)
NatCen analysed detailed NHS data about adults’ mental health undertaken for the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute. It found that 13% of people in problem debt – about 420,000 a year – think about suicide and 4% of them – more than 100,000 people – try to end their life.
Suicide attempts in people with debt are around 400x more likely than those without debts (it's around .01% in the UK yearly), which surely counteracts the idea that nobody is claiming that people in debt are more likely to be suicidal?
Having debt certainly isn't a mental illness, but we can't ignore the effect having debt has on people with mental illnesses.
Edit: sorry for any typos or grammatical errors, my medication causes difficulties typing and recognising errors
(°) Of course, it may actually be rational, since her financial security would be significantly improved by the removal of debt and the extra mouth to feed - but rationality does not necessarily imply correctness.
Did you know that army medics are 3x more likely to be diagnosed with PTSD than army infantrymen encountering combat? Likewise being a combat medic/doctor isn’t an illness. There is no discussion of eliminating those jobs to save people from mental health illnesses. Even if those jobs and/or debt were eliminated there is no reason to suggest the persons at potential risk of such illnesses would cured from the risk of such.
Teenage homosexuality is another high suicide pattern. Nobody is suggesting treating juvenile sexual orientation.
Since suicide is the result of mental health illness and mental health illnesses are a medical problem would you agree that it’s safe to say it is something that demands medical attention? Medical doctors treating that condition don’t throw the patient into a finance class to hear about managing debt or give the patient money to relieve the financial distress. The subject of financial crisis isn’t treated at all.
Many things can have an effect on persons with illnesses. The goal of a doctor is to treat the illness and lower the pain. They do this through a combination of observation, medication, and counseling.
Ignoring the medicine and medical aspect of suicide to focus purely on financial management, as so many in this thread suggest, will likely result in a sharp increase in suicidal completion.
If advocating against such harm and ignorance costs me all my HN karma I am ok with that. I am not afraid of being stuck in an echo chamber.
I'm not advocating the removal of treatment for people in debt, I'm just saying that mental health illnesses are exacerbated by stress and money problems can be a huge source of stress.
You have to treat the entire patient, it's the difference between the nightingale and peplau schools of nursing: the patient is not just their symptoms, they are a complete human who has to be treated to prevent recidivism in to a dangerous mental state.
Without the stresses of financial debt I'm not suicidal, I'm depressed and have anxieties and impulses, but one of those impulses isn't suicidal ideation.
In this instance, the diagnosis is an anxiety disorder, not suicidal ideation, but the addition of a second aspect - the debt - can severely increase the chances of the symptom of suicidal ideation occuring.
Again: people with mental health illnesses should be treated for those illnesses, but we also can't ignore the family practicioner and governments role in ensuring that people in financial hardship have the support that they need.
As they say, a small amount of prevention is worth a lot of cure: I imagine the cost on the government to help with the debt is lower than the cost on the government to deal with the mental health issues exacerbated by the debt.
There is no discussion of eliminating those jobs to save people from mental health illnesses.
In the UK, ex combat medics receive government funded psychotherapy with specially trained mental health practitioners who deal specifically with people who have worked as medical professionals on deployment. So there are some countries pioneering the treatment of patients with a higher risk profile for mental health illnesses. I was for 5 years a combat medical technician with the royal logistics corps and I've had this treatment first hand.
Edit: again, sorry if I don't make sense in some areas, I'm trying very hard :)
> Ignoring the medicine and medical aspect of suicide to focus purely on financial management, as so many in this thread suggest, will likely result in a sharp increase in suicidal completion.
This is not supported by anyone working within suicide prevention. Indeed, focussing on the medical model is rejected by any organisation working in suicide prevention, and they talk about the full range of bio-psycho-social factors involved in suicide.
It is simply incorrect to say that suicide is caused only by mental illness.
> the statement becomes absurdly false even though the logic remains identical: persons in debt are 8 times more likely to be suicidal
Why do you think this is absurd? How are you defining "suicidal"?
There's good reasons why reputable organisations involved in suicide prevention recognise financial difficulty as a risk factor (one of many) for suicide.
> 156. Patients who died in the first week after leaving hospital were more likely than those who died later after discharge to have a diagnosis of personality disorder (15% v. 10%). Over half (52%) had experienced recent adverse life events, especially financial (25%) and family problems (23%).
> Although under 20s and 20-24 year olds had many antecedents in common, there was a changing pattern,reflecting the stresses experienced at different ages. Academic pressures and bullying were more common before suicide in under 20s, while workplace, housing and financial problems occurred more often in 20-24 year olds
> Factors that should be recorded in an initial assessment of social circumstances include, but are not limited to: (i) family members, significant others or carers who can provide support; (ii) dependents; (iii) housing; (iv) personal or financial proble
"Suicidal ideation is a mental health illness." - this may be mostly true, but there are enough counter-examples to make this factually wrong. Terminally ill patients wanting euthanasia, bankrupt Wall Street brokers jumping from windows, and Romeo and Juliet (and other scorned lovers) would beg to differ.
I wouldn’t count fiction as an indication of fact and Wall Street brokers under extreme social pressure to recover lost value may well be experiencing PTSD.
I like the incentive that a maximum wage introduces: increase the pay of your staff and subcontractors hired by your company to raise your wage ceiling.
I can't see a drawback, aside from someone at that ceiling simply wanting to raise their salary without raising those working for them.
Re/ medicare for all ... Canada has universal health care yet a very similar suicide rate to the USA.[1] Canada doesn't have a livable minimum wage either. Each province sets its own. There is talk of UBI experiments.
I think it would be hard to compare the two times. Canada is unrecognizable in so many ways when compared with Canada before that point in time. We got a constitution, no-fault divorce, and a whole lot of other major changes in the course of about ten years, the same ten years the provincial health insurance was introduced AFAIK.
Our model (Canada) doesn't include free ambulances or drugs, it's better to compare to the European model. We do have good welfare programs here however, and drugs are much cheaper anyways.
Any good model does it's best to prevent ambulances. The kink in the USA is that if you cannot afford to go to a family doctor, you call 911, they send you an ambulance, you get a free ride to the general hospital emergency room where you then sit for 5 hours to be told you have bronchitis. That taxi ride cost the taxpayers about $2500, and then the hospital writes off another $1500 (which is what the emergency room would charge you for 10 minutes of doctor time. Really).
I moved from San Francisco to Istanbul a few years ago, and now every time I hear an ambulance or a firetruck I am blown away by the fact that I heard one. In SF you don't hear them because they're going 24/7, mostly for stupid reasons (certainly not fires).
Ambulance frequent fliers also really gum up the works. Take for example Bruce Myers, an alcoholic drug addict who gets picked up in an ambulance on average 90 times per year. There's another drunk in San Francisco who averages 300 times per year and has cost the city $10m.
Pretty much every single aspect of healthcare in America is broken.
But your correct that we should probably go by the individual countries’ statistics, where the UK is slightly above the average compared to other developed countries and the US a good amount above it.
> The previous National Statistics definition of suicide includes deaths from intentional self-harm (where a coroner has given a suicide conclusion or made it clear in the narrative conclusion that the deceased intended to kill themselves) and events of undetermined intent (mainly deaths where a coroner has given an open conclusion) in people aged 15 and over.
It's this "events of undetermined intent" part that is different. In the US (and I guess many other places" those deaths are not counted as suicide.
The US uses this definition:
> Death caused by self-directed injurious behavior with an intent to die as a result of the behavior
We have universal health care, but that does not typically cover dental, mental, or pharma costs. I think our system has been allowed to be mediocre because it still looks good compared to the US
I really hope we do not get a UBI in any current forms. I know the second the stores realize that every person now has 'x' amount of dollars to spend, they will raise the prices to match the most they can extract. What I wish Canada would do instead is establish some sort of Universal Basic Rights like every man woman and child is entitled to 5lbs of potatoes a week, 1 gallon of milk, 1 pound of carrots, ect. I as a Canadian do not want a check every week, the next day I can be told my cost of living has gone up. I want to know I can eat and shelter myself at the end of the day. How we can do that I do not know and am thankful I am in a good financial position to not have to worry about it.
> I know the second the stores realize that every person now has 'x' amount of dollars to spend, they will raise the prices to match the most they can extract.
That's not how economics works. The prices most stores charge is limited by competition. The only areas you might see an effect are in ones where supply is highly, and likely artificially, constrained.
>That's not how economics works. The prices most stores charge is limited by competition.
There would be no much change in competition, as everybody that sells anything of low-medium value will benefit from the increased spending capacity UBI receivers. The increased demand across all competitors will raise prices.
Housing is artificially constrained due to zoning regulation, and in any given area there is a small number of major landlords, who all know each other and who all are politically well connected. UBI will be a conduit to funnel money from the taxpayers to large landowners.
I mean rent control would be an answer in these markets. You could have that determined by formula or analysis. In
California commercial property use should invalidate prop 13 as well. That should open things up.
I think this is why people want 'less government'. What they really mean is there are too many governments, the basic three levels, plus other institutions like home owners associations. Moving means dealing with a whole different bureaucracy, and falling to the bottom of a new list.
You can't push money around; it's tougher than you, and will push back. But you can push a sack or potatoes. If a domestic potato farmer tries to raise prices, a foreign farmer will be all too happy to undercut them to get back to the commodity price.
Instead of taking money from some and giving to others, it has to be invested in actual production, and the output granted to the recipients directly. If there are any middlemen involved at all, they will certainly reduce the efficiency of the entitlement program.
The effects are profoundly complicated by implementation details; but in theory...
'Trading' is a complex little signalling display where the seller shows how hard it is to produce a good (represented in price) and the buyer signals that they have previously contributed enough of some sort of resource to justify the production of the good (represented by having the money to pay the price).
UBI messes with that by allowing everyone to signal they contributed economically even if they did not. This effectively redistributes resources contributed by someone who is economically productive to someone who is not.
The impacts of that are hard to nail down. It might cause some prices to rise and other prices to fall. It will likely cause less resources to be allocated to the future; because economically unproductive folks tend not to invest in the future. However it is much more efficient than the bureaucratic complexity of a modern welfare state and easier to reason about.
We already have soup kitchens in America. We have solutions of last resort regarding hunger. So this is a total strawman.
Yes. Having every man, woman and child line up for government potatoes, government bread, and government cheese at some government office is unequivocally a dystopian nightmare.
Saying that "every man, woman and child" would be lining up is a straw man also. "Every man, woman and child" does not currently line up at soup kitchens.
There's also no reason that distribution has to work that way. How about an EBT card mailed to every home, which can be used for potatoes, cheese, and bread at any grocery store?
> Saying that "every man, woman and child" would be lining up is a straw man also. "Every man, woman and child" does not currently line up at soup kitchens.
It's also a strawman because not everyone would be lining up for potatoes in this instance, presumably some people can afford to eat in this free suds world. Maybe we'll even have a post-potato society eventually, when everyone decides they hate potatoes after they all get jobs (probably not).
It's not a dystopian nightmare but the parent completely ignores the practicality of the law. There is a reason why food stamps exist and it's because we don't know what they want to eat or can eat.
Set up temp motorhome parks until the housing crisis is over. Happened in the 1950s, during that housing crisis.
Have free 'bootcamps'. Want to change careers and be a mechanic or welder? Take an intense 6 month course. That's what happened in WWII, people stuck in crappy depression era towns all of a sudden got retrained in a few months.
Financing a UBI is extremely difficult. It makes more sense to raise the minimum wage and introduce a "guaranteed minimum wage". It would be very similar to a UBI except you need a job and it only covers 1/2 of the difference between what a job pays and the official minimum wage. The downside is that there is still a lot of room for abuse but earning a $ through working is still twice as valuable as earning a dollar through the minimum wage so in the end economics prevail and a welfare trap is avoided. It also means that if you hate your job you can switch to a lower paid one and still receive some support. Bad jobs will face a lower supply of workers which will force companies to raise their wages to match the working conditions.
Glad someone noticed. If everyone is getting $1000/month, that becomes the new $0/month. Basic necessities, especially rent, will jump in cost; a low-end landlord will know everyone there has another $1000/month to spend, as does everyone looking for an apartment, so rent will jump because if one renter doesn't want to pay more there will be someone else who can. Of course economic complexities will affect this, but that's the short version.
"Supply and demand" is an absolute economic law. Anyone trying to distort that (say, redistributing taxes so all get $1000/month) finds out the hard way. If S&D is not directly addressed in your pet socioeconomic proposal, implementation will fail.
You won't have $1000/mo for food when your landlord raises rent by $1000/mo.
As I said, the actual economics around this are more complicated, but the paraphrase/summary is that if nobody has to work for $1000/mo and everybody gets $1000/mo then $1000/mo will be worth practically nothing, with staples & necessities rising to consume that.
If we exclude rent from consideration, and apply the economics of UBI to just food: the average price of 1 Calorie (of which you need ~2000/day) rises $0.016, or $32/day. For a baseline reference, I regularly make healthy meals at $1/plate. Congrats, you've just increased the cost of food to at least $35 per day - precisely because "everyone now has $1000/month, free".
If we then roughly combine that with housing (as primary costs): I figure a normal baseline poverty minimum of $10/day for living space & utilities plus $3/day food, but then you're adding $32/day available which those necessities will instantly absorb (supply-and-demand) ... ergo you've just increased poverty-level living costs by 3.5x!
Unintended consequence: giving everyone $1000/month increases the cost of a $1 hamburger to $3.50. Now the beggar with $0 has to find/panhandle close to four times as much to afford something barely considered a complete meal. This is not what you had in mind.
Apart from failing to account for competition, I think the problem with this kind of analysis is that it misses how transformative UBI would be for how we reward work. All those dirty, unpleasant jobs paying minimum wage will suddenly become a lot harder to fill. When people have a viable safety net the compensation those jobs offer will have to be commensurate with the unpleasantness of the work. Who would spend 40 hours a week cleaning for $200 a month when you already get $1000?
As the only candidate currently running on a UBI platform, Andrew Yang has argued that one of its benefits would be a reduction in economic anxiety, with ancillary benefits to health in the form of stress reduction and improved executive function, as well as lower rates of depression, suicide, and drug addiction.
I can attest to this. I've been in both situations where I was very financially comfortable and where I've been in more financially risk situations on and off. You definitely have higher stress, anxiety, and develop negative habits at financially risky times. And for reference the were longer time frames: 5 years well off, 3 years poor, 2 well off, 2 poor
Without other universal floors on things like housing and healthcare, UBI is just going to be eaten up by those costs. An indirect sop to these sectors isn’t going to do much to improve the average person’s quality of life.
I agree that universal health care should be solved independently from UBI (Yang supports opt-in Medicare For All).
Housing is a more complicated story; there's certainly a theory that landlords will simply raise rents in proportion to their tenants new ability to pay more. On the other hand, a stable income boost might make the housing market more fluid, giving renters more options to move when the rent goes up. I personally favor LVT to discourage rent-seeking, and there's a lot that could be done by removing zoning and building restrictions (multi-family conversions, etc) to make housing more competitive.
I think many of the poorest would happily choose a flat $1000/month over the benefit systems we have in place now. But even for those who opted out in favor of existing aid programs, I think the societal benefits of additional liquidity from everyone else getting the dividend would lead to more consumer spending, and therefore better employment opportunities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-side_economics
There’s something obviously wrong with the U.S. because suicide is now the second leading cause of death among young people and has jumped 50+ percent since the Great Recession:
What would you prefer the second-leading cause of death be for young people?
I am being serious. Some things have to be the top causes of death for young people and the list definitionally can’t include the aspirational “old age.”
This seems like an odd question. Obviously we should prefer accidental death among young people vs. that which is self-inflicted, while hoping that the overall number of deaths diminishes, regardless of circumstance. But I don’t think a spike in youth suicide is something we should hand waive away in any case.
We can have get accidental death up to second place by banning railings, air bags, helmets, and tire tread patterns.
In other words, was there really a spike in youth suicide or did it just climb in rank because we reduced other causes of death? Something must be first, something must be second, and so on.
The only argument you could really make is that suicide rates have been rising across the US since 1999, up in most states and up by 30% in half of all states, making youth suicide of a part with the broader trend. But I don’t think this is any less disheartening.
I don't understand. That chart shows very clearly that youth rates of death by suicide have gone up since 1999. It shows a climb from 10.x in 2007 to 14.x in 2015. That's not quite a third, but it's not far off.
More importantly it shows that deaths from suicide are i: no longer declining and ii: increasing.
This increase appears to happen around 2007 onwards -- this is when we had worldwide financial insecurity, with things like the sub-prime mortgage crisis.
We know financial insecurity is a driver for higher rates of death by suicide, and we have a good idea that the financial problems in 2007 drove some of the increase.
On the linked graph I see the highest suicide rates in the late 90s. They dropped in the early 2000s and then at some point start climbing.
It’s like, one can pick any window from a graph like that to make a point.
Think if someone did that with the stock market. You could prove the market was going down, or up, merely by choosing the window that suits the claim.
Now, the graph only goes through 2015. I am receptive to the notion suicide rates have been climbing and are at all time highs. You may have a vital and valid point.
But the graph I linked doesn’t back it up, and you are including a whole bunch of causation in your comments that makes your argument start to sound ideologically shaped.
There is nearly a 2x difference in rate between white and native americans vs blacks, asians and hispanics. I'm wondering if there is a good understanding of that difference. I don't think it is just economic.
That stood out to me as well, indeed the numbers vary a lot nationally and ethnically.
How are you supposed to study it, though? Not exactly a good situation for an exit poll.
Imaginably the government could be in a position to grant a gift, and help, to offer a moment of respite from whatever is causing the most distress -- that might help some people...
yeah, that could work if it was wide scale enough.
apparently google and facebook already have some kind of tech that estimates if people are vulnerable to suicidal ideation based on searches ("hey google, how do I kill myself painlessly?" gives the national suicide prevention hotline -- good)
Because if you're told you're supposed to "make it" since birth, and you don't, you feel like a piece of shit. Marginalized communities have been told the other story, every little thing is a win. Difference in expectations is huge, and source of all sort of bad things (like racial resentment etc...).
Solution: make this country slightly less "dog eat dog" and you'll solve a LOT of social issues almost overnight.
Does society say that? I've never come across a description of white privilege that didn't compare it to playing your life on easy mode. Sure, your life might be tough but it's less tough than it would be if you in the exact same situation and not white.
Is there evidence for this? An alternative explanation is that black and Hispanic people are more likely to be religious, and religious people have lower suicide rates in the United States. They are also more likely to have kids, which also is associated with lower suicide rates.
That's not necessarily a contradiction, since churches double as social clubs and Christian charity means supporting your neighbour who is in trouble. So if you are active in a church you belong to a circle that is a little less dog-eat-dog. Same thing with immigrant communities.
> So if you are active in a church you belong to a circle that is a little less dog-eat-dog.
That would imply that life in the US ~300 years ago, when pretty much everyone belonged to a church, was less dog-eat-dog.
If anything, I would say it was the opposite. People would often shoot someone—someone who is just as likely as themselves to be a "good Christian"—just for being an interloper on their farmland, i.e. for having the opportunity (whether they took it or not) to make off with some of their turnips.
When you're putting tremendous direct effort into those turnips, when those turnips will likely make the difference between life & death thru the winter, when others facing bleak prospects are likely to take "the opportunity to make off with those turnips", when there is no viable/relevant police enforcement to speak of, yes you take trespass very seriously.
Contrast that with the modern luxurious miracle of the $1 hamburger: with just 9 minutes of minimum-wage commodity labor, one can obtain a fresh complete meal (bread, meat, veggies, cheese) any time all year.
When you’re living the latter, the gravity of the former is hard to grasp.
Using the term "marginalized communities" as a broad descriptor for people with a certain skin color in America is misguided and counterproductive. It paints a distorted view of reality and is a political statement more than anything else.
being poor and uneducated in this country IS being marginalized. I clearly stated that if you're white the expectations are different, but whatever else you're reading in my message is your projection.
Yup, USA culture is toxic as fuck (that's not to say it's different elsewhere, just talking from experience in the US). You're expected to make money and/or have some impressive-sounding career to have "made it", or else you're a loser.
I call this the "loser" class (obviously, I don't personally see them as losers, just in terms of societal expectations). You're supposed to go make money or you're a loser. Hopefully, you're "in charge of people" too, because managers and executives are the only people that contribute to society. Do-ers just cost money. You buy a house and become a homeowner to be a "real American" and not be a loser. You better get a big car and attractive partner too. I think there's a talking heads song about this.
Worse, we think that all failures should be permanent. Once you become a member of this class, especially as you age, it becomes difficult to get out. What have you been doing all these years? Did you not want to sit in a cage for your entire adult life? No degree? Have you ever been fired? Have you had any issues with the law? Well, you're done. No longer a member of the "successful American" class, you're now a loser. A despised and ridiculed lesser class within society.
We'll let a few losers out, and rise to the level of good American, but generally, they stay there. Don't forget that you deserve this, and it's your fault because you're a bad person. I'm not surprised by the suicide rate at all.
I mean the data by race suggests it’s not economic, right? Black, Hispanic, and Asian people have half the suicide rate of non-Hispanic white people.
Another anomaly: Hispanic people have the second highest life expectancies in the United States (after Asians), significantly higher than non-Hispanic whites, despite on average having lower incomes and health insurance coeverage.
I'd like to see the correlations after things such as how many close family members and friends one has are taken in to account.
I suspect that the larger and more cohesive one's support network is, the less likely you are to commit suicide, and that the more socially isolated one is, the poorer one is, and the sicker one is, the more likely one is to feel hopeless and see suicide as the only way out.
Other important factors are things like how many recent traumatic events (such as relationship breakups, serious illness, bereavement, rape, witnessing or being a victim of violence, etc) one has suffered, recent alcohol and drug use/abuse, and then very hard to quantify things like how good one is at coping with such events.
You can't really boil all this down to any one factor, and there's no one solution to any of these issues. But, yes, reducing misery (whether economic or social) should help.
Most of the evidence suggests (unintuitively) that insurance coverage doesn't have much of an impact on health outcomes, but does have a large impact on economic outcomes. I say that as a supporter of M4A
If you're going to disaggregate, by sex is the major axis. If the gap reversed, it would likely become one of the greatest issues to solve, whatever it took.
I think a max wage totally makes sense, because nobody is more than a modest constant times more productive than anyone else, and anything created by a person is always built on existing knowledge and constructs created by society. Also, risk does not really exist anymore these days (with minimum wages, financial constructs around bankruptcy, etc.)
A max wage is insane government overreach. If I want to make a deal with someone else where I’ll work to do something and in return they pay me a portion of the surplus value I create, there is no justification, moral or economic, to cap that amount.
Finally, by what measure do you feel able to assert that no one is more productive than someone else based on some constant? How much more productive was the team of the Manhattan project than some other team of physicists?
If managers and executives are so overpaid, why aren't top firms outcompeted by companies that offer lower wages for such positions? Lower wages would allow those companies to offer the same services at lower prices and take over the market.
I think the correct way to think about it is not that nobody does anything wrong, it's that if people consistently do things wrong, and it's reasonable clear that they are doing things wrong, then their long run survival rate in a competitive market will be zero, as someone else will outcompete them.
If someone is making a claim that someone is clearly doing something wrong, the burden of proof should -- to some extent -- be on them to explain why despite this, they are continuing to be successful without going out of business (if that is in fact the case).
For example, it feels to me that the way FANG companies hire SDEs and place them on teams is inefficient and weird. Why are 24 year old 1337coders considered fungible to work on any project? It doesn't make sense to me. But it's hard for me to convince myself that my feeling is correct, given that there are billions of dollars on the table for anyone who can come up with a better strategy.
I think this argument fails because “firm-space” is sparse. There are many companies, but there are way more possible companies given all the degrees of freedom. Also, the number of “competition events” is small. Companies don’t have the opportunity to run gradient descent to optimize themselves. A bunch of companies can make the same bad decision for the same bad reason, and they will each succeed or fail because of a bunch of unrelated factors.
But what defines overpaid? You? If there is an opportunity to not over-pay, you should be able to start your own firm and put overpaying ones out of business.
...Of course, we can actually be even more clever than this, if we want, and imagine models where we are both right (of course they might not be true).
For example, we might say the value provided by a manager is, on average, $1,000,000. However, this is driven mostly by the top 10 percentile who are worth $10,000,00 a year, whereas the median is actually slightly overpaid. We can justify this distribution by adding uncertainty on the signal. A more thoughtful model of this quick example exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#Job-mar...
So the next question would be: What is more likely? That people are overpaid, obviously, and the government needs to stop it? Or the market is behaving optimally under complex uncertainty, and the government, being no better at interpreting signal than these firms themselves, is likely just to make things more complicated and screwed up by entering? (I'll leave this as an exercise to the reader, but if you want to solve it formally follow the journal articles in the link I shared above).
>If there is an opportunity to not over-pay, you should be able to start your own firm and put overpaying ones out of business.
Sure, but first lend me a few hundred million in capital would ya?
I realize not every business requires that much but I work for an oil supermajor... so, little hard to do what you're suggesting without your help. The "capital" in "capitalism" keeps getting in the way.
A lesson from history shows this not to be the case: hand-wrought nails were such a precious and militarily significant commodity in Roman England, that when the legion left, they painstakingly concealed their hoard to prevent the locals gaining access to them.
Fast forward to the 1860s, and nail production is automated to the extent that wire nails can be produced by the tens of millions with almost no human intervention.
The worker who forges nails by hand and the inventor who automates their production are undoubtedly orders of magnitude apart in productivity.
Most likely the person who invented the machine to automate nails didn't become rich. Maybe, just maybe, the people who owned the company that produced nails first, if they had a patent or something like that. So maybe some people can be thousand of times more productive, but that doesn't mean they should earn thousand of times more money.
Over a thousand years of technological advancement is not evidence of how effective some brilliant inventor is, given that humans do not live for thousands of years.
In software engineering we're talking about 10x developers all the time. Whether they actually exist or not is kind of disputed.
Do we have 1000x or more business leaders? Because that's how well compensated a select few of them are. I don't believe we have. Because at most one developer is 100 times more productive than other one, so it makes no sense that a business person would be 1000 times more productive than another one.
A max wage will just lead to workarounds, hiring each family member at the maximum rate for instance, or schemes where a family member sues the company and the company "loses", etc. Is it worth it to play that game?
"Somebody might work around it" is never a good argument against a policy. Whatever the policy's goals are, even a version full of loopholes will accomplish more of those goals than not implementing the policy at all.
The point is that it won't be effective. We'll get a situation like [1] that takes decades to fix:
> Concept and origin (1991)
> Partial closure (2018)
To essentially cap wages, you could use higher tax rates in higher tax brackets, and that might actually be enforceable as it would leverage the existing enforcement apparatus that has decades of experience patching workarounds.
Your heart is in the right place, but the richest people derive their wealth from capital investment, not from wages. A maximum wage would address the gap between executives and workers, but not between investors and workers. Since the investors hold the power, the money that's no longer paid to executives would just go to them.
It doesn't make any sense because it would have to be readjusted ahead of time all the time. A minimum wage is allowed to lag behind because nothing stops you from paying more but if people have 20% higher wages after 15 years of inflation why should they have to wait until the government approves a pay raise?
This is disingenuous. It doesn't classify by Socialist, but by country. Russia is #3 on global suicides, and when I think of socialist healthcare, my first thought isn't Russia.
Many of the countries I think of as socialist healthcare (UK, Denmark, Canada, to name a few), they all come up below the US in suicides.
I feel like everyone posting the link to that article needs to also post this quote from it in their comment.
> The WHO statistics are based on the official reports from each respective country, therefore are no more accurate than the record-keeping in the specific country, and revisions (updates) are usually performed as well.
> In much of the world, suicide is stigmatized and condemned for religious or cultural reasons. In some countries, suicidal behaviour is a criminal offence punishable by law. Suicide is therefore often a secretive act surrounded by taboo, and may be unrecognized, misclassified or deliberately hidden in official records of death.[3]
It is very hard to compare rates of suicide across countries.
The wealth tax is the best way to fight inequality. A maximum wage would just discourage our best entrepreneurs. I agree that raising the floor without changing anything else doesn't do much.
Have been reading Rutger Bregman’s book and UBI seems to be an incredible money saver and immense benefit. It would take however a big jump in consciousness to do something like this because who would take the shorty jobs paying 1/3 living wage if no one is afraid Of homelessness?
If nobody is taking that job for a salary that is economically viable, then it shouldn't exist. We shouldn't make people waste their finite time on this Earth doing pointless jobs under the threat of homelessness or starvation.
In an employers’ market with no unions and no regulation ensuring a livable wage, many corporations write business plans relying on precisely this kinds of jobs.
Don't forget student loans. Having six figures in student loans simply from getting a masters degree is enough to make one almost consider abandoning the U.S, especially when you consider that the older generation who caused this never experienced it themselves.
My most depressing times were when I was unemployed (not to be confused with "funemployed") and not making any money.
Damned commie. How would we commit genocide in Iran if we were giving all of those entitlements to taxpayers? How could we afford to give $30bn to Israel so they can buy arms from us? HOW COULD WE AFFORD OUR SECOND YACHT IF WE HAVE TO PAY A REASONABLE WAGE?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
The best form of a maximum wage would be a simple wealth tax in place of the income tax. It doesn't discourage entrepreneurs continuing to work, but it doesn't allow wealth to accumulate in idle hands.
making a living wage, and I would hardly call $1 above the current min wage a "living" wage, has nothing to do with having more money to buy things with and everything to do with feeling psychologically safe from spiraling into debt and possible homelessness.
the lack of a psychological safety net is one of the most anxiety inducing things about American capitalism. we underestimate as a society how damaging it is because it's so hard to measure.
> we underestimate as a society how damaging it is because it's so hard to measure
I'm not sure I agree with that. It has been known within public health for decades that poverty is an important predictor of life expectancy and quality of life.
The real problem in the US appears to be a deep cultural belief in self-sufficiency, and an accompanying unwillingness to vote for politicians who support implementation of said safety nets.
Well this is actually one of the biggest issues in Eastern Europe. The belief the state should take care of its citizens ( the safety net you are talking about ).
The truth is only populist crooks get elected and only come up with shortsighted inefficient solutions (and half of the budget gets stolen).
Mmm, seems like a stretch to blame problems in Eastern Europe on the belief in a safety net - Western Europe/Scandinavia also believes in a safety net but doesn't have the same problems.
I have my own little saying that I always say in response to that saying:
Lack of money can definitely cause unhappiness though
You don't need to look further than Maslow's hierarchy of needs to see why, when you don't have enough money to reliably fulfill some of the most fundamental needs like shelter and food, it's going to severely hinder your self actualization. Forget about moving on to the more psychological higher-level needs when you are worrying about where you are going to sleep tonight. It's easy to understand why happiness might be very hard to reach for individuals who don't have enough money to cover their basic needs
This is the part people fail to recognize: in our society, money is an abstraction that provides necessities and wants. If you cant provide necessities, then of course you're unhappy. Many people can't and most everyone cuts corners and makes sacrifices to meet needs.
Another hidden need that is studiously ignored is having enough margin that you can help others. I think that something that hits men very hard when they are struggling financially.
I always heard the 2 greatest days of owning a jet ski are the first day, and the day you finally sell it. I've had several people say they get old REALLY fast. Kind of like pools, get a friend/neighbor with a pool and a jet ski, now THAT's happiness.
I dunno. They say that about boats, much bigger than jet skis.[0]
Jet Skis are pretty easy to load/unload and store compared to a bigger boat. Also much easier to maintain, most of the jet skis I've ridden have all been small 2-stroke engines. Bigger than a lawn mower engine, but not as powerful as most motorcycle engines (except for the bigger wave runners, those are 4-stroke motorcycle engines). Like a go-cart engine. Yes, they require maintenance, but also probably the simplest engine you could possibly maintain.
Beyond the surface-level pithiness of the joke, the point is that having money may not guarantee happiness, but it makes it a lot easier to distract oneself with viscerally pleasant experiences and engage in new hobbies that may in fact lead to genuine happiness.
Robin Williams actually had a degenerative brain disease. I know a lot of the news didn't wait long enough for that information about his situation to come out, but it's on Wikipedia.
Money can't buy happiness, but it prevents one of the worst things in the world for people/families - financial stress. I bet financial stress is one of the major causes of divorce/destruction of families, child underdevelopment ( mentally/physically ), crime, suicide, etc.
Can't be happy when you can't afford medicine for yourself and your kids, can't pay for food, can't pay the rent/mortgage, etc.
Money can't buy happiness, but lack of money causes a lot of unhappiness.
I was reading the other day that typically mass shootings happen during a recession, and right now is a confusing time because the economy is supposedly doing fantastic, yet we keep having mass shootings.
Could this have to do with the mounting inequality? It seems the standard indicators for the health of the economy are breaking because wealth just keeps pooling near the top. So what this study could be saying is, "make changes so that more people get the benefits of the booming economy."
My suspicion is yes. Doesn’t much matter if mean economic indicators are trending up while the majority of people are becoming worse-off.
I also think social media/internet is to blame for this though, because it makes the realities of economic inequality much more real than just tangentially hearing about celebrities in rags and trashtv.
The market is great, and a lot of money from the trump tax cuts has been used for buybacks that kept prices rising, but wages have stagnated as expenses such as health care, child care, education, etc have all increased rapidly.
Those with investments have a much different economic situation than those who don't, to the point that it almost doesn't matter how well the economy is doing for the lowest wealth classes. Minimum wage in a bull economy is the same as minimum wage in bear economy.
The economy is only doing great for businesses. Common folk are barely recovered from the recession. So yes, I would say it's definitely due to inequality and a breakdown of indicators.
When you measure wealth as including home equity, as this article does, this is bound to happen in 2007. I'm not sure it tells us anything meaningful except that home prices were way out of whack and for many people their home is a substantial % of their wealth.
Many did, yes. I personally know a couple people who had their mortgages recalculated to be more in line with the corrected values. It was all over the news at the time.
But by that point more people stopped paying completely and got foreclosed, or declared bankruptcy.
My point is that it’s logically inconsistent to say on one hand, the banks are to blame, it was all fraud, it was a fraudulent bubble caused by greedy banks, etc — and on the other hand say, look at all this wealth that was destroyed, because the wealth itself was caused by the bubble.
To clarify, I’m talking about “wealth” that is equity caused by home value appreciation, not caused by paying a lot into the mortgage. Remember that most of the distressed assets were subprime (0-down, no doc, etc) loans — the sales pitch at the time was, put nothing down, and in a year your homes appreciation will make it like you put 20% down. The gains that analyses like the link above count as “wealth” were all smoke an mirrors.
If you want to make a significant dent in the mass shooting problem (by the way, the FBI's crime stats page [0] is illuminating on many subjects, not the least of which is that violent crime rates are way down from earlier in the 2000s [1]), you need to start looking at why someone feels shooting up a bunch of innocent people is a valid response to whatever stressor they're feeling. Maybe there is an income inequality, and that can cause someone to feel angry. But there's a leap that needs to be made from "angry" to "mass murderer", and it'd be helpful to understand why that is. I suspect it's mental.
> I was reading the other day that typically mass shootings happen during a recession, and right now is a confusing time because the economy is supposedly doing fantastic, yet we keep having mass shootings.
This feels like the sort of thing that's really going to depend on the definition of mass shooting used. Inner city African American gang violence is the majority of "3+ killed by gun at once" incidents, and if your definition includes that then that's what you'll be measuring. And on the other hand if you use "2+ unrelated people killed or injured including shooter, not gang related" like some advocacy groups do you'll get different results, and if you use what most people would consider a mass shooting (3+ unrelated people killed in public place not including shooter excluding gang violence, or "something that shows up on national news") you'll have minimal data to go off of since those events happen <10x/yr.
> The minimum wage should be livable - sincerely any good person
Also unemployment should never happen, and if we simply declare how the economy should works, it will magically reorganize itself in a way that makes it so, and which doesn't do serious harm to anybody, and doesn't cripple our futures. And you are a monster for daring to entertain the notion that achieving goodness in the world is any more complicated than this, and you deserve to be shunned and hated.
Livable to what extent? You should be able to afford food (what quality of food? do good people also believe everybody deserves to eat filet mignon/comparable on occasion?), transportation (which in some cases means car + gas + maintenance + insurance) + housing (what kind of housing? rent a room in a low cost area? have your own single family home?) + family (should you be encouraged to have 3 children aka mouths to feed if you are low income)?
I don't know if I've been brainwashed growing up by fake news but... isn't the idea "work hard for a living", not "do the minimum and be rewarded?" (aka minimum wage)
Work hard for a living, even though it's minimum wage, knowing it's enough to support a life and family? Wasn't that the case 50 years ago? Too much to ask for today, I guess
Minimum wage jobs are frequently difficult and labor-intensive, but the individual workers are replaceable. The idea that pay rate and effort required are perfectly linked is what I'm contesting.
In my experience, the lower you are paid, the harder you are worked. Cooks, janitors, sanitation workers, mail(wo)men and amazon delivery workers, waiters, teachers, mechanics, construction workers, etc. all work longer hours in more emotionally and/or physically taxing jobs, with worse pay and work environments than any dentist, accountant, lawyer, CEO, sales person, or software engineer that I have ever met.
Wages are inversely correlated with how hard you actually have to work, perversely
> Wages are inversely correlated with how hard you actually have to work, perversely
You are right.
Why are cooks + janitors paid so little? Because that's their worth to the economy. A ton of people are willing to do that job because it is an "easy skill" with a low barrier of entry.
How do we get unskilled labor on STEM paths? I totally understand unequal opportunity not allowing everybody the same options, but at what point do we say "people aren't created equally, most cooks/janitors wouldn't be great engineers for reasons X, Y, Z"
Are the reasons because they never had the chance, or is it genetic?
Please don't be a sealion. It doesn't make for productive discussion. Disagreement is one thing, but aggressively peppering people with questions until they get annoyed with you is not conducive to mutual understanding.
Exactly. People won't work for less than their worth. So a minimum wage doesn't accomplish much except set a price floor that excludes low value add workers from the economy.
If you were starving and I offered you a job washing dishes for $2/hour, would you take it to be able to afford some rice+beans tonight or would you rather not eat tonight? You're worth more than $2/hour.
We need minimum wage laws to protect people from being crunched by capitalists exploiting labor market inefficiencies.
In this scenario let's presume the laborer has valuable welding skills but the only factory in town closed. They need to move somewhere else to use their skills but that takes time. In the meantime they need to eat and so they take a job washing dishes.
Inefficiencies in the labor market happen all the time. A minimum wage is one way to protect desperate people from being unfairly exploited.
That's beyond absurd, showing no understanding at all about human nature whatsoever. I have billions of counterexamples for you. I cannot think of anyone I know who hasn't done this at some time in their life. Working for less than one's worth is, in fact, what the majority of the human race is doing. Working for one's worth or for more than one's worth is what is rare and almost nonexistent.
People do it all the time. When their basic needs (food, health, shelter) aren't being met, they'll take whatever work they can. It doesn't mean they're getting their true worth out of that work, it just means they're getting screwed by their employers who are taking advantage of their need to pay them less than they would otherwise.
That's a common trope, but there have been studies indicating that minimum wage doesn't have a significant effect on unemployment. [0] [1]
Assuming that's accurate, then shouldn't we mandate that these corporations pay their workers a livable wage? If they don't pay the workers a livable wage, guess who does? The taxpayers, in the form of food stamps, welfare, and increased prison population. I really don't see why the American public should be forced to subsidize Walmart (or any large megacorporation) just because they won't pay their employees enough.
EDIT:
Before anyone says it, I know forcing Walmart to pay more to their workers would increase the prices of their goods; that's still almost certainly cheaper than increasing welfare.
I don't think anyone is suggesting we set the minimum wage to be particularly high, just enough to have a reasonable living wage. In the case of the linked studies, it was an increase of somewhere around 20-30%.
I figure you made your comment to demonstrate that the reasoning doesn't work on the extremes, but that only really works as a rebuttle if someone were seriously suggesting something extreme.
Economists can't run experiments like other scientists. In a way, they are more like historians.
In my opinion, almost all of the actual past raises to minimum wage have been on the small side, and have not significantly affected unemployment. You're right about that.
But if my opinion is true, then there's a huge leap with no scientific basis to saying "therefore this specific large increase in minimum wage will not raise unemployment."
Unfortunately, there aren't any scientific studies of increasing the US minimum wage by 100% because it has not been done multiple times in the past. So no one really knows what would happen if we did it now.
The problem though is that a lot of goods sold are essentially optional and may not be able to withstand the price increase. Like I said upthread, this would act as a fitness check on businesses and weed out a lot of employers.
These would have ripple effects up the chain. Malls and retail real estate are empty as it is, for one; any fewer and we legitimately might see problems.
Any good economist would point to the economic inefficiencies created on the whole market by the externalities of the human suffering this would cause.
Sweden has unions which negotiate minimum wages for everyone in their industry. So yes, nationally there is no minimum wage, but in practice, almost everyone is covered by a minimum wage.
Considering that almost 70% of people in Sweden are part of a union* compared to about 10% in the USA, scrapping federal/state minimum wages in America would be catastrophic, at least in the short term.
*and those that aren't will still benefit from union set minimum wages
Really doubt this. Instead I would look into the connection between anti depressants/anti psychotics and suicide. There's research of strong connections, but immunity is claimed by the drug companies, "because they were already depressed/mentally unhealthy when put on the drugs". Mental health professionals and managers at large drug companies need to start going to jail for over-prescribing psychiatric drugs.
The next big culprit is other drug addiction, like fentanyl and heroin. Stemming the flow of cheap fentanyl dumped into the United States by China and throwing doctors in jail who over prescribe these drugs would do wonders for people.
+1, antidepressants are not magic and don't work for everyone, but they worked amazingly for me.
I was put off for so long because I had read so many people saying that antidepressants were evil or bad or whatever. I wish I asked my doctor about them earlier.
It's OK to take them. It's ok to not want to take them. I wish they were less stigmatized because they do help some people a lot.
> studies showed that children and adolescents taking antidepressants were almost twice as likely to have suicidal thoughts or to attempt suicide, compared to patients taking a sugar pill.
Not arguing either way, as I don't think I am knowledgeable enough on the subject to do so, but I feel like there is a lot of potential to confuse correlation and causation. It simply could just be that "children and adolescents taking antidepressants" are already in a high risk group that is 3 times as likely "to have suicidal thoughts or to attempt suicide", and antidepressants reduce that number to "twice as likely".
This is, of course, the very first thing any reputable study tries to control for; presumably the placebo and active populations are both taken from populations with comparable diagnoses.
Right and this is where plausible deniability comes in from the point of view of the pharmaceutical companies. Drug studies are problematic because nothing happens in a vacuum.
Ironically, this happens because the medicine is working. FTA:
> When a person’s depression starts to lift, he or she may feel less hopeless and helpless. That sounds like an improvement, but when people feel less helpless but still feel depressed, they may think about suicide as a way out, whereas before they were too immobilized to make a suicide plan. For that reason, a decrease in the symptoms of depression can increase the risk of suicidal thoughts or actions.
I couldn't agree with you more. Its sad that so many people have dismissed this possibility out of hand. Even the FDA agrees that there is a risk (which is why there are black box labels on antidepressants).
There are also many cases of drug companies going to court and losing over suicides and murder-suicides. Leaks during those trials have shown horrible cover ups such as Study 329.
The whole thing is really is too horrible to imagine. The idea that we could give drugs to people making them want to kill themselves, which I think is why so many people don't want to believe it could be true.
Pardon my French but what the heck do you think is driving rising depression rates and opioid addiction if not economic pressures? Do you really think those are unrelated?
A large volume of research shows depression/suicide/drug abuse/etc are directly related to economic stress, but that's a much harder topic to address so it's ignored in favor of easy scapegoats and bogeyman.
> Stemming the flow of cheap fentanyl dumped into the United States by China
OK, and how's the "war on drugs" going thus far?
> Mental health professionals and managers at large drug companies need to start going to jail for over-prescribing psychiatric drugs.
Really? You want to put people into jail for trying to treat depression?
> throwing doctors in jail who over prescribe these drugs would do wonders for people.
And now you want to imprison doctors for treating pain and taking care of patients?
You can't be serious, I hope you are merely ignorant rather than that punitive.
BTW, prescriptions have nothing to do with illegal fentanyl overdoses, and virtually nobody prescribed painkillers becomes addicted to them. This is well studied but largely ignored by the political posturing, media hysteria, and moral panicking about an imaginary prescription crisis, data shows it does not exist.
"Overall 675,527 patients underwent urological surgery, of whom 0.09% were diagnosed with opioid dependence or overdose."
> OK, and how's the "war on drugs" going thus far?
The case with fentanyl is not like heroin, well established factories make it in China. It is within the Chinese governments power to stop the flow, this is a foreign policy issue. The fact that its not at all in the news is disturbing.
> Really? You want to put people into jail for trying to treat depression?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Secondly, this isnt "trying to treat depression", its a profit driven industry. SSRIs commonly do not outperform their placebo. Most of the recent adolescent mass shooters were on SSRIs!
> throwing doctors in jail who over prescribe these drugs would do wonders for people.
If Boeing engineers design an unsafe plane to squeeze out more profits and then line their pockets, which results in airplane crashes, they should go to jail. The same is true for healthcare.
Claiming that prescription opiods are not fueling the heroin and fentanyl crisis is a radical opinion. There was a massive lawsuit against the big pharma companies making money off these drugs. I'm not going to google research, its plain and simple.
Criminal doctors have been prescribing these drugs and making money off them. This has caused mass deaths and suicides.
Look at the chart of opion consumption on this page:
I'm doubtful the discussion will go anywhere productive but I think part of your argument is an assumption, "And now you want to imprison doctors for treating pain and taking care of patients?" because filling a role of a job to just prescribe medication isn't really trying and when we don't actually know what the outcome will be. Following a protocol isn't really trying is all.
Research from the past few years has been questioning if the brain will just adapt overtime while on medication to the point of becoming oversensitive when off the medication and where the normal state of the person gets worse. I've only read this about antipsychotics more so than antidepressants.
In any case much if not all research in the topic of mind altering medication is still in the infant years and should be read while being skeptic. Multiple unique life factors can make research very difficult to get right in this topic.
I couldn't agree more about psychiatric medication but that doesn't mean there aren't multiple causes. Also, drug addiction in many cases is caused by low wages and terrible economic conditions so addressing the addiction needs to address the underlying issues which are low wages and a terrible economy for normal people.
Well America has a difficult problem to solve. And that is its workforce is insanely expensive.
Or lets say the rest of the world is insanely poor compared to the americans.
We often joked here in Eastern Europe that we would be better off leaving our current IT jobs and just go to the US to work at McDonalds.
Does anyone have access to the paper? Raising the minimum wage means less jobs will be available, as employers cut costs and perform layoffs. My assumption is the paper neglects to factors this into their analysis, but if they do, I'd love to read it.
please read any study on cities that have substantially raised min wage in recent years (like Seattle) and understand how wrong you are about there being "fewer jobs" as a result before making such ridiculous statements
Seattle's raising of the minimum wage was arguably symbolic.
Seattle--a world-class tech nexus point--raising its minimum wage affected a relatively small percent of businesses compared to a "normal" city, as businesses in Seattle would have long since needed to offer higher wages in order to keep employees.
I'd be much more interested in seeing the effects of a $15 wage in Nowheresville, USA than in Seattle.
Well, that's both the point and missing the point. Seattle's higher minimum wage represented an already-existing reality in Seattle: their top-heavy economy.
"Normal" towns' leaders would recognize it as virtue-signaling rather than transformative change, because it would've affected proportionally few people.
The Seattle study was done during a time period when the economy of the city was going up significantly. The authors write in the paper that it's possible that if the minimum wage was not raised, it could have resulted in even more people employed.
That’s probably accurate, but hotly debated. I would be very cautious about stating it as fact, since there are many competing models and studies about the effects of raising minimum wage, and the one thing that is clear is that no one knows for sure.
Thanks. It's worth noting that they're studying people 18-64 with high school or less education.
If this result stands up, it'd be very interesting to drill in and figure out what's really happening. Quite challenging, though--apparently long study hasn't even settled the question of how minimum wage affects the job market.
In this case, one could imagine all sorts of confounders. For example, maybe communities that have higher minimum wages simply have them because they're wealthier as a whole, which could in turn lead to lower suicide rates. Or perhaps a higher minimum wage leads to the most marginal workers losing their jobs, and it turns out that they're happier for it somehow.
You know, a lot of basic economic models rely on underlying assumptions like conditions of perfect competition or zero transaction costs which people tend to forget about when trying to apply those models to the real world.
If you a see a piece of research that seems to contradict some elementary principle of economics, it's possible that the researchers somehow forgot all about it or never learned it and that the paper somehow passed out of peer review without anyone pointing out its glaring deficiencies, but it's more likely that that an elementary understanding of economics is insufficient to explain real world phenomena.
You can see a parallel to this in the climate science debate, where people object to scientific assertions on the grounds that the sun is very much hotter than burning fossil fuels or 'climate is always changing' and human activity is too nebulous to possibly have an impact. Often deliberately simplistic arguments are used to mislead the slightly-educated and discourage them from becoming better informed.
> Kaufman is planning future work to see whether depression, a risk factor for suicide, also decreases with wage hikes
It doesn't. A good working environment does. £1/hr more is nothing if you're on minimum wage working for Amazon Fulfillment or Facebook Moderation, being treated like a slave.
Source: totally unscientific experience with factory work and workers.
I’m all for fair pay, even if it means things (products or services) become more expensive. But therein is the problem: If the minimum wage is ten dollars an hour and you’re making twelve dollars an hour, that’s very different from minimum wage being twelve dollars and you’re making twelve dollars. Raising the minimum doesn’t just give minimum wage earners more money, it simultaneously devalues the money they receive. Does it devalue it at a rate proportionate to how much more they now make (on paper)? I don’t know. We almost certainly have to increase it (x+n)% to realize a benefit that on paper would come from an x% increase alone.
Globalization and protectionism also play a role here, and are a critical factor in the answer (think global minimum wage vs local minimum wage).
It does not devalue it if they're sharing demand for those products with people who make $50 an hour and a select few who make $1000 an hour - assuming those incomes don't go up proportional to the increase in minimum wage.
No, it definitely does. I’m not talking about the old “everyone’s income will just go up” defense. There is a “time added” cost that is a part of the price of any good or service (which may comprise only a part of the value added measure). Imagine a product that is created from raw materials so abundant as to be in and of themselves worthless. Its cost is purely the cost of the time (and effort, which is actually convertible into time) that went into it (amortizing the cost of tools and equipment, overhead, utilities, etc). This “time cost” is a component of any product or service for sale. If the wheel on your car used the same exact materials and the same exact manufacturing process but took ten times longer (just stretch every step out) it would cost more, and not only because they can make less of them.
This time cost cannot be less than a factor directly proportionate to minimum wage (local minimum wage or global minimum wage depending on economic policy).
In a sense, minimum wage is the cost of (human) time itself. You’re saying “regardless of the labor involved or otherwise, the skill involved or otherwise, the care involved or otherwise, the social skills involved or otherwise, the know-how involved or otherwise, this is the lowest you can pay someone to do something on an hourly basis (with many caveats, such as allowing employers to deduct the cost of services they provide their employees from said wage, etc). You can’t raise that cost without the cost of everything else shifting upwards by some extent with it. No one that understand economics debates that. The question is just how big this shift is.
I think that ignores, in a holistic sense, the effect of increased consumer spending, health benefits/better health outcomes, tax revenue etc.
If people are buying more because of wage increases, what is the macroeconomic effect? If people have better health care and take less sick days, what is the effect? If the government has more revenue to spend on programs to benefit people like public transit, job training, drug treatment, what is the effect?
Also worth it to a look at this paper, that shows that there aren't less jobs when you raise minimum wage.
Also CEO income (an exec compensation in general) has risen dramatically over the past 20 years while regular wage growth has been anemic. Are CEOs dramatically more productive, and workers barely so? That seems illogical, much more likely that the executives are capturing the value of their workers increased productivity. A company doesn't have to raise costs to consumers, it can always cut executive compensation.
If people are buying more then it means more demand, leading to increased price, unless there was an excess in supply (production capacity) in the first place.
I see income inequality as a key issue here. I recently read the "Triumph of injustice" and came away with a changed view in our tax system. After reading the book, I now believe that any household with a net worth over $100 million should be subject to both an income and capital gains tax of 99%.
In short folks with income come and or net worth at levels that surpass their ability to buy a life of finical security for several generations only increase income inequality.
High historically high levels of income inequality have torn countries apart.
That would not create the semi-communist world you're hoping for: today's rich people are already rich, and the effect would be stopping anybody new from becoming rich.
>> "and the effect would be stopping anybody new from becoming rich."
I read this as you thinking there's a problem with no more people getting rich. Can you expand on that?
For example: how many people need to get rich to balance the economic, social, and political power of the people who already are? Is this the best way to achieve that balance?
How many things were invented or financed because someone wanted to get rich? What happens to those types of things when it's impossible to get rich?
The answer is they don't happen here, they'll happen somewhere else. They may happen with the same people even, and then you're losing knowledge and experience to other countries, which is fine as long as those other countries choose to be friendly with you.
In other words, you willfully put your country's advancement into the hands of other entities. You no longer control your future.
>How many things were invented or financed because someone wanted to get rich?
Not as many as you think I would suggest. In the US a golden era of invention was the postwar era during which inequality fell and the American middle class rose to power and the American government still participated actively in shaping innovation and economic future. Even the Soviet Union invented a good deal of stuff.
Today economic growth is low, inequality is high, it looks like we're on our way to a second gilded age and the things that we call innovation are escooter startups and expensive juice machines. Even die-hard capitalists like Thiel have pointed this out.
If you want innovation what you need is a healthy, equal society, individual opportunity and collective ambition.
Every other developed economy was destroyed by the war. The rise of the middle class here was a result of overall economic growth and the economic suicide of the two world wars and the depression. Holding up the 1940's and 1950's as a model removes the context of cataclysmic world events of the 30's and 40's. Also remember that the US had virtually no welfare state at that time and used higher taxes to pay off war debt.
>I read this as you thinking there's a problem with no more people getting rich. Can you expand on that?
At least with our current system the rich people change every couple generations, if income and capital gains were frozen after $100M without any other changes to the tax code, everyone who is presently rich would keep their money while suddenly there would be no risk of replacing them. Bill Gates would become the richest man in the world, not just today, but forever. That's terrible according to Marixist and modern economic consensus: so not a good plan!
I suggest you look at current income figures and try to come up with a plan where juicing the rich works. There's a reason Germany's 42% tax bracket starts at... €55,961
If you want to pay for these things, you need to bring your idea of who's gonna get taxed way, way down to earth.
US healthcare is corrupt and inefficient. It's not only a debate about who should pay for it. Your comment suggests changing the latter would fix the problem with cost, which surely has a lot to do with the former.
What is chuckle worthy about the government running healthcare? Plenty of countries have good government run healthcare system. Several studies have found that patients on Medicare are generally more satisfied with their healthcare than patients with private insurance. Government can run health care.
The us has low governmental capacity and lower trust then most other nations. We don't have a clear view of sovereignty between state and federal and have the most active judicial system in the world.
That's my point. You can totally have those things, just most middle class people will have to pay in, it cannot be built via taxing only some nebulous $100 million+ class.
Employers can also stop paying $6,000/year[0] for middle-class health insurance and add that to middle-class paychecks, and then the government can take it in the form of taxes, to provide the health insurance.
The difference is that the cost savings should make this enough enough to cover EVERYONE, not just the upper-heeled middle class.
It's possible that quite a bit of the middle class may not notice a large difference in take-home pay even with an additional 10 percentage points of federal income tax.
Where's the remainder of your premium going to come from when you're only paying 10% salary for it? Private insurance companies sure aren't going to reduce their prices.
> the premium stops going into the pockets of insurance middlemen.
This just replaces one middleman (insurance co) for another (government).
I can tell by the downvotes that my point whooshed over everyone's head -- my point was essentially yours. Changing who pays isn't going to change anything. We have to change what gets charged.
I think this is the way to go. A wealth tax is unfair. But an income tax rated on your wealth feels very elegant. The richer you are, the harder it is to get richer. Which feels like it is fair because the richer you are, the more you leverage societal structures to become wealthier.
I think 99% is an overkill. If you assume 7% ROI and 2% inflation then a 70% top marginal bracket (combined with unifying capital gains and income) would make it very hard to maintain wealth.
To get rid of these high levels of inequality we don't need to make it impossible to be rich, just make it very hard to be rich and let nature take its course.
Note that in my lifetime the top marginal tax bracket has been over 70% so it's not even that radical of a change.
At 2% inflation, it's not possible to maintain $100M of wealth without also having $2M in annual income. If every dollar over $1M in income were taxed at 70%, then you would need over $4M in annual income, plus more than twice your annual expenditures to maintain that level of wealth.
4% rent on $100M in assets is probably sustainable over a long time, so if you live frugally, you could likely self-sustain that level of wealth.
If you have $1B in assets and make a 7% return (which is my conservative estimate of the maximum long-term rent you could extract on a large fortune) then that's $70M return in income, essentially all of which is taxed at the 70% rate, leaving $21M remaining, $20M of which is "lost" due to inflation.
This means that if you have a billion dollars and want to live just off of rents, you would need to both invest prudently, and live on expenses of no more than $1M per year. Mess up either and you are on track to leave the billionaire's club.
In addition, consider an heir who gets a high-paying professional job with a rags-to-riches one. The one with no wealth isn't having unearned income to pad their tax bracket, so the marginal pay they get for working is much higher than the heir who is also collecting investment income, thus allowing them to grow their wealth faster if they have an identical savings rate.
The US right now has an income tax scheme that is regressive for wealth because wealthy people have a greater fraction of their income in the form of long-term capital gains. GP suggested making it extremely progressive vs wealth, and I'm merely pointing out that a properly implemented wealth-blind income tax will work out to be progressive vs wealth due to inflation.
That's interesting because... right now we have a system that examines income and taxes income.
The "wealth tax" is a system that examines wealth and taxes wealth (not income). It's theorized that it's unconstitutional, and even if it isn't, the conservative US court might cause it problems anyway.
But if instead you examine wealth and tax income, maybe that gets around the issue. Higher income tax brackets for those with more wealth?
Seeing as wealth is rarely in the form of cash, and you need to pay taxes in cash. You would need to sell the wealth, creating income, which in turn is used to pay the taxes. So it seems right.
A simple wealth tax of 4-5% would completely eliminate idle wealth in a couple of decades and would not destroy the American way of bootstrapping yourself to wealth like a 99% tax would.
Doesn't seem plausible, _especially_ when unemployment is high.
Retail is the land of the minimum wage jobs, and margins are fairly thin there as it is. Raising the minimum wage simply means some employees become former employees. If the unemployment is at historic lows as it is today, there's a good chance those former employees will be able to find another job, so I see how the conclusion of the paper could be plausible, although loss of a job is still a very stressful event regardless.
When the unemployment rate is high (as it was in the studied date range), however, the effective wage becomes whatever unemployment pays, which isn't very much, and then it goes away entirely at some point. I don't see how this would reduce suicide.
Seems to me like another study crafted to produce the outcome the author wanted. The hypothesis isn't really testable anyway.
I always thought about more of a hybrid model for the US.
Something like a market socialism a la Singapore.
I would try to commoditize housing,healthcare and food.
It would be essential to make sure that these fundamental needs of people working for minimum wage are take care of.
Not too surprising. Suicide is a death of despair, which are closely linked to job loss, income loss, love loss, family loss, pain, etc. Easing any of those scenarios should help reduce suicide.
Alternatively stop exporting jobs and outsourcing joining a race to the bottom.
Stop buying cheap, disposable stuff and buy durable things affording locals a living wage. Minimum wages are only slightly better. In my mind minimum wages are wages to minimally support a teenager or similar who has no other responsibilities. People with responsibilities need actually decent jobs.
Hollowing our decent paying blue collar jobs will drive some people to despair.
You mean domestic policies have been negatively impacting the labor force for decades now? Get outta town! It's almost like low-to-no tariffs and importing literal slave-produced goods has created economic incentives to produce things overseas.
I agree with Bernie and Trump on protecting American workers. Everyone else just goes along with the siren song of more better value add jobs that never materialized for the affected population.
No one listened to the crazy Texan when he warned us.
Now their supposed to be happy having access to $5 T-shirts which last a week and should be mad that tariffs could push that up but could make s better paying job viable for an employer who no longer gets undersold.
It worked out great for the rich, which is exactly who was telling us about the Siren song. So in a very toxic way they weren't lying, they just weren't talking about (the metaphorical) you.
> Alternatively stop exporting jobs and outsourcing joining a race to the bottom.
Isn't that's just one half of the problem. Isn't the importing of labor the other half of the problem.
We've exported jobs and imported labor. That's a double whammy for workers and can't help but put downward pressure on wages. But it's great for the wealthy elites. Exploit cheap labor overseas and cheapen labor at home.
It seems like you need to be pretty damned sure before you try this. If they were to raise the minimum wage and suicides don't drop, do you put the minimum wage back where it was?
You're talking about quite literally like 80% of the entire tax revenue generated by the government. Income taxes we're devised because an industrial nation cannot collect property taxes on non land owning tax payers. As the cities grew, governments realized that they could only tax the wealthy and prominent land owners so much before they had to generate it in another way.
You're talking about quite literally like 80% of the entire tax revenue generated by the government.
This is wrong.
$50k/yr is below median household income so we're talking about eliminating income taxes for the bottom half of taxpayers (less than that actually, but whatever). The bottom half pays roughly 3% of income taxes.
Now, that number gets somewhat bigger when you take into account payroll taxes but it's nowhere close to 80%.
Payroll tax is more akin to a government pension program in that your payment roll gets you money back when you retire. Counting as just another tax really cuts against years of government arguments to the contrary.
Aren't there studies that show the suicide rate among married men is drastically lower than unmarried men? I really don't think it has anything to do with income (or at least to a significant degree) than it does with loneliness. Men's self worth is tied to his friends and wealth. It's hard to share your wealth if everybody else makes the same as you. So making more poor people "less poor" still wouldn't solve the problem among men not acquiring prestige or status that attracts people to them. It makes it incredibly easy to feel like a loser and ponder "whats the point?"
New Zealand also has a terrible youth suicide rate.
http://socialreport.msd.govt.nz/health/suicide.html
"New Zealand’s youth (15–24 years) suicide rate was the highest among the 34 OECD countries, ahead of Finland for males and Korea for females."
Point me to the data. Those who get higher wages may be happier, but those unemployed due to their work being ended for want of value would understandably despair. Seems like data easily shifted for sociopolitical benefit.
Raising minimum wage will push automation even further, making currently productive people switch to be welfare-dependent. Financed by taxes on the tech industry. This is a recipe for dystopia.
You have provided, and I'm not aware of any empirical evidence that this is true. There is also plenty of evidence to the contrary, see min wage increases in individual states, Australia, and NZ.
Yes, but the specifics are important. It's different for different people. Perverted justice system, news hysteria, jobs that are either awful or great, bad medical system, seems like every institution trying to rob you, war culture, political corruption from all sides, corporate dominance, civil forfeiture, bad public schools, expensive college, government encroachment on basic liberties, mob mentality laws, decades of the above; that's just off the top of my head. It's amazing we aren't worse off.
When idiots try to use simple math to try to model complex phenomena, I can only assume they have idiotic simplistic goals in mind.
Why do we need to prevent suicide? Maybe we need to remove the stigma around it so that people who got dealt a shit hand, aren't further burdened by getting shamed by everyone around them for wanting to end it.
We have too many people, it'd be an improvement for those who want to live and those who don't, if those who do not, decided to spend a few months doing whatever they wanted that isn't harming anyone else, and proceeding to peacefully move on with it.
It'd force shit parents, shit communities and shit people in general, to re-examine their way of life, if those around them would rather cease to exist, than co-exist with them. It'd be a massive move in the direction of honesty, dignity and respect for one another - something humans rarely engage in.
I used to think this way when I was a teenager, and I'm really glad that I grew out of it.
When I turned ~20, I started getting really bad insomnia and depression, and there wasn't a day that went by that I didn't think about suicide for years. At some level, I sort of planned around it (when I'm dead, x will happen).
I was incredibly fortunate to have a good support network of friends and family that helped me through the worst of it, and thanks in no small part to medication (and probably some hormones balancing out as I've gotten older), I am still alive, and happy to be alive.
It's not hard for me to imagine the alternate universe where no one tried to help me out of this depression, where there's no "stigma" around killing themselves, and I don't get the assistance I need to make me better; I'd be dead.
Now, granted, maybe it's no big loss for me to be gone, I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't like me, but considering how it ended up being a "phase" for me with no undo button, I'm pretty glad that we don't encourage people to killing themselves.
Just a note, I want to make it clear that I am ok with suicide in certain instances (like people with terminal diseases), but I really don't like the tone in this comment.
In the US, 434,000 make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Another 1.3 million make wages below the federal minimum.
The article mentions raising the minimum wage by 10%, or 73 cents an hour, which would save 1230 lives per year (plus a 10% increase in federal EITC as well). Assuming a 2000 hr work year, this increase in minimum wage would cost $633.64 million nationally for those making exactly minimum wage, and some larger value at least 3x that, if we also bring those 1.3 million making below minimum wage up to minimum wage + 10%. (It's unclear who is making below minimum wage, it might be family farmworkers? $2.13/hr service employees who aren't getting tips? Students exempt from the minimum wage? All of the above?) In any case the cost per life saved using this method at a minimum comes to $1,745,921, but probably around twice that. That might be a good value. Or it might be that there are other methods of saving those lives that would be more effective at lower cost, allowing even more lives to be saved.
I'd also like to see the inclusion of compulsory personal finance and budgeting education in our education system, both during high school and college/university years. A lot of the stress that encompassed my life back when I was working in a retail environment came from worrying over bills which ballooned because of my own lack of budgeting. It's an important skill that everyone should be exposed to early on.
Eh, I might kill myself in a year or two - more money would not change anything. The recent realization that I will never find a romantic partner despite being (relatively) rich, tall, good looking, sociable and sane has been crushing. At least if I had money problems I'd have something else to blame than myself.
UBI would also probably help. As a freelancer I've had some really slim months and depression hits hard when money is tight.
There's a very direct correlation between income security, insecurity, stress, depression, and suicidal thoughts.
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