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shokwave comments on Optimal Employment - Less Wrong
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The minimum wage point alone is probably enough maths, honestly. The hypothetical person here is far more likely than the average American citizen to be on or near minimum wage.
I'm not sure if that follows. Why do you believe that?
Because it's possible to live extremely comfortably on the minimum wage here as long as you don't have dependents. This creates a disincentive towards going out and getting a higher paying job that requires far more actual work. eg. Last year I was covering my costs of living in Sydney by working three days a week at minimum wage and was still able to go out to nice restaurants and so forth fairly regularly.
Ah, okay. My mistake-- I thought shokwave's "here" referred to LessWrong as a whole, not Australia.
The people I know who are similar to the results in the survey linked in the top level post are disproportionately on minimum wage or near minimum wage jobs - particularly casual or part-time.
Not to mention that a high minimum wage suggests it might be hard to find a minimum wage job.
It does suggest that. The unemployment rate far more strongly suggests the opposite.
For the curious: One of the reasons why the wages in Australia seem so high is because Australia largely dodged the credit crunch, having put suitable controls on its financial sector well ahead of time. So the currency has stayed up - particularly compared to the USD, which has gone down the toilet. Conditions may equalise with time, but right now there's a huge discrepancy.
(I moved from Australia to London when the AUD was worth half what it is now, when it was about AUD$3 to GBP£1.)
Ah yes, I forgot that Australia largely avoided the current recession, that explains a large part of it.
And to make it stranger - cash register prices (food, etc.) in AUD have approximately doubled in the last ten years, the time in which the dollar has grown to twice the size. So in USD or GBP, stuff has gone up in price by about four - but it doesn't feel like 4x in Australia.
We have a pile of first-world economies that are not in fact all that closely coupled, except when two countries both do similar stupid things, e.g. letting the financial sector run rampant.
FWIW, the idea that "letting the financial sector run rampant" was the cause of the current recession is not uncontroversial. I and others think poor monetary policy is much more to blame.