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jimrandomh comments on A potentially great improvement to minimum wage laws to handle both economic efficiency as well as poverty concerns - Less Wrong
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Comments (74)
There are very few people whose work is worth between zero and minimum wage; most people's labor is either worth more than minimum wage, or has negative value because of the non-wage costs and risks associated with hiring someone.
I'm not sure I believe you. By "non-wage costs and risks" do you mean things like health benefits, or lawsuit liability, or what? I can think of a lot of productive uses for cheap labor.
There's a bunch of trash and graffiti in my city. There's lots of unemployed people whose labor cleaning it up would be worth, say, a euro an hour.
Reference?
This estimation might be affected by the availability heuristic - I don't see a reason why marginal cost of labor should jump around a lot, so maybe it's so common for low-benefit jobs not to be filled that nobody comments on it.