Lumifer comments on On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor - Less Wrong

13 Post author: ChrisHallquist 27 November 2013 05:08AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (510)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Strange7 21 September 2015 12:13:09PM 0 points [-]

Personally I would expect large corporations and the very rich to be capable of defending their position against any reasonably predictable shift in the economic environment, since they have resources and motivation to lay out more comprehensive contingency plans than anyone else. That extra productivity from "Job 2" doesn't just vanish into the aether. Higher minimum wage means the poorest people have more money, then they turn around and spend that money at Walmart.

The ones who lose out from a higher minimum wage would be the middle managers, who are then less free to treat bottom-tier workers as interchangeable, disposable, safe targets for petty abuse. With higher wages, those workers will have more of the financial security that makes them willing to risk standing up for themselves, and specialized skills that make them more expensive to replace. That's what wage compression, reductions in turnover, and improvements in organizational efficiency look like from the trenches.

Comment author: Lumifer 21 September 2015 04:51:59PM 1 point [-]

Personally I would expect large corporations and the very rich to be capable of defending their position against any reasonably predictable shift in the economic environment

If you can formulate that claim sufficiently precisely to be falsifiable, it shouldn't be hard to test it.