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Lumifer comments on On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor - Less Wrong
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Sure. But having had a higher-paying job means (or at least can mean and sometimes will) having more savings (or, more likely: some savings instead of none), which means that losing your job is a nuisance rather than a cataclysm likely to put you on the streets within a month. That seems like it might be quite a big deal in terms of employee attitude.
(Yes, of course guaranteed employment would have a much stronger effect. So, less disastrously I think, would a reasonable-sized basic income.)
I don't know. You're talking about the propensity to save and -- at the minimum-wage levels of income -- it's not obvious to me that it's correlated with income.
We can throw images back and forth ("Now she has money left after buying food and she'll put into a savings account!" vs. "Now she'll just buy a bigger TV and fancier clothes ending with the same credit card debt!"), but I suspect that economics papers with relevant data exist. I also suspect that the results will show high variance and dependence on the prevailing culture (e.g. compare average savings rates in the US and China).
And ability. The higher your income, the more of it is somewhat discretionary and the easier it is to save more.
I agree that there is almost certainly real research on this, but evidently neither of us has read it yet :-).