drnickbone comments on On Walmart, And Who Bears Responsibility For the Poor - LessWrong
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That's an inefficiency, but it seems to me that a far more central one is embedded in the assumptions of your toy model: how many unskilled jobs ($3) funge against skilled or semi-skilled ones ($10). In practice, it seems to me that the kind of jobs an employer can offer are often narrowly constrained by business requirements.
A factory owner, for example, might be able to retrain unskilled line workers (fitting Subwidget A to Subwidget B) to do semi-skilled work (operating a widget-fitting machine) for higher total productivity; that's consistent with your model's assumptions. But if you run, say, a hardware store, someone's got to stack shelves, mop the floors, and run the registers, all of which take roughly the same level of training, and there's only so many places you can squeeze out more per-body productivity by investing more. Anyone you have to fire because of minimum-wage laws there represents an economic loss: they aren't getting paid, and you aren't running as efficient a business as you could be.
Someone downvoted your reply, Nornagest, which I really can't understand: I upvoted it myself.
The parent is now at -2; one more down and it will disappear from view, and we will get a heavy tax for continuing.
What is happening here? Are we just not allowed to have discussions on this forum about the possible economic gains and costs of minimum wage or minimum income policy?
Someone's probably downvoting everything in the thread, most likely on grounds of being too political for the forum. My other comments here have taken the same hit.
Obviously I don't agree with that policy as it's applied locally, but I can't really blame them either. This exchange has been relatively sane, but the discussion under other comments has had points of low quality, and I'm not totally convinced that we're better off with the thread as a whole.