[max_hoffmann]

Why should we exclude some people from living in attractive cities?

Being less wealthy doesn’t mean a job is less valuable. Police officers, firefighters, bakers, artists, nurses… currently struggle living in attractive cities because they cannot afford it. This makes these cities less liveable for everyone.

[Pyxl101]

This seems like a problem that is naturally solved by market forces, supply and demand. If some job is sufficiently valued in a city, then businesses and government will pay whatever wage is necessary to hire people to perform that job.

If people who are doing some job cannot afford to live in a city, then they will move away or find a different job. This will cause a shortage of people performing the job.

If there is a shortage of people doing the job, and the results of that job are sufficiently valued, then employers will be forced to raise wages until they can attract the number of employees required.

For example, if a city has a shortage of police offers, then they can solve that shortage by paying police officers a higher wage. If the city cannot recruit police without a higher wage, then the city will need to allocate more funds to police compensation so that they can pay a higher wage. If the city doesn't have the funds, then they may need to take the issue to the voters, who can approve some form of appropriation like a new tax to pay for it.

Alternatively, perhaps the voters will not approve a tax, and the city will not pay a higher wage for police, and there will be a police shortage. That's the voters' decision. The city will experience the consequence of the police shortage, whatever that may be. Later, the voters may change their mind and decide to approve the tax.

My point is that the fact of there being a labor shortage will cause a correction naturally via market forces.

[nzeribe]

What are you talking about? Nurses, teachers and public sector workers all critical for the functioning of cities are claiming welfare. Some nurses in the NHS are eating patients' left-over food. The logic of the market is to drive wages to the bottom and replace workers when they break. It leads to the destruction of service quality, social cohesion and increased deaths in our hospitals. Please stay off the Ayn Rand methamphetamine.

[imtringued]

The argument is that if the voters are not willing to fund those vulnerable workers then it clearly means that the voters have made the concious decision that these workers are not important to their community and therefore they think the workers should leave.

Well, there are two solutions, either make the voters less influential or change the behavior of the voters.

[Pyxl101]

> Nurses, teachers and public sector workers all critical for the functioning of cities

Sure. As a voter, if my region was experiencing a shortage of public sector workers, and that shortage was affecting my quality of life, or the life of people that I care about, then I would certainly be willing to vote in favor of a pay raise.

> The logic of the market is to drive wages to the bottom and replace workers when they break.

No, this is not true. Markets exhibit emergent behavior. They don't have any logic per se, although we can reason about how we expect them to behave. If markets have any "logic", then their logic is to reach an equilibrium price.

This does not necessarily mean that wages are driven to the bottom. What happens to wages is a function of supply and demand. If very few people are capable of performing a job in some area, and that job is in high demand, then the result of supply/demand dynamics will be a very high wage. On the other hand, if lots of people are capable of performing a job, and/or the job is in low demand, then the result might be a low wage.

It is certainly the case that everyone wants to pay the lowest price that they can for acceptable quality goods and services. Who wants to pay more at the grocery store, or the dentist, or the doctor's office? The cost of labor is a dominant cost in the price of all goods and services that we consume. The fact that automation is replacing labor in many industries has directly lead to the phenomenally low prices for many goods in the modern world.

For example, before the Industrial Revolution, clothing was exceptionally expensive. Clothing required a massive amount of human labor, and so a single shirt might have cost the equivalent of $3,500 modern dollars. As a result of this, poor people could afford very little clothing - resulting the trope of peasants wearing rags to tatters. Most of our fabrics and clothing are produced by machines now, and so the cost of clothing has come down by orders of magnitude. The result is now that even fairly poor people across the globe can afford adequate clothing.

https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2013/06/the-3500-shirt-history-...

Automation in most cases results in an increase of quality, not a reduction in quality. For another perspective on this, examine how the cost of lighting has decreased over time: https://ourworldindata.org/light#price-of-light-over-the-lon...

It is a good thing for everyone that the costs of goods and services comes down over time (or equivalently: the quality of goods and services increases while the price remains steady). This directly leads to a better quality of life for everyone -- this is exactly the way in which economic growth leads to an improved standard of living: the same dollar can buy more than it could before, either a greater amount of goods, or goods of greater quality.

[seunosewa]

I see no reason why a productive city with a high-earning, tax-paying population won't be able to pay police officers, firefighters, nurses, etc. as much as they need to be paid in order to do their important jobs well. I don't see why artists who do important work e.g. for Apple won't be paid well too.