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by gavinballard
5558 days ago
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From the article: "If business owners could hire people in the US to clean up their messy databases for $3.00 they wouldn’t need to go on mechanical turk to hire the same person for $1.50 an hour." That's completely against the very pure form of economic rationalisation Friedman epitomises. A self-interested, economically rational business would hire the worker for $1.50 an hour. They get the same result for half the cost - it's a no brainer. In the absence of a minimum wage, the income of folks in developed countries are depressed towards the levels of income of folks in developing countries - without a corresponding shift of the cost of living. Minimum wages protect the poorer members of society in a developed nation from falling even further behind economically. As to the point that "minimum wages cause unemployment" - I think this article misrepresents the nature of Friedman's argument in this respect, and completely skips the depth of his position. It also begins to take on the view that low unemployment is the end itself rather than a means to improve underlying social conditions. 0% unemployment with an average low-income wage of $0.50 is not 'better' than 5% unemployment with an average low-income wage of $7. A final note - the minimum wage in Australia is currently nearly double that of the United States. Our current unemployment rate is about half that of the United States. Unemployment is far more dependent on broader economic factors than just the minimum wage. |
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This assumes that MTurk is an exact substitute. It isn't even close.
I know of a person who made this exact choice - instead of going lean and using MTurk at $1.50/hour, he is paying close to $5/hour (loaded cost, wage is probably about $2.50) for live humans and suffering with monthly contracts and renting office space. (I'm helping him with the data analysis.)
Among other things, with a single turk at $1.5/hour, you need to hire 2 more turks each at $1.5/hour and get a majority vote on their work. You also need to hope you didn't hire two colluding spammers. You don't get to give them live, in-person training, and checking work is more difficult.
Then there are statistical issues. If you have 10,000 HITs produced by 100 turks, you need to check 100 x 15=1500 HITs and you have a low confidence that any individual turk did a good job. If you have 10,000 HITs produced by a single employee, you can check 200 HITs and get a much higher confidence rate. Do this for a few rounds, you now have a set of employees who you can trust. Additionally, you can control when the work is done. If something is important, it will be done in precisely #HITs / (employees x HIT rate) hours. On MTurk, you hope it will eventually be done one day.
0% unemployment with an average low-income wage of $0.50 is not 'better' than 5% unemployment with an average low-income wage of $7.
The average low income wage in the US is far lower than $7. Most poor adults (about 70%) have a wage of $0 due to having no job.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf