[worried4future]

> They would rather a young person take on mounds of debt, instead of say a low paid internship or apprenticeship. Current minimum wages ensure automation are going to win.

Yes. Abolish the minimum wage. Higher minimum wage forces more people out of the workforce entirely and skews the labor market in favor of large corporations vs small businesses. Amazon can absorb any minimum wage hike you can conceive, they don't want to and they will fight tooth and nail against it, but they can afford it. Your neighborhood pizza shop will go out of business (and be replaced by a Pizza Hut -- paying twice as much but employing 25% as many people and working them 400% as hard) if they have to pay their drivers 15 or 20 or 25 (or more) dollars an hour. Both of these effects, lower labor participation rate and consolidation of the employment market in fewer large corporations, are much worse for society overall.

[jrajav]

If you're going to make claims that don't align with academic consensus and empirical evidence (that higher minimum wage is net bad for the lowest earners, or for the economy as a whole, or that it reduces employment), you'll need to back up your claims with substantial evidence of your own. As is, you're just spinning a hypothetical based on total assumptions, which don't really pass the sniff test.

[worried4future]

> academic consensus and empirical evidence

I reject the "academic consensus" of people who are not a part of the real world.

[guywithahat]

The academic consensus is, in fact, that minimum wage hikes hurt the lowest paid workers by forcing them out of the labor market and raising prices. I'm not sure what the other guy was talking about

[guywithahat]

I was admittedly confused and had to read your comment a few times.

It has been empirically proven that a higher minimum wage does hurt the lowest paid workers the most by forcing them out of the labor market and raising prices. Now as the other posted not so eloquently pointed out research, especially sociology (infamously in 2006 ~18% of social scientists considered themselves marxists), is a very left-leaning field and there is a lot of disingenuous research. The two most common bad studies I've seen say a very modest minimum wage hike doesn't cause layoffs, which is usually because everything is within the margin of error, or we see studies that say given enough time they see a benefit but this doesn't usually include inflation, forcing those workers to relocate, or a variety of other real world effects. But the fact raising the minimum wage hurts the lowest paid workers is just a fact

[ocbyc]

A worker is worth what a business can pay for the value they bring. Arguably a low paid apprenticeship is more beneficial than mounds of college debt. Somehow taking debt is seen as better than simply breaking even. I know many jobs that would benefit from someone "sweeping the shop" while they learn the business.

[eropple]

And when they starve or go homeless in the process of “learning the business”?

Spherical cows don’t work in physics, let alone economics. Minimum wages are suboptimal but starving is worse.

[BenjiWiebe]

Wouldn't you starve or go homeless even faster if you had no income but were paying for an education?

vs getting paid (a little) to get education.

[worried4future]

No, because, when you're paying for an education you can also get loans (at usurious rates) to cover cost of living expenses too!

You won't pay now for that 10k/year required meal plan for cafeteria food and 20k/year for hostel-level accommodation but you're sure going to pay for it later.

[FpUser]

>"Spherical cows"

Thanks for the laugh. Makes for warm and fuzzy memories. My science days are some 30 years behind.

[worried4future]

> And when they starve or go homeless in the process of “learning the business”?

These are effects of the fact that costs of living are dramatically out of control, you can't just infinitely raise the minimum wage to compensate as this is only making the problem worse.

[worried4future]

> A worker is worth what a business can pay for the value they bring.

I think this is a good point of view, but, it's important to remember that what the business can pay differs from what it's willing to pay and that larger employers are more able to drive rates lower. Not all businesses are equal and we should favor the ones which bring the most benefit to the most people.

> Arguably a low paid apprenticeship is more beneficial than mounds of college debt.

100%. Remove "arguably" from your comment. Factor in the value of starting earlier and negative value of the debt you accumulate and very few professions truly benefit from a college education and most of the remaining ones only do so due to regulatory capture effects of requiring them and we would do well with reducing those in favor of far more trade-focused education (tl;dr more trade schools, less liberal arts colleges).