[toomuchtodo]

This is a bit of a wild way to explain away "we're going to pay people under 18 less because we think we can justify it." Just raise the minimum wage and pay them the same. If they don't take the jobs, they don't. If the jobs go unfilled, raise the pay to a clearing price where they are. If employers can't make the economics work, that's unfortunate.

How you see this issue is likely governed by where on the spectrum between "human" and "labor" you see a person, admittedly. In this context, we're going through contortions to argue to pay people less by age "because we can."

[eadmund]

> If employers can't make the economics work, that's unfortunate.

Yes, minimum wages are unfortunate for those who don’t have sufficient skills to work at minimum wage. That’s why there are almost no more human order-takers at fast food restaurants. Kind of sucks for the kids — and poorer folks — who could have worked those jobs and used them as a springboard to something else.

[marcus_holmes]

There will always be some kind of work at this level. I did market research, which sucked, and fruit picking, which sucked, and warehouse order picking, which sucked, and bar work, which didn't suck too much, before getting into my career.

I think if we replaced all those jobs with robots, there would still be new, more interesting, work at this level that would emerge.

My favourite example of this is bank clerks. Every bank used to employ an army of clerks that did all the double-entry book-keeping by hand. Then we invented computers and that entire career vanished. All of the people who would have been bank clerks are now doing something else, almost certainly something else way more interesting than being a human spreadsheet. But at roughly the same pay level in roughly the same numbers as bank clerks used to be employed.

[toomuchtodo]

You are stating these things like they are natural or physical laws, when they are simply agreed upon politically and can change. Look no further than California raising the minimum wage to $20/hour for fast food workers, increasing costs roughly ~1.5%. So, let us not say that it can't be done, only that those with the power to change this are unwilling to (for obvious, economic advantageous and exploitation reasons).

California's $20 fast-food minimum wage improves pay at small cost to consumers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43806608 - April 2025

[nullc]

I'm in California. Two of my favorite fast food restaurants have closed (or closed their locations here) others have radically reduced their workforce and replaced humans with machines.

It'll be interesting to see if this effect turns out to be statistically signficant in time. ( https://reason.com/video/2024/12/19/no-californias-20-minimu... ).

[eadmund]

You are not addressing my point. The cost to consumers does not consider the cost to potential employees who no longer have jobs. Note the very first comment (at this time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43806765): ‘The fast food chains seem to have a bifurcated response. Some, like McDonalds, seem to have cut crew, while retaining relatively low prices.’

And yes, it is a natural law that increasing the cost of something reduces its usage. That’s why we many governments tax alcohol and cigarettes. Raising the cost of labour means that less of it is bought.

Raising the cost of labour puts labourers out of work.

[toomuchtodo]

> There is always a great deal of political heat around minimum wage increases, largely driven by concerns about job losses. After a minimum wage increase, the story goes, many employers will not be able to afford to pay their workers the new higher minimum wage and will therefore shrink their payrolls. If these job losses are large enough, they could even swamp the higher wages and lead to lower overall wage income for the entire group of affected workers.

> Actual evidence shows that this narrative is largely wrong. A new review that I co-authored with Arindrajit Dube finds that most minimum wage studies find no job losses or only small disemployment effects. In other words, the vast majority of minimum wage research implies that minimum wage policies have unambiguously raised the total earnings of low-wage workers.

> This conclusion is strengthened by focusing on the studies that examine broad groups of low-wage workers or the overall workforce, not just narrow segments like teenagers. As the figure below shows, the median employment response is essentially zero among these more comprehensive studies, with 90% of these studies finding no or only small disemployment effects.

Most minimum wage studies have found little or no job loss - https://www.epi.org/blog/most-minimum-wage-studies-have-foun...

Own-Wage Elasticity: Quantifying the Impact of Minimum Wages on Employment - https://www.nber.org/papers/w32925 | https://doi.org/10.3386/w32925

Repository of underlying data for the claim: https://economic.github.io/owe/

[sarchertech]

> 90% of these studies finding no or only small disemployment effects.

That’s what you’d expect though if the studied minimum wage increases were too small to meaningfully impact the labor market, which mostly seems to be the case from randomly spot checking a few of the underlying studies.

For example roughly 0.15% of the workforce currently makes $7.25 an hour. McDonald’s in low cost of living areas starts out closer to $15.

So if you raise the minimum wage to $8. You’ll see “small unemployment effects.”

If you raised it to $20, you’ll see much larger unemployment effects. But legislators know this is the case so they don’t tend to raise minimum wages by amounts that will cause large unemployment effects.

So of course most studies of real world minimum wage increases don’t show large unemployment effects.

Personally I think a negative income tax is a much more efficient and fair means of accomplishing the same goal.

[const_cast]

The reality is those jobs would have been obsolesced either way.

[nullc]

Have you ever lived in poverty? Have you ever earned minimum wage (or below)? I have and I am extremely grateful for the oppturnities it brought me and the life I was eventually able to make out of it.

There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!

[toomuchtodo]

Yes and yes. It is why I believe there is no room for negotiation and weaseling out of paying humans a wage required that enables them to live with dignity (as it relates to a minimum wage) [1].

Edit:

> There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!

I don't know what else to tell you my dude. McDonalds made $14B in profit last year. I can show you many examples where the economic resources surely exist based on the profits being made, in whatever industry or vertical you want to pick from, to pay people a living wage. I'm not saying no profits, I'm not cheering on communism. I'm simply arguing for the existing system to pay people enough to survive in comfort, regardless of age, with some combination of decreased profits and increased costs. If I can show you the economic value and wealth exists, and we still go through contortions to argue we cannot pay living wages to people (when the evidence is robust that we can), I can either come to the conclusion that someone has not built a robust mental model on all of the variables in play or they just don't think we should pay people enough to live. We're just arguing unnecessary economic system complexity (living wages for some, lower wages for teenagers even though a majority of minimum wage workers are not teenagers [2]) to paper over exploitation for some combination of consumer excess and shareholder returns. No attempt at dehumanizing is being made.

[1] https://livingwage.mit.edu/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43840936

[nullc]

As a worker being denied the ability to get work I wanted to accept at an agreed wage because someone far away who never met me and doesn't understand my life thought it was too low for my own good isn't particularly dignified.

That's why I'm arguing with your presentation even though I don't oppose having a minimum wage. It's not just a question of lacking empathy for someone or living with dignity, because in those terms a minimum wage can have the opposite effect.

And dismissing contrasting views as unemphatic or suggesting that no one can be poorly paid with dignity detracts from having a useful conversation... it also says little about what the minimum wage should be. Certainly $1m/yr is more dignified than less! :P