[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.