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I think i speak for a lot of the American right when i say "fuck no".
The left claims without evidence that immigration is neccesary because immigrants do the jobs Americans don't want to do. The Right responds that necessity has nothing to do with it and that the truth is that they're doing the jobs that the left is unwilling to pay an American to do because the left are a bunch of moral degenerates who value cheap access to avocado toast over the health of thier community, and would rather have a serf than an employee.
It is the attitude of people like you that has made this an issue of contention in the first place because like it or not, proles vote.
But those are functionally the same thing. Pay us enough money and sure, you can get an American to work in a chicken processing plant or wherever. But you'll also have to massively jack up prices. It doesn't raise overall prosperity, it just raises inflation. People have this fantasy that the entire country can all be rich and prosperous, but it's never been like that, there's always an underclass doing unpleasant work for shit wages, it's just a question of who is going to be that underclass.
There is a free lunch here: the productive output of folks who prefer not to work and consume welfare instead.
They can do the jobs or starve. In either case the rest of us benefit.
The fake socialists like AOC have given up one of the key tenets of socialism: from each according to his means.
is your username legit? You really want to be like the USSR and feed all people into the industrial machine, letting the weak die off from starvation?
I want to replace our fake socialism/welfare state with real socialism where people contribute what they can.
The "weak" as you call them are not people incapable of producing value. They are just lazy wreckers who consume welfare and refuse to work. I want them to work for their dinner. This might be a net negative in EV - their consumption might exceed their production - but it's higher EV than having them sit around playing video games and doing drugs.
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Yes, that's the smoking gun that proves beyond any reasonable doubt that anyone claiming that "there is no evidence that immigration has a negative effect on wages" is either an idiot or a liar.
This is the crux of the issue. The left claims that they want people to be paid a living wage while doing everything in thier power to undermine and sabotage said wages.
As I said in last weeks discussion of this topic, i have yet to be convince that the exchange of labor is somehow exempt from the ordinary rules of supply and demand.
The main problem is scale.
You want more eggs? no problem, raise wages and get more chicken workers.
You want more strawberries? No problem, raise wages and get more strawberry workers.
You want more of everything, across the board, espeicially in low-wage manual labor jobs that are hard to automate? Well... now you've run out of workers. You can raise wages as much as you want, but you're not going to magically get more workers out of thin air. It might have been different in 2010 when US unemployment was high. Now it's near record-lows, there's just not a lot of slack left in the economy. Or do you want to put my 90-yr old grandma at work building houses?
You're not "running out of workers" though, you just don't want to pay them. Labor force participation for people under 65 has been trending downwards for decades.
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Prime-age male labor force participation rate is at 90%, off its all-time lows during COVID but still well under the 97.5% we had in 1955. So there's slack without grandma building houses. Unemployment is low, but it's been lower.
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As we all know, in America, absolutely no homes were built, no lawns were mowed, no children raised, no crops picked, no animals butchered, prior to the passing of the Hart-Cellar Act.
At one point, all of these jobs were done, and ones requiring a wage - as opposed to the family just doing it - paid living wages. The idea that it's mathematically impossible for chickens to be slaughtered at a living wage without immiserating the rest of the US flies in the face of all of recorded history.
Once again, I am begging the citizens of the Motte to stop with this "reasoning from first principals" nonsense; it doesn't work, it has never worked, and it is incredibly unlikely it can ever work.
And there were many more poor people in America circa 1960 than there are today! There were also far fewer labor-intensive services on offer- you mowed your own damn lawn.
You cannot run a society without Dalits. Middle class people don’t want to be janitors and meatpackers and peach pickers(I don’t either). When we stopped oppressing the blacks we needed some replacement.
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You say i should stop "reasoning from first principles", but that's what you're doing. The 1960s weren't some golden age of American prosperity. The average wage was far, far lower back then than it is today. The average person lived in a small, low quality house shared with a large family or many roommates. The average job was shit. They also had a huge underclass of both black Americans and refugees from 3rd world countries, in much worse poverty than we have today.
Please, show me your ideal society so that we can stop using reasoning.
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I have bad news to you about how most cotton was picked in the past. Even after 1865.
Immiseration is relative and it's well documented that relative deprivation is perceived far more sharply than the equivalent increase.
US poultry consumption was fueled by low prices -- taking that away now, even partially, is a dead idea.
I do agree that an objective sense, the state of Americans in the 60s eating far less meat was not immiseration. But that's not the same as saying that going back to that place now would not be perceived as such.
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Back in those days Americans were being paid well under what they're currently getting in real terms. If there are Americans willing to work for similar real wages as to what they were getting back then then yes, they can build homes, mow lawns, raise children etc. The problem is that they're aren't willing to to this for the much higher wages they are currently being offered, so what makes you think they'll happily accept the much lower wages (yes we are more technologically advanced today which means we can offer them higher real wages than those days without much loss, but we're not that much more advanced that we can just give them however much money they are asking for)?
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This is true, but you are overlooking the fact that the average American in the past was very poor compared to Americans now. Yes, even poor people could buy houses and raise large families back then, but the standard of living was much lower. How many Americans would really be willing to pick fruit or lay roof for contemporary fruit-picker or roofing wages today if we just magically departed all the illegal immigrants? You might like to go back to the demographics of the 1950s, but you can't magically unroll immigration but not all the economic and technological changes since then as well.
Personally, I'd be willing to bite that bullet and say yes, let's deport illegals, pay Americans living wages, and eat the price increases in the grocery store and service industries. But I think a lot of people would regret asking for this, because I think those prices will get jacked to the sky compared to now.
(Tagging at @BahRamYou and @Tractatus because this is all kind of flowing together)
No one should be a chicken processor for their entire career. Or a waiter / waitress at a diner or fast casual restaurant (service staff at high end restaurants is another matter). Or the proverbial burger flipper.
These jobs should be more or less easy-in-easy-out temporary employment for people who need cash to pay their bills. If you read some of the mid century "road" novels, you'll see how a pretty common modus operandi was for the protagonist to roll into town on his last dollar, pick up a few days work doing janitorial work at a auto garage or something, and then go on his merry (usually drunk) way of philosophizing. I've written about this before. It's not so much that people in the 50s/60s were raising full families on these unappealing jobs, it's that these unappealing jobs were the equivalent of day rate motel stays.
So, problem number one is that employment law and regulation has become so burdensome that we literally have millions of jobs that are not worth having - for either the employer or employee. These are the jobs that immigrants (many illegal, all of them willing) actually end up taking. I think I actually saw the very beginning of this as I was finishing high school. One summer, I got a job at a book store - I filled out a single page application and was working the next day. I got a check at the end of the week. The next summer, I got a job at a decent restaurant. The first FULL DAY, I had to fill out pages and pages of digital corporation nonsense on the computer, then watch a bunch of compliance videos (mostly about not falling down in the kitchen or being on drugs), and then had to sign even more physical paperwork relating to me 'trainee' status. This is all so that this restaurant (owned by a corporate chain) doesn't get sued to death by various regulators for not ... self-regulating.
To put it in economist terms, the friction for labor is so much higher than it was decades ago, that it isn't worth going through that friction for some of the lower paying jobs.
For immigrants, however, employers might just skip the paper work and pay in cash. Or, if they employee is visa connected, the company knows they won't just rage quit one day and face deportation. I can't support this at present, but I also feel like the visa-employment situation has a cottage industry of consultants who help the employers manage all of the paperwork (for a fee).
But the fact remains that shitty jobs have always been shitty but, before, you could hop in and out of them, collect some cash, and be on your merry way.
The second issue is that market interference has made the cost of certain things untenable. The major one, of course, is housing. There simply isn't enough (because of burdensome construction regulations and the perverse incentives of home equity appreciation). Wages can't keep up. Wages, however, have kept up with some things that we now consider close to necessary - computers and phones. A decent laptop can now be had for less than $500. Same for a phone. Monthly cellular service is between $20 - $100 depending. nearly gig level internet at home is $100- $200 a month. Very few Americans who want a phone do not have one. Very few Americans who want broadband (and don't live intentionally in the middle of nowhere) do not have it.
All of this is to say I see "the immigration question" in it's economic context as really an outgrowth of a much bigger issue - over regulation and bureaucratization. I shouldn't care too much about low skill immigrants because, if I am competing with them, we're all essentially "taking turns" in that job pool. As we go up the skill ladder, I'm competing with fewer people and then things like community and connections (networks) become more important (which I, as a native, ought to have an advantage in). Instead, because jobs are such high friction now, I am at the bottom of the skill ladder competing with people who exist with the ability to better slide through the legal maze of employment because they are either (a) breaking the law or (b) part of a international labor movement system that penalizes me, ironically, for having been born in the right place.
I'm skeptical that you're getting a "normal" view of society from reading novels. Basically, anyone who can write a novel is above-average intelligence and motivation. Even more so if it's a famous novel like "On the road."
As a teenager, I worked a few shitty minimum-wage jobs. One I particularly remember was being a dishwasher at a fancy restaurant. It was basically like you described- I showed up, the manager told me bluntly that it was minimum wage, I told him I had no experience but I was friends with another kid who worked there, we shook hands and I started the next day.
It sucked. It wasn't "a step on the jobs ladder." It didn't teach me any useful skills. It mostly just sucked up all my time and energy and made me too tired to concentrate on my schoolwork. It also injured my body with scalding hot water full of sharp metal objects, which I had to work in like a maniac to keep up with the pace of dishes. The only way to get a break was to go smoke, so basically everyone in the kitchen was a hardcore smoker. Also, almost everyone there had a prison record. Most of them were not young people on the path to a better job- they were pretty much stuck in shit jobs for their entire life.
So no, I don't think I could "hop in and hop out" of a job like that, and be on my merry way to my "real career" as a novelist or whatever. A lot of jobs just suck, that's why we pay someone else to do them for us because we don't want to do them. Most of the people who do those jobs get stuck their for their entire life (or in a similarly shitty job). That's why we call it a "dead-end job."
But, like, you did.
But your very own account, you had this job as a teenaged, hated it (but made some money) and then worked hard at your studies to go build a different career. Not hopping-in-and-out of it would imply you either a) never got the job in the first place or b) are still working there (or a similar job).
You're proving my point here. Shitty jobs are shitty. People shouldn't have them for very long. But they're hand to have if you're close to destitute and need quick, honest cash (or if you're, I don't know, a student who would like some small income).
Please re-read my original post. I'm not advocating for shitty jobs as actually not shitty. I'm not saying people should be thankful for their shitty jobs and stay in the forever. I'm saying that shitty jobs should have low friction of entry and exit and that, because they do not, this contributes a level of extra competition at the lower end of employment that is wrong and unfair, especially for legally complaint native born Americans.
I think that there's some misinterpretation of what my point is and I'm not totally convinced it's innocent misinterpretation. I agree with "people shouldn't have to work shitty jobs" as much as I agree with "we shouldn't have wars" -- A nice thought, but unrealistic. Worse yet, I find that people who are super-duper anti-shitty job tend to be in favor of very generous Government cash transfer programs. This is a negative-sum game; the taxpayer base gets a raw deal, and the welfare recipients become strange pseudo-indentured wards of the state.
The thing is, I was already a good student before I had that shitty job. It didn't motivate me to go and work harder, it actually just distracted me a lot from my studies. Saying I hopped-in-and-out is like saying someone can quickly move from from a brief drug addiction or short prison sentence. It's possible, there are people who do it, but it's not good for anyone, and there's an awful lot of people who get stuck there for lifetime. Most of the people I saw there were stuck there or in a similarly shitty job for their entire life.
I agree with you that it's unrealistic to not have shitty jobs. You seem to think that they can be done by native-born people who are just working there briefly on their path to a better life. I think that's unrealistic too, and that we should help citizens find a better life while letting immigrants from 3rd-world countries work the shitty jobs because it's still better than what they would have faced back home.
When you say "we" in "we should help citizens find a better life" what do you mean exactly? Education programs? Cash transfers? Job finding support?
Because all of these ideas have been tried before and, in some cases, are still being tried - to great failure.
Again, what is your proposed solution? Please try to be more specific than "help those who need helping"
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One of the important lessons of price floors/caps is that they cause competition on other margins. Think back to when there were price caps on gasoline. It caused shortages in terms of price, and produced competition on other margins - specifically, it caused people to have to compete or "pay" in terms of time spent sitting in line. Alternatively, you could curry favor with a supplier (say, your dad's brother runs a gas station; he might be willing to let you skip the line; presumably you're "paying" with good will).
Similarly, a price floor on low-skill labor (minimum wage) results in shortages in terms of price (unemployment) and competition on other margins. If you're not willing to work under shittier conditions, for example, you're easily replaceable by someone else who is, and since you're going to cost the same either way (in terms of monetary price), who do you think is going to "win" the job? It's very similar to rent control as a price ceiling. Tenants can't compete on price, so they implicitly compete on who is willing to endure the housing conditions getting worse and worse (lack of maintenance, etc.). If the "price" of shittier conditions gets too high for you, someone else who is willing to pay the higher "price" of shittier conditions, but is mandated to pay the same monetary price, will win the competition.
I don't really understand how your comment relates to the topic at hand. H1B visa holders are usually getting paid more than minimum wage, and migrant/illegal workers aren't bound by any rules at all.
My own experience is that the real world is a bit different from the perfect frictionless sphere econ101 view of the world. Working at a small shop, it's not always easy to replace someone, so they'll often put up with some shockingly bad behavior to avoid firing. But there's also shitty managers who enjoy flexing their petty power to make workers lifes worse just because they can, for not rational economic reason.
The conversation turned significantly toward minimum wage "dead-end jobs". You can find some more interesting discussion of this group here.
This sort of feeds into 100's point about frictions. Yes, there are frictions to firing people, too, which in multiple markets leads to behavior like, "Let's just make it shitty enough for them that they quit." This isn't just at the low-end. I'm very aware of situations where C-level people were pushed out by just gradually taking away all of their power/budget and making their job shittier and shittier from the perspective of a C-level person.
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The job you described is basically a frivolity, a way for the rich to waste time, a way to skimp on a dishwasher, no one needs to do it. The people who work those jobs are obsolete. Their jobs suck because there’s not enough demand for their supply, so they need to accept bad work conditions for low pay. Improve their conditions and offer better pay and it’s not a dead end job any more, but to do that there’d need to be greater demand, tautologically proving these people and their work aren’t very important.
Sanitation is far from frivolous, if anything it is one of the more essential jobs out there. I am prepared to wager that janitors and dishwashers are far more critical to the day-to-day survival of civilization than whatever it is that you're doing.
With that sort of attitude I am confident that you aren't working in food or energy production.
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I think you misunderstand what it was like. the restaurant had a dashwasher. Not like the one you have at home, it was a huge industrial machine. It required two humans to constantly load and unload it, like an assembly line. If you want to raise pay for that sort of thing, you'd have to massively raise prices at the restaurant and no one would want to eat there anymore.
My father did a job like that for several years. They didn't have air conditioning, and he complained about it being about 90 degrees most of the time, and they only gave him little pixie cups of water. He eventually left after they switched the kitchen language to one he didn't know, and got a job teaching high school math, because he was a grown adult with a college degree, a clean background check, and family at the time. In retrospect, I have no idea what he was doing there, and it's good he was pushed out.
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I think you're the first person I've seen in the wild who seems to agree with me thay not all jobs need to pay a "living wage", and that that's okay! That some jobs should be just for the high school kid after school or during the summer, or someone who isnt trying to support a family on it ling term. I don't know how you deal with people getting stuck in a rut and eventually not being ready for retirement, though... I'm sure many will say that it isn't their problem to make sure others don't make poor life choices, but that doesn't help convince the general population when the news is publishing sob stories.
I'd be willing to bet that the number of people who:
Rounds to zero.
Let's say you get the "burger flipping" job because you're not really doing anything else. You're living at home (or with a bunch of other underemployed roommates). Sure, maybe you get some cheap beer every weekend - fine, whatever. If you retain that job for two years, you're going to be promoted to some sort of assistant manager position by inertia and availability alone. The cycle repeats.
Or, you get the burger flipping job, decide that, yes, it does suck, and figure out a new job a little further up on the skill/wage level. You like this and do it again. The cycle repeats.
My more controversial take is that this should be the path for pretty much everyone.
College has become a pay-to-play social proof mechanism for bullshit jobs that mostly fuels middle class over-capture of resources - especially housing. There are some hacks around this (military service, community college pathways) but it, most of the time, boils down to a family being able to pay between $100,000 - $500,000 to jumpstart their kid into the professional class. Oh, by the way, for something like 50% of graduates, this has not worked and has been a fraud for 20+ years. Please ignore that.
At the bookstore job I alluded to in my original post, I got unofficially promoted to assistant manager by my second month mostly because I would follow the store close down procedures correctly each night. This was as a 17 year old. Several of the other 20-somethings working there would routinely forget to lock doors, secure the cash box, or do basic cleaning and organizing. It doesn't take much to be an above average performer and, with just a dash of talent, you can accelerate quickly. I've seen too many graduates of "prestigious" universities who can't metaphorically close down the bookstore making $100,000+ per year because they have the fancy sheepskin on their wall.
But why do you not care about those people? Those are also human beings and our fellow citizens. We should help them, not make fun of them for being losers and go "oh well, sucks to suck, I guess we're going to remake society to make their lives even worse."
I do care about them. But I'm not willing to trade the general warfare of the top 80% to help the dysfunctional 20%.
Of course, always.
Not always.
@Amadan's comments below are useful here. The fact of the matter is that somewhere around 10% of the population even in highly prosperous western societies are just going to continually fuck themselves up with bad decisions. This is a fact as real as gravity and it sucks. I don't think we should leave these people to die in the streets, but what to do when every bit of government "support" delivered feels like it's not only going nowhere, but might actively be subsidizing damaging anti-social behavior.
You, @BahRamYou, can keep telling me "it's hard out here in these streets!" and "people are struggling." Great. But what's your solution? Because if it's more of the same; a Government sponsored cash transfer and redistribution scheme, I am telling you it does not work for anyone involved. The poor remain trapped in poverty, the middle class gets soaked and slowly collapses, and the wealthy elite use the myriad holes in tax and estate law to shield their assets.
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Reading reddit subs like /r/personalfinance and /r/povertyfinance, I am not so sure. There are a lot of threads along the lines of "My mother worked her entire life at low-wage jobs and has nothing saved up, what should I do?" A lot of people really do just fall into a rut, have zero ambition, and do not think about the future. Either they assume their kids will take care of them or they assume there is some sort of government assistance.
We here on the Motte are almost all well above average in intelligence, conscientiousness, and time preference. Those 20-somethings you mentioned who couldn't even cut it as assistant manager of a bookstore are more numerous than you think, and a lot of them will never really change.
Should we as a society say to these penniless retirees (even the ones who did have substance abuse or crime issues) "Tough shit, your bad choices, die on the street"? While there is a certain karmic justice in that, I also think that's a path to looking more like India.
This made me think of something else.
The Success Sequence
It states:
If you do this, there's only a 3% you're at or below the poverty line by your late 20s to early 30s. This even holds for a variety of often awkwardly tricky subgroups:
To me this says there's more to the equation than just jobs and job friction - it's a basket of pro-social and delayed gratification goods.
So, to return to your anec-data about "my mom worked odd jobs all her life and she can't retire" .... I'd have to ask that reddit poster if their mom had kids before marriage (perhaps before adulthood)? Did she graduate high school? Has she always worked these menial jobs full time or sort of cycled in and out? Because, depending on those answers, I become a little more openly hard-hearted. Repeatedly fucking up what should be obvious decisions because of a lack of self-control doesn't make me feel for you.
If you go to page 3 of the report, you see a pretty stark data visualization. I've attempted to summarize it here:
These numbers drop drastically as each step is completed, starting with finishing High School.
Much like crime being concentrated in a handful of super-repeat offenders, it would seem that non-violent but "I don't have my shit together at all" people are hyper concentrated as well. Maybe a lot of them party on reddit, that wouldn't surprise me.
I know there are some other folks on here who like to dabble in the genocidal, but I do not. I don't want to round up the "poor 'n stupids" to walk them off a cliff. I don't want to sterilize them. I don't want to have them knife fight on Netflix (Hobo Wars 6!). But allowing them to exist in a kind of poverty limbo that also slowly bankrupts the nation seems like a literal negative sum game; everyone who plays leaves worse off.
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This is fair enough.
The better data point would've been to hit me with would've been "what about people who save something, but then have it gobbled up by medical issues later in life, or some other tragic event?"
The simple solution is what used to be the default solution - you have Old Timer's insurance in the form of Social Security, and it only kicks in at a truly advanced age. "Retirement" in the American vision of it is not something that can endure. People live far longer now and, due to some of the cost diseases I mentioned earlier, it's just plain harder to save the necessary amount to finance a 20 or 30 year retirement.
I'm optimistic that people will be comfortably working into their 70s by about the 2040s. I do believe this is a good thing. I've seen retirees go through cycling phases of anger and depression because they feel they've lost purpose by not working, even if they are totally financially self-sufficient. Cognitive decline without social interaction is a real thing and seems to me (anec-datally) to be more severe in older folks.
But what to do about those folks who can't even work a semi-BS laptop job after 65? Or who have medical issues (probably lifestyle related) that simply makes not-dying a herculean daily chore.
My answer here is I don't know. Which is an unsatisfying answer. I can say, however, that the math paints a pretty stark picture - if we keep paying out for healthcare and social security the way we are now, we're bankrupt as a nation by 2030. That is a path that doesn't just look like India, it would look up to them.
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Given the latest election under moderate inflation, I suspect that you wouldn't do that if you wanted yourself or your party to remain electable.
FWIW, I think it would be worse than just price increases. Many entire classes of services and establishments would no longer be viable. It's not just that Chick-fil-a would charge $10 for a sandwich, I think they would cease to exist.
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This seems super important.
Even worse, it opens up the possibility of large-scale working-class organised labour movements engaged in industrial action, as with the UK General Strike. But still worth a shot, I think.
Perhaps, but ... those houses were smaller, shoddier and had few modern conveniences (or safety features), and every man had to be a handyman to keep the walls and roofs up. Would you want to live in a 1940s (with no modern upgrades) house? Would you want to have a lot of children whom you will struggle to keep fed and clothed and educated? My point is that people point at how folks lived back then ("Large families, everyone had their own house!") but little notion of just how much harder and poorer their lives were compared to ours. Maybe that is a tradeoff a lot of trads would be willing to make, but I think the majority of people would not, and you should at least be honest that deporting all the immigrants doesn't mean suddenly lower class people will get to live like middle class people and middle class people will all be richer and more numerous.
In Britain this is basically standard, for reasons which have been discussed elsewhere. New builds are rare and the extent to which modern upgrades (dishwasher, tumble dryer, central heating, double glazing) are available varies wildly.
What you have to remember that where mod cons were unavailable they were compensated for by other things. My granny didn't get air conditioning until a couple of years before she died because she had a permanently-fuelled coal-fired oven, and she spent the whole winter in the kitchen next to it. Add thick walls, blankets and jumpers and you're sorted. The only mod cons I have trouble doing without are hot water and washing machines.
I read Scott's article on Cost Disease once and I've never forgotten it. I think that lots of people would be happy with 1940s housing and education at 1940s prices (adjusted for inflation). Medical care not so much. Food is complicated, because the form, quantity, quality and satisfaction associated with it has changed in so many ways that it's not easy to pin the changes as wholly positive or wholly negative.
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In practice, those fifties houses don’t seem to exist at fifties price points in places people actually want to live in- clearly, people today are willing to live in them.
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To some extent, yes, but it's less a question of raising prosperity and more of shifting it. People who eat lots of chicken will be somewhat poorer, people who work in chicken processing plants will be richer. So it goes. I suspect it would do a lot for American cohesion.
At the risk of scoring cheap points, the last time America imported people to pick cotton for shit (no) wages, it didn't work out well.
Do you think the last 4 years has been good for American cohesion? Because we've gotten pretty much what you describe- higher wages at the low end, paid for by higher inflation overall. But people don't seem happy about it, especially people on the low end.
And I think there's a pretty significant difference between literal slaves and migrant workers, don't you?
Just to be clear, I'm not American and I don't have boots on the ground experience. My understanding is that Biden just pumped money into the system, which is obviously inflationary and primarily benefits those with assets. To the extent that working-class wages rose, it would only be to keep up with inflation. I don't think it's quite the same thing as reducing the lower-class / middle-class divide. EDIT: @Crowstep suggests that I am wrong and the rise in working-class wages is real. He's not American either but he has sources so I will concede.
You were mentioning Dubai and Singapore, "where we have lots of migrants workers but only for the low-wage jobs, and Americans are given a huge boost to help them enter the middle class". My point was that, in the same way as having a slave caste, or post-slavery segregation, this system doesn't seem like it will be stable long-term. It seems likely to generate massive amounts of resentment and political struggle. Places like Dubai make that arrangement work because they're willing to do whatever they have to do in order to keep the migrants in their place; I don't know if that's stable either but I really don't think modern America has the stomach for it.
My lived experience is that the lower middle and middle classes would happily go back to 2019 in terms of both price and wage levels, but actual lower income people would not. Wage growth at the bottom is real.
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Biden pumped some money in toward the beginning of his administration but a lot of the 2020 stimulus money was still beginning to make its way into the economy when inflation started taking off. Republicans like to blame Biden but, to the extent that inflation involved COVID stimulus money, there's plenty of blame to go around. Anyway, you can talk about COVID money pumping and supply chain disruption and this was all definitely part of it, but the low-end labor shortage and resulting wage hikes were obvious to anyone who wasn't still hunkering at home in 2021 or 2022. You couldn't walk into a restaurant or convenience store or retail establishment without seeing a help wanted sign in the window promising a signing bonus and a starting wage that was at least 50% higher than anything imaginable in 2019. Activists had been pressing for a $15 minimum wage for years, but, in the absence of any legislation, places that were paying like $9/hour were now proudly advertising $14. That this was necessary was evident in the fact that these places were all operating for fewer hours than before the pandemic and were obviously short-staffed when they were in business. It wasn't uncommon to go into a McDonalds at the height of the lunch rush and find a single cashier working the register. Even now Wal-Mart, which used to be open 24 hours almost universally, closes at 11 pm. All-night restaurants are a thing of the past. US Steel used to have a year-long waiting list for basic laborer positions and now offers 85k/year with bonuses and no overtime and still can't get people to stay more than a few weeks. I don't know how much this contributes to inflation, but I don't think it helps.
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Whether it was Biden or other systemic issues, the distribution of the last few years has been strongly towards wage growth in the below-median (under $35K/yr) section.
Pumping money into the system, especially the pandemic giveaways and outright PPP fraud, seemingly (?) has allowed that segment of society to coast for longer without work.
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