Dane here. We don't have a minimum wage. We rely on structural remedies for improving working conditions and wages, and they work far better than a minimum wage. The UK, on the other hand, favours direct intervention. They've been increasing their minimum wage considerably over the years. The result appears to be aggressive wage compression. Meaning very little benefit to people who get degrees and accrue experience relative to someone doing an unskilled, minimum wage job. It also appears to have created a very unfavourable job market for the young. Why hire a young and inexperienced worker for £12.71 per hour when you can hire an experienced worker for £14? Young people with degrees appear to be particularly impacted, since they "wasted" so many years on degrees which yield very little benefit, and they cannot find a job. The UK also has very tough laws about firing employees, meaning companies are incentivised to not take a chance on a young worker.

To your point: yes, people who have a weaker bargaining position in Denmark earn less. However we also have generous social safety nets, so no one ends up destitute or hungry. Ultimately, I think wages should be between an employer and employee (with or without the assistance of unions - we like our unions). If an employee has fewer skills, less experience, is unwilling or unable to move for a job, etc, they should expect to be paid less. This represents materially different value to the employer.

As a tangent, poverty line definitions vary by country, in Australia, for example, earning less than half the median wage is considered below the Australian poverty line.

Worth keeping in mind when doing any apples V oranges country by country comparisons of population percentages in poverty.

* AU: https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/poverty/

* UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_Kingdom

* US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_thresholds_(United_Sta...

Why does it have to be a choice? Raise the median, raise the minimum, use wealth created through higher productivity and a healthier labour market to redistribute to some degree, everyone wins?

The frictions we're talking about, like health insurance being tied to an employer, make things worse for families anyway - getting rid of the distortionary regulations that cause that can only be a good thing.

You should live in France, having to pay 15% of the value of your home to be allowed to move, being cash poor (which means having low flexibility) because 50% of what your company pays for you goes to mandatory social things, taxes and insurances and most of the rest goes to fixed expenses.

In France the minimum wage is roughly indexed on inflation (especially if inflation isn't too high) but getting a raise when your salary is higher than this is very difficult, especially without job hopping. Your employer knows that he can risk not giving you a raise and you can't as easily risk being upset about it.

Employees are (or should be) given more rights/protections than the employers because they have less individual bargaining power. The rights are there to counterbalance. For example it shouldn't be as easy to get fired as it is to quit.

The country's culture matters a lot. The same system that works perfectly in a healthy society will end up an abusive nightmare in an unhealthy one. Mobility for salary raises can also become mobility just to keep a job.

They also have a much better safety net. Healthcare not being tied to employment is already massive.

I think a flat tax + UBI is the only way to go. The dream of AI should be a society where maybe 10% of people have to work. The nightmare is if the other 90% still need work but can’t find it.

You mention unions, but what you're leaving out is they have a huge advantage in those countries compared to the US. One big one is that, Union A can boycott a Company B over a dispute with Union C. That is illegal in the US, and it's a very powerful thumbscrew against the powerful.

It's one thing to fight your baristas, it's another to fight your baristas, bean supplier, mail delivery, and freight movers all at once.

I always wonder if minimum wage does more harm than good.

This conversation usually derails, so to be clear no, I don’t think people should work for poverty wages, a viable business should include happy non-subsidized employees.

My question is whether a global price floor psychologically depresses wages by establishing a global price anchor. Price anchoring is well known to influence the price people will accept.

For jobs like cashier that are fungible just blanket get minimum wage, would they pay more without one when the employer can’t just point to the anchor price and say take it or leave it? Would they be faster to localize wages to local costs?

Why are tech wages lower in Scandinavian countries than in the United States?

We don't need a minimum wage if your minimum needs are met.

When everyone is the same (genetics, background, culture, etc) there is very little structural inequality in a competitive market. In an empire like the US, so many groups exist in a hierarchy that government support is required. In such an environment bare competition simply reveals and highlights fundamental difference, which is not conducive to social cohesion or harmony.

4 years seems like a long time, but I'd easily say that's true for a year. I suppose it's relative to your definition of good.

In my industry, 2 years is about what it takes to feel the ramifications for your bad decisions. Leaving before then makes you a bomb thrower in my not so humble opinion, leaving everyone else holding the bag. And unless you are a contractor, it's a resume red flag for me.

I get that not all jobs work out, but a long string of < 2 years makes me skeptical.

For sure there is a downside. To develop real expertise in a domain takes time. We have people hopping between jobs before they've even learnt how to do one job right.

In software it can take a long time between writing the code and seeing what happens to it in the long term. How it evolves. How it's maintained. Quality. If you never close this loop you're limited in your growth as a software engineer.

I don't know what the magic number is but I can relate to 2-4 years before you feel like you're comfortable in a new and complex domain. So ideally people stay some reasonable time beyond that. The company is getting a lot more out of this person then they did when they started so it should be a win-win. Instead what's happening is this guy is going to jump ship, get a higher pay, and be totally ineffective or even contribute negatively, and the company will hire someone new and possibly pay that new person more than the original guy, only to have him spend a ton of time getting up to speed...

The labor market is just kind of complicated. Having a four year span where your real income goes down because you didn’t job hop isn’t ideal, but it’s totally possible that it pays off in the long run quite handsomely.

Ideally, you want to have a dynamic economy where people have very many paths to prosperity. In the US, you have people like Ted Sarandos who managed video rental stores for 17 years before taking a job at Netflix, which eventually led him to become CEO. Or you have Doug McMillion, who started at Walmart in 1984 unloading trailers at a distribution center and rose up to the CEO position. And you have Dara Khosrowshahi, the Uber CEO, who started his career in investment banking, became a media executive, and then served as Expedia CEO. An of course, there any plenty of extremely successful entrepreneurs who never worked for anyone else before founding their own company.

What kind of things made you feel not good in the first four years? Just unfamiliarity, something else?

Maybe we can fix the things that make workers uneasy in the first few years.

I think it's bimodal for me, lots in the first six months bringing fresh eyes and outside ideas followed by a lull of a couple years before the benefits of realy knowing the company sets in.

But greater turnover only occurs when people don’t want to stay.

It’s my observation a high-turnover business is often good for nobody. There’s more spent in retraining etc than if you just paid halfway-competent people properly instead of literally rolling the dice every year or more.

Not just in employment; voting out incumbents improves economic growth for the majority: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766

Since the early 1980s, start of the Millennial generation, inflation is 300%; takes $800k/yr to have the buying power of $200k/yr in the 80s

Millennials and GenZ have only ever known austerity and oligarchy.

And that Exxon computed the min-max of the climate trend back in the 1970s just says they know, given all the data, they know.

GenX edge lords don't give shiiiit

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/style/gen-x-generation-di...

I have zero respect for people >50 especially any in official policy roles. Zero fucks for anyone but themselves this whole time; ignored reality just like religious nutters and presumed political dogma would be on their side

Jokes on them; Millennials are even more convinced it all just goes black with death, fewer young people going into elder care jobs, population decline crushing those jobs... GenX can enjoy hobbling to their toilet unassisted with bed sores and gout. Fuck them too then

Exactly like this.

Since a public option will never happen, maybe the most feasible fix we could do is to do a REAL version of the P in HIIPA - portability. Let employees stay in the group plan of any company, paying the full premium a la COBRA, but forever, and require companies to give a tax-deductible cash benefit equivalent to the premium subsidy they'd be entitled to in their new job, if they show proof they're in a COBRA plan (which for efficiency, should just be a flag in some government database since they're all up in our business now with the 1095 forms anyway, they ought to know).

Or hiring practices that can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent?

> The minimum wage is a strawman by comparison: it doesn't actually help workers.

[citation needed]

By measures such as own-wage elasticity [DUBE & ZIPPERER] increases to the minimum wage evidently increase wages more than they decrease employment.

[DUBE & ZIPPERER]: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32925

I'd like to see a world where the government provided a job for anybody who wanted one. If you're not enjoying your corporate job you can go back to planting trees to offset carbon emissions. Getting to old to plant trees? Go work in the library. Want to develop it skills? get a job helping the government transition to Libre Office

A competitive labor market doesn't automatically mean you switch jobs constantly though. You get choose which job you go to, and if you have better options available, and choose your optimal fit, that can give you more purpose, not less.

And while it is inefficient if a company has to constantly retrain employees, overall you can have a more efficient market when people are given options, since employees can find the best fit. If you're working a job that isn't the best possible fit (something that's harder to find when your limited by time and resources) that's worse overall for the economy.

Of course there's more nuance here, but this is the core debate of unemployment payments. More unemployment benefits incentivizes people to stay unemployed longer (bad), but when they do find eventually find employment, it's usually better employment (very good).

This really depends on mindset.

If your mindset is "The economy is an incredibly dynamic, living thing whose purpose is to satisfy the consumer desires of the moment", then job-hopping can be all of very satisfying, very lucrative, and very purposeful. Your purpose is to do whatever is most needed. You don't get attached to any one task, but treat yourself as malleable and adaptable, and think of your past roles as a portfolio of skills and experiences that you can draw on to meet new challenges. You could describe your approach to work as "Work is something I do, not what I am."

If your mindset is "The economy is the society that I grew up in, and I'm seeking my place in it, and then I want a role where I can grow and build expertise", this is extremely unsettling. You view your job as an identity, a part of yourself. To leave that job is to leave a part of your identity behind, and to be fired or laid off is to have a part of your identity ripped away. And so you'll fight hard (and take many poor bargains) to avoid being put in that situation. It's not simply a matter of economics; it's a matter of being and belonging. Work is not just what you do, it is who you are.

Commerce vs. Guardian syndrome [1], or growth vs. fixed mindset [2]. There isn't really a right answer, but American culture, society, and business favors commerce syndrome over guardian syndrome, while many other cultures (really, most of the rest of the world) is the opposite.

[1] https://jebkinnison.com/2016/04/29/jane-jacobs-monstrous-hyb...

[2] https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/growth-mindset-vs-fixed-min...

Competitive labor markets are FAR more efficient in terms of labor productivity, allocation, skill development, and spreading ideas around. One of the reasons the Industrial Revolution happened in England was because labor was more mobile than on the continent.

> [...] on the greater national economic level (it's insanely inefficient and completely irrational to churn employees because you're willing to pay new hires more than your veteran staff).

A certain amount of churn is good on the national or even global level, because it moves knowledge between companies. Probably not great for the company you depart, but great for the company you arrive at.

Job-hopping doesn't seem to have those downsides in Silicon Valley though? I think the "feeling like a cog" aspect has more to do with company size. Can you get a meeting with the CEO?

You're not simply hoping that corporations do the right thing though. Rather, you're making it economically unfeasible for them to pay workers less.

That's good because you don't have to rely on corporations acting morally, and corporations who do act good out of moral obligation aren't punished fiscally for it. It also just works better than adding a price floor, if done right.

And although the idea is sexy, it's far from a wet dream. It's actually the standard in the Scandinvan social democracies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity

Local IT with 15 years of experience and a masters degree?

Employers are optimizing for labor cost control. As long as the enterprise continues to function and is profitable, the behavior continues. We cannot say it doesn’t work as long as it continues to work.

Some have said job hop, I’d say unionizing can also work.

Most Americans are shareholders, I’m all for spreading the wealth but don’t ignore why there’s so much to spread. Americans reinvest for profit

Gps didn't provide value to regular people?

They’re saying that few workers get RSUs

Assume you have no overall economic growth, but workers get more productive over their lifetime (as they accumulate experience).

In that scenario, each individual worker sees increases over their lifetime, even though the average stays flat.

Isn't that the core issue? Productivity isn't being shared with the workers who actually produce it.

I read it as 3% retire, 3% enter the workforce, and everyone else is slightly better / more senior than the year before. So the average wage could be flat.

The stimulus was not just the checks, it was also pretty generous unemployment, and the discussion was about incomes of workers, not wealth.

Yeah agree, share of wealth definitely went up for folks who had the money to be invested in the stock market.

My recollection is that some combination of stimulus checks / COVID dynamics made it much harder to hire low wage workers, so employers were "forced" to raise wages in response. At the same time, higher wage workers who got "normal" raises were not keeping up with inflation.

https://www.reuters.com/business/us-job-growth-picks-up-may-...

By getting more, you just mean getting the value of their labor.

Isn't deciles every 10%? The top 90% is too rough, you need to compare the top 0.09% and the rest to see how much the social gap has widened

For that 1/3 of Americans, that's a very real statistic to be frowning over.

There are good reasons for companies to provide those benefits. And they most definitely are part of their total compensation. When a study does not take this into account, their results are not valid.

Not so. I'm part of a religious community for whom FICA is something we can opt out of via IRS Form 4029, and I can avoid contributions to FICA more broadly (not just SS taxes!) by handing HR the approved 4029 that I receive in response to filing.

I don't know how available this is to folks who aren't Mennonite or Mennonite-adjacent, but it's there.

Thanks for looking up the data.

> Working class typically rely solely on wages and have little to no wealth. So any purchasing power decrease is often referred to as a hidden tax on wages.

That's only true if wages are fixed. They typically aren't, especially when people move jobs.

Kevin Erdmann has some good writing about mortgages before and after the GFC.

The biggest problems were various supply shocks associated with the pandemic and its aftermath and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The Biden admin brought down inflation much faster than even optimistic economists predicted, while maintaining full employment and avoiding a recession. The US economy during that period significantly outperformed most other wealthy countries. (As one indicative example, the cover story of The Economist from October 2024 was titled The American economy: The envy of the world.)

Since then we've had a wide range of completely self-inflicted policy faceplants, including notably several rounds of illegal tariffs and a war with Iran.