Higher minimum wages linked to reduced suicide rate

[Telconi]

"B-but guys think of the poor executives who will now have to down grade from 3 private jets to one!"

Suicide is not a health crisis.

Not what the CDC says but ok

Why is the CDC's opinion valuable?

[The Derpy Democratic Republic Of Herp]

"B-but guys think of the poor executives who will now have to down grade from 3 private jets to one!"


Not what the CDC says but ok

Why is the CDC's opinion valuable?

Might be because they are a world leader in researching, containing, and controlling diseases.

[The Emerald Legion]

"B-but guys think of the poor executives who will now have to down grade from 3 private jets to one!"

Suicide is not a health crisis.

Not what the CDC says but ok

Suicide is not a sickness, therefore the CDC can shut up with pathologizing freedom.

[The Derpy Democratic Republic Of Herp]

"B-but guys think of the poor executives who will now have to down grade from 3 private jets to one!"


Not what the CDC says but ok

Suicide is not a sickness, therefore the CDC can shut up with pathologizing freedom.

Suicide is a simptom of a illness. It is not a freedom but a thing to be prevented. I am rather disturbed with your post defending suicide.

[Czechoslovakia and Zakarpatia]

Quite a bit of Left-Wingers suggest that even a large increase of the minimum wage will lead to "huge improvements for the poor" & "economic prosperity for the minimum wage worker", an argument which obviously has no basis in reality.

^ there you go. Fixed the terms for you. See how lovely a logical fallacy is?

Also your various "links" mean nothing. I can provide my own that I assembled in about a minute of searching with my browser:

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/i ... oyment.asp
https://www.epionline.org/oped/o76/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adammillsa ... 98f1cf1e7d
https://www.npr.org/2019/07/08/73960796 ... s-cbo-says
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregoryfer ... 6fcaad6ffa
https://reason.com/2019/02/26/minimum-w ... or-robots/

& more. Not to mention, many advocates of minimum wage simply don't look at the context of the policy. Let me explain.

We live in a world where automation is becoming an ever more present reality. Even today, businesses such as Taco Bell or Mcdonalds are beginning to implement self serving kiosks that eliminate the need for a cashier. By increasing the minimum wage, sure, those workers will be better off... in the short run. In the long run, companies will begin to look for ways to cut those costs down. Especially mega-corporations like Mcdonalds where the constant goal is how to expand their profit margins. Now, maybe in the 50's or 60's automation seemed like a distant dream. But we are in 2020, where, again, you have self serving kiosks.

For those who look to "morality" as the deciding factor. Why don't they answer this?

Is it moral to help benefit workers for a year or two, only for them to be replaced by a machine?

Will you be there to pay for the lives of those workers when they get laid off? Or will you still be here, on NationStates? Crying about how the world is unfair that we don't pay Joe at Mcdonalds $50 an hour?

& to critics who state, "Automation will happen regardless of minimum wage". Perhaps, but to think again in the mind of a company. They will be looking to cut costs. Machines are still that: machines. They require maintenance, upgrades, etc. to remain relevant. The cost of a worker in the IT field is higher (& depending on the job / skillset required it could be MUCH higher) than the cost of a minimum wage employee. <---- this does not also account for the increase in expense of say electricity or other minuscule factors that one does not consider which factor into overhead costs for a business.

So again, simply raising the minimum wage may seem like a sweet deal in the short run but not in the long run.

>complains about logical fallcys
>attacks the person, not the arugment later on in his post

You know what cuts could be done? Cut executive funding, not the ground workers.

He just destroyed all of his credibility with his patent nonsense. Not even his lazy attempt to smear "the left" argued anything concrete.

[Czechoslovakia and Zakarpatia]

"B-but guys think of the poor executives who will now have to down grade from 3 private jets to one!"

Suicide is not a health crisis.

Not what the CDC says but ok

And its not just the CDC:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-shee ... il/suicide

[Telconi]

Why is the CDC's opinion valuable?

Might be because they are a world leader in researching, containing, and controlling diseases.

Suicide isn't a disease tho...

[The Derpy Democratic Republic Of Herp]

Might be because they are a world leader in researching, containing, and controlling diseases.

Suicide isn't a disease tho...

It is a complication, part of a disease.

[Plzen]

As much as it pains my naturally internationalist heart to admit it, Stearns has a point.

Developed world labour is being squeezed from two directions. A lower demand (automation) and a higher supply (globalisation). The higher the minimum wage is, the greater the monetary incentive to just replace workers with either machines or foreigners.

No solution to stagnant wages will be viable unless it does something about those two issues.

[Telconi]

Suicide isn't a disease tho...

It is a complication, part of a disease.

So is vocalization, should we prevent speech?

[The Derpy Democratic Republic Of Herp]

It is a complication, part of a disease.

So is vocalization, should we prevent speech?

You know full well that these two things, speech and suicide, are noncomparable.

[Kubra]

"B-but guys think of the poor executives who will now have to down grade from 3 private jets to one!"


Not what the CDC says but ok

Suicide is not a sickness, therefore the CDC can shut up with pathologizing freedom.

Freedom to what?

[Kavagrad]

As much as it pains my naturally internationalist heart to admit it, Stearns has a point.

Developed world labour is being squeezed from two directions. A lower demand (automation) and a higher supply (globalisation). The higher the minimum wage is, the greater the monetary incentive to just replace workers with either machines or foreigners.

No solution to stagnant wages will be viable unless it does something about those two issues.

So there's this German guy called Karl...

[The Emerald Legion]

Suicide is not a sickness, therefore the CDC can shut up with pathologizing freedom.

Suicide is a simptom of a illness. It is not a freedom but a thing to be prevented. I am rather disturbed with your post defending suicide.

It's not a symptom of an illness. It's a fucking decision. You don't get the cold and suddenly your arms move themselves to kill you.

It's a shitty thing to do, but it's their decision to make.

Sure, some people might have diseases that cause mood swings, but if that's the case then higher minimum wage is not relevant to that.

[Vetalia]

The part that doesn't make sense to me, though, is how would a minimum wage increase work during a recession? That seems like it would be counter-cyclical by raising costs at the same time companies' revenues were decreasing; in theory I imagine some of that would filter through in the form of increased spending on goods and services but for a lot of employers in retail and other low-wage fields it would be pretty damaging.

Maybe instead this points to the use of UBI in that role since it would not burden employers with additional costs at the same time their revenues are decreasing. I can only imagine how much more positive an effect doing that would have had on the economy and US society than the trillions of dollars pissed away on QE, bailouts and low interest rates to bail out the wealthy and criminal banks.

[The Derpy Democratic Republic Of Herp]

Suicide is a simptom of a illness. It is not a freedom but a thing to be prevented. I am rather disturbed with your post defending suicide.

It's not a symptom of an illness. It's a fucking decision. You don't get the cold and suddenly your arms move themselves to kill you.

It's a shitty thing to do, but it's their decision to make.

Sure, some people might have diseases that cause mood swings, but if that's the case then higher minimum wage is not relevant to that.

Mental illness is illness.

[The Emerald Legion]

It's not a symptom of an illness. It's a fucking decision. You don't get the cold and suddenly your arms move themselves to kill you.

It's a shitty thing to do, but it's their decision to make.

Sure, some people might have diseases that cause mood swings, but if that's the case then higher minimum wage is not relevant to that.

Mental illness is illness.

Mental illness is far overstated. A consequence of pathologizing decisions.

[Kubra]

Suicide is a simptom of a illness. It is not a freedom but a thing to be prevented. I am rather disturbed with your post defending suicide.

It's not a symptom of an illness. It's a fucking decision. You don't get the cold and suddenly your arms move themselves to kill you.

It's a shitty thing to do, but it's their decision to make.

Sure, some people might have diseases that cause mood swings, but if that's the case then higher minimum wage is not relevant to that.

Sure but there's kind of a difference between like a Hume-like sort of guy waxing-existential about the implications of suicide before doing it and a guy who can't make rent lobbing himself off a bridge on the way home, no?

[The Derpy Democratic Republic Of Herp]

Mental illness is illness.

Mental illness is far overstated. A consequence of pathologizing decisions.

No its not. We are seeing rises in both and it's not supriseing.

[Antityranicals]

Look, I'm sure you can find some study which can link anything to anything else. That higher minimum wages have somehow been found to be correlated to reduced suicide rate means nothing, and is infinitely more likely to be correlative rather than causative. What is an inarguable economic fact is that minimum wages can either do next to nothing, or cause unemployment, depending on how high they are. This is for obvious reason. Imagine if the government were to mandate that apples may not be sold for less than $0.10. The result of this would be, well, next to nothing, since nobody sells apples for less than a dime anyway. Apple sellers will not benefit from this in any way. Now, let us imagine that the government were to mandate that apples may not be sold for less than $5. The result of this would not be that apple sellers would be better off, but that people would stop buying apples, causing apple sellers to be far worse off.

Minimum wages are economically the exact same thing as the government mandating minimum apple prices. If minimum wages are low, they do nothing to help laborers, and if they aren't, they cause people to stop hiring, causing unemployment, and harming laborers. There is literally no conceivable benefit for minimum wages, unless you think that certain undesirables being unemployed is a benefit, in which case you are exactly like the southern Democrats who came up with the idea of minimum wages as a way to stop blacks from taking the jobs of white people who weren't willing to work for as little as their African American counterparts. The fact is, minimum wages are dumb and useless at best, and eugenic at worst. The whole reason why the Federal Deposit has to bend over backwards to trick employers to maintain "full employment," is because the minimum wage is too high, and is causing widespread unemployment, and has for the past century.

[Czechoslovakia and Zakarpatia]

Look, I'm sure you can find some study which can link anything to anything else. That higher minimum wages have somehow been found to be correlated to reduced suicide rate means nothing, and is infinitely more likely to be correlative rather than causative. What is an inarguable economic fact is that minimum wages can either do next to nothing, or cause unemployment, depending on how high they are. This is for obvious reason. Imagine if the government were to mandate that apples may not be sold for less than $0.10. The result of this would be, well, next to nothing, since nobody sells apples for less than a dime anyway. Apple sellers will not benefit from this in any way. Now, let us imagine that the government were to mandate that apples may not be sold for less than $5. The result of this would not be that apple sellers would be better off, but that people would stop buying apples, causing apple sellers to be far worse off.

Minimum wages are economically the exact same thing as the government mandating minimum apple prices. If minimum wages are low, they do nothing to help laborers, and if they aren't, they cause people to stop hiring, causing unemployment, and harming laborers. There is literally no conceivable benefit for minimum wages, unless you think that certain undesirables being unemployed is a benefit, in which case you are exactly like the southern Democrats who came up with the idea of minimum wages as a way to stop blacks from taking the jobs of white people who weren't willing to work for as little as their African American counterparts. The fact is, minimum wages are dumb and useless at best, and eugenic at worst. The whole reason why the Federal Deposit has to bend over backwards to trick employers to maintain "full employment," is because the minimum wage is too high, and is causing widespread unemployment, and has for the past century.

Wrong, once again. Raising the minimum wage does not increase unemployment:
http://cepr.net/publications/reports/wh ... employment
http://www.krueger.princeton.edu/90051397.pdf
http://clinton4.nara.gov/media/pdf/minw ... 000208.pdf
http://www.fiscalpolicy.org/FPISmallBusinessMinWage.pdf
https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-con ... _EVENT.PDF
http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/181-09.pdf
http://www.cepr.net/documents/publicati ... 011-03.pdf
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7jq2q3j8
http://nelp.3cdn.net/5f5063b72229a9081a_lym6bkbrw.pdf
http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/148-13.pdf
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... VomwKYyU7A
http://irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/104-14.pdf
http://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcont ... l_research
http://www.cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/sta ... that-didnt
http://s2.epi.org/files/2014/importance ... -final.pdf
http://blogs.piie.com/realtime/?p=4700
http://www.iie.com/publications/briefings/piieb15-2.pdf
http://s4.epi.org/files/2015/we-can-aff ... m-wage.pdf
http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/Cit ... idence.pdf
http://www.integrityflorida.org/wp-cont ... final-.pdf
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? ... wnload=yes
http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/NEL ... lation.pdf

[Plzen]

-snip-

If you have so much as tucked away a term of microeconomics in high school you ought to know that’s not how it works. Imposing on an idealised free market a price control reduces social benefit, but what it also does is shift the recipient of that benefit.

I’ll extend your example to make it less oversimplified. Consider a simple demand curve for apple where the quantity demanded is ten less the price and a supply curve where the quantity supplied is equal to the price. In an ideal free market under these conditions you would see five apples sold for $5 per. The total cost of production becomes $12.50 and the total benefit of consumption is $37.50. Since the apples are sold at $5 per for $25.00 total, this means the producer collects $12.50 (the sales revenue minus the cost of production) and the consumer is $12.50’s worth of value (the benefits enjoyed minus the price paid) better off.

Now impose on this idealised free market a government that sets a price floor of $6. The apple price rises to $6, since it is no longer permitted to trade at the equilibrium price. At this price four apples are demanded and sold. The total cost of production is $8.00 and the total benefit of consumption is $32.00. Four apples sold at $6 per is $24.00 in price paid. While the consumer now only enjoys a value gain of $8.00, lower than the $12.50 they would enjoy in a free market, you can see that the producer now collects a profit of $16.00. There is some inherent loss of efficiency from the intervention, which is why the amount the producer gains from this price floor is smaller than the amount the consumer loses, but the producer does definitely gain.

The idea that nobody benefits from a price floor is blatantly false. Set correctly it can definitely benefit the producers.

[Antityranicals]

Look, I'm sure you can find some study which can link anything to anything else. That higher minimum wages have somehow been found to be correlated to reduced suicide rate means nothing, and is infinitely more likely to be correlative rather than causative. What is an inarguable economic fact is that minimum wages can either do next to nothing, or cause unemployment, depending on how high they are. This is for obvious reason. Imagine if the government were to mandate that apples may not be sold for less than $0.10. The result of this would be, well, next to nothing, since nobody sells apples for less than a dime anyway. Apple sellers will not benefit from this in any way. Now, let us imagine that the government were to mandate that apples may not be sold for less than $5. The result of this would not be that apple sellers would be better off, but that people would stop buying apples, causing apple sellers to be far worse off.

Minimum wages are economically the exact same thing as the government mandating minimum apple prices. If minimum wages are low, they do nothing to help laborers, and if they aren't, they cause people to stop hiring, causing unemployment, and harming laborers. There is literally no conceivable benefit for minimum wages, unless you think that certain undesirables being unemployed is a benefit, in which case you are exactly like the southern Democrats who came up with the idea of minimum wages as a way to stop blacks from taking the jobs of white people who weren't willing to work for as little as their African American counterparts. The fact is, minimum wages are dumb and useless at best, and eugenic at worst. The whole reason why the Federal Deposit has to bend over backwards to trick employers to maintain "full employment," is because the minimum wage is too high, and is causing widespread unemployment, and has for the past century.

Wrong, once again. Raising the minimum wage does not increase unemployment:
http://cepr.net/publications/reports/wh ... employment
http://www.krueger.princeton.edu/90051397.pdf
http://clinton4.nara.gov/media/pdf/minw ... 000208.pdf
http://www.fiscalpolicy.org/FPISmallBusinessMinWage.pdf
https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-con ... _EVENT.PDF
http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/181-09.pdf
http://www.cepr.net/documents/publicati ... 011-03.pdf
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7jq2q3j8
http://nelp.3cdn.net/5f5063b72229a9081a_lym6bkbrw.pdf
http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/148-13.pdf
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... VomwKYyU7A
http://irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/104-14.pdf
http://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcont ... l_research
http://www.cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/sta ... that-didnt
http://s2.epi.org/files/2014/importance ... -final.pdf
http://blogs.piie.com/realtime/?p=4700
http://www.iie.com/publications/briefings/piieb15-2.pdf
http://s4.epi.org/files/2015/we-can-aff ... m-wage.pdf
http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/Cit ... idence.pdf
http://www.integrityflorida.org/wp-cont ... final-.pdf
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? ... wnload=yes
http://www.nelp.org/content/uploads/NEL ... lation.pdf

As I've already noted, the Feds have a lot of tricks to make employers think the economy is better off than it is, and hire people whom they otherwise wouldn't, but these tricks ultimately result in recession. It's rather common sense that minimum wages cause unemployment, even if minimum wages are often accompanied with inflationary policies which forestall it until recessions. If anything, the fact that unemployment is temporarily manageable in the US is evidence that the minimum wage here is closer to the useless side of things than the harmful side, but it is still
somewhat harmful, even if not as harmful as a $15 minimum would be.

[Antityranicals]

-snip-

If you have so much as tucked away a term of microeconomics in high school you ought to know that’s not how it works. Imposing on an idealised free market a price control reduces social benefit, but what it also does is shift the recipient of that benefit.

I’ll extend your example to make it less oversimplified. Consider a simple demand curve for apple where the quantity demanded is ten less the price and a supply curve where the quantity supplied is equal to the price. In an ideal free marker under these conditions you would see five apples sold for $5 per. The total cost of production becomes $12.50 and the total benefit of consumption is $37.50. Since the apples are sold at $5 per for $25.00 total, this means the producer collects $12.50 (the price paid minus the cost) and the consumer is $12.50’s worth of value (the benefits enjoyed minus the price paid) better off.

Now impose on this idealised free market a government that sets a price floor of $6. The apple price rises to $6, since it is no longer permitted to trade at the equilibrium price. At this price four apples are demanded and sold. The total cost of production is $8.00 and the total benefit of consumption is $32.00. Four apples sold at $6 per is $24.00 in price paid. While the consumer now only enjoys a value gain of $8.00, lower than the $12.50 they would enjoy in a free market, you can see that the producer now collects a profit of $16.00. There is some inherent loss of efficiency from the intervention, which is why the amount the producer gains from this price floor is smaller than the amount the consumer loses, but the producer does definitely gain.

The idea that nobody benefits from a price floor is blatantly false. Set correctly it can definitely benefit the producers.

A few major issues:

1. Why is the cost of production $2.50 per apple in the first situation, but only $2.00 per apple in the second? I'll correct that mistake, which I'll assume is innocent, making the hypothetical producer's gain in the first example $15, instead of $12.50.

2. All you managed to prove here is that the market price is not, in this example, actually $5. The only way that the market value could, in fact, be $5 is if selling apples at $5 was optimal for the producer. Since in this example it's not, the market price would not be $5, but closer to $6. If the market price was actually $5, the demand curve would be steeper, resulting in a demand for, say, three apples, at $6. Does that make sense?

I suppose such a price floor could help an inefficient producer stay in business if he was only capable of procuring apples for $5.50, and would thus go out of business at a market price of $5, but if we assume that the cost of procuring is constant across the board, nobody benefits.

[Plzen]

A few major issues:

1. Why is the cost of production $2.50 per apple in the first situation, but only $2.00 per apple in the second? I'll correct that mistake, which I'll assume is innocent, making the hypothetical producer's gain in the first example $15, instead of $12.50.

It is not a mistake; supply curves generally have a positive slope.

If the United States tried to produce a million apples a year, they can do so under the most efficient conditions - the best farmland, the most talented workers. If the United States tried to produce a quadrillion apples a year, you quickly find that those ideal resources are finite. To produce that quantity you’re going to have to plant apple trees in the mountains and deserts, maybe build hydroponic towers. You’re going to have to hire people who would rather be doing something else and have them pick apples. Higher quantity means substandard resources and substandard resources mean higher cost of production.

2. All you managed to prove here is that the market price is not, in this example, actually $5. The only way that the market value could, in fact, be $5 is if selling apples at $5 was optimal for the producer. Since in this example it's not, the market price would not be $5, but closer to $6. If the market price was actually $5, the demand curve would be steeper, resulting in a demand for, say, three apples, at $6. Does that make sense?

The market price is the price at which the quantity supplied is equal the quantity demanded. Since I mentioned that the quantity supplied is the price and the quantity demanded is ten less the price, it is trivial that the solution to the equation p = 10 - p is solved by p = 5.

Seriously. Anyone who so much as tucked away a semester of economics in high school would understand this.