

The Wage Struggles of Men - akkartik
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/the-struggles-of-men/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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HaloZero
A valid point from the comment section of the articles (In case you didn't go
down that far)

You might look at workforce participation by age. The percentage of men and
women under 25 had been slowly dropping long before the recession. I figured
this was because more of them were going to college. It also occurred to me
that, as more men had a working wife, fewer men were working, or working full-
time. So men's wages might be going down, and households remaining the same,
because the paid work was shifting to a more equal distribution.

\- By Lisa deGruyter Clarksburg, WV

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harshpotatoes
A valid point, but the article mentions that the employment decline is
disproportionately concentrated amongst low skill workers. It doesn't seem
likely to me that these types of workers would be living in a household where
only one of the spouses would work and the other would stay at home by choice.

~~~
StudyAnimal
What is more likely? That a low skilled man marries a medium or higher skilled
wife who is likely to find a job, or more likely to delay or decide not to
have children? Or he is married to a low or unskilled wife who likely couldn't
find work if she wanted, or has children she has to stay home to look after?

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olalonde
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca8Z__o52sk&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ca8Z__o52sk&feature=related),
enough said.

~~~
nopassrecover
Minimum wage law may be debatable, but Milton's arguments here are poor. The
minimum wage is a trivial amount, and noone holds skills below this rate - I
severely doubt that the minimum wage stops unskilled people getting work on
the basis of being too high a cost for businesses. Furthermore, increasing
unemployment among the youth is based on increased education participation and
a richer middle-class, not on the minimum wage being so high that businesses
can't afford to employ teenagers.

~~~
jacoblyles
>"The minimum wage is a trivial amount, and noone holds skills below this
rate"

It is probably true that the minimum wage is not a binding price floor in rich
white suburbs.

~~~
nopassrecover
I'm not sure what you mean here exactly, but I think you are implying that
rich white suburbs don't abide by the minimum wage when hiring? Alternatively
you might be saying that everyone in a rich white suburb manages to make more
than the minimum wage. Either way it reeks of ad hominem by playing on the
accepted racism of white people as heartless and trouble-free.

Regardless, saying people work below the minimum wage is irrelevant to my
point that the minimum wage is sufficiently low that it does not deter people
from hiring unskilled workers.

~~~
jacoblyles
I mean that I have read evidence that minimum wages increase unemployment more
in poor areas of the country than in wealthy ones. I'm coding all night at the
moment, so I don't have time to look it up. But to say that "noone" has skills
to offer the labor market that will clear at a price below the minimum wage is
myopic.

~~~
nopassrecover
Okay, so my argument is that the minimum wage shouldn't increase unemployment
at all, because it is so low that any reasonable task is worth more than the
low rate the wage is set at. What you say makes sense - if a minimum wage is
so high that employers can't afford employees anymore then the poor areas will
be hit worst, because the poor areas are the most unskilled.

------
rorrr
So low skill workers find it harder and harder to find jobs. No surprise here.

Automation, bitches.

~~~
yeahsure
When I was a kid I was naive (and still am, to a degree) and I thought that in
the future machines/computers/automation would do what humans didn't want to
or simply couldn't, not to make a few people rich and bring more comfort to
upper middle class, but so that humans worldwide could go after more important
things that could make us evolve as a species.

~~~
noonespecial
It is kind of working out. People making minimum wage have things that were
sci-fi when I was a kid, better than the most expensive attempts the rich made
to try to buy their way in early back in the day.

Global communicators that fit in the pocket, 40 inch high definition flat
panel view screens, game systems with unimaginable processing power and
graphics. Most people can't even sign up for basic cable without getting a
time shifting miracle-machine or a basic cell phone account without being
handed a damn tri-corder.

No argument that inequality of wealth is growing rapidly, but its good to
remember that _total_ wealth is growing too and even the poorest are
benefiting.

What we really need to do is pull all of the parasites out of our health-care
services and allow this magic to happen down there as well before the have-
nots figure out it doesn't matter whats on your giant TV if you can't afford
those patented, insurance inflated, heart pills and decide maybe its time once
again to dust off the guillotines for another go at the rich.

~~~
joe_the_user
I remember a few months back seeing a homeless guy pushing a shopping cart
with one hand and talking on a cell phone with the other.

But I'm not sure if he thought everything was working out...

~~~
noonespecial
I did say _kind of_ working out, not working out the way it should (for some
definition of should I think we mostly agree on). I'm just saying that
automation has made it possible for homeless guys to have cell phones, when
before they couldn't.

I'm not even floating a guess as to whether or not he'd be homeless if it not
for that automation. That's a much larger and more complicated debate.

On the balance, I'm still betting that more automation makes better lives for
more people, even if it seems to increase inequality in the short run.

I wait patiently for the day when mankind looks at himself in a collective
mirror and says, "Know what?, everything's so good now that we don't _need_
all of this inequality." I think this is an essential step in man becoming a
semi-eternal space-faring species instead of one that just drives itself to
extinction.

