
Try a $15 Minimum Wage and See Those Jobs Get Automated Out of Existence - fixxer
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/03/19/carls-jr-ceo-try-a-15-minimum-wage-and-see-those-jobs-get-automated-out-of-existence/#584403fcf0e9
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blacksqr
Good luck staying in business when you automate your entire customer base out
of work.

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PhantomGremlin
It is happening gradually, but Oregon is already doing this:
[http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/03/its_off...](http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/03/its_official_kate_brown_signs.html)

I think it's great that an "experiment" like this is taking place in a single
state. It gives the rest of the country the opportunity to observe, to learn
from the experiences of others.

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Thetawaves
What about the Automat? It's been proven again and again that people don't
want to deal with poor vending machine food, and fast food has been on the
decline for almost a decade now.

Consumers have already made the choice, and Carls Jr is not it. Automation
won't change that.

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pink_dinner
Mandating a higher wage through law won't work in the long-run. Inflation will
catch up in a few years and a person making $15/hour will no longer have the
increased spending power they once had when they first got the boost in pay.

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Thetawaves
There are several problems with this simplified view of the economy. Namely
that the inflation rate is not realistically tied to minimum wage in any way.

In your view, why do we even have a minimum wage at all? Obviously if the job
is so inefficient at creating wealth that it isn't worth paying minimum wage
to do the work, that work needs not be done at all.

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anthony_james
Inflation has averaged about 2.5% annually since 2000. In 20 years, the
spending power of a 100% bump in minimum wage (from ~$7.5 to $15) would be
destroyed. This conservatively assumes that business owners just don't
automatically increase the price point of their goods more rapidly than the
average. His viewpoint isn't simple, it's realistic.

Often times there are jobs that provide value at an hourly rate greater than
$0.00 and less than whatever the minimum wage is at. The job could be done,
and provide meaningful value, so just because it isn't worth paying a minimum
wage doesn't mean the job shouldn't be done at all. It's a difficult situation
because the employer wants to pay the worker a fair value for the job, but the
government forces them to pay more than the fair value of their work. That's a
poor moral and financial situation, and so businesses look for people in other
countries, or technology to automate the job completely.

The trouble with increasing a minimum wage is that it increases the reward for
whichever entrepreneur is able to automate that job function, which would
further income inequality in the long run by causing job loss of all those
workers.

One question I have is why do we care so much about protecting minimum wage
jobs? If no one had the safety net of a minimum wage job, they would be forced
to innovate and pursue groundbreaking research in other fields - such as
medicine or technology. Imagine if the rate of innovate was exponentially
increased - think of the thousands of lives we could save or the decrease in
costs of healthcare if we said "no one can work at Starbucks - you have to be
a doctor."

source:
[http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Long_Term_...](http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Long_Term_Inflation.asp)

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Thetawaves
"Often times there are jobs that provide value at an hourly rate greater than
$0.00 and less than whatever the minimum wage is at. The job could be done,
and provide meaningful value, so just because it isn't worth paying a minimum
wage doesn't mean the job shouldn't be done at all. It's a difficult situation
because the employer wants to pay the worker a fair value for the job, but the
government forces them to pay more than the fair value of their work. That's a
poor moral and financial situation, and so businesses look for people in other
countries, or technology to automate the job completely."

This is an idea I reject with enthusiasm! You need to take the emotion out of
it; this has nothing to do with fairness. If a job isn't worth paying some
minimum level, it simply is not efficiently creating wealth. It is the
government's duty to discourage and eliminate this wasted productivity.

Continued off-shoring and automation are good things. Off-shoring in
particular is just arbitrage of the labor market. Every dollar we ship out,
the more we elevate the standard of living of those folks. This implies
(demonstratively) that this will not last for ever. In the mean time it is a
profitable manoeuvre for the economy as a whole.

Automation just goes to further eliminate jobs that shouldn't be done so those
resources can be better spent in another areas. As always, the labor _market_
determines quite efficiently the best distribution of this limited resource.

"One question I have is why do we care so much about protecting minimum wage
jobs? If no one had the safety net of a minimum wage job, they would be forced
to innovate and pursue groundbreaking research in other fields - such as
medicine or technology. Imagine if the rate of innovate was exponentially
increased - think of the thousands of lives we could save or the decrease in
costs of healthcare if we said "no one can work at Starbucks - you have to be
a doctor."

I think what you fail to grasp is the minimum wage is the exact knob the
government has to destroy unproductive employment. As you say, these minds
could be pushed into medicine or technology.

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andrewclunn
Oh please, if those jobs could have been automated already, then they would
have. It's cheaper technology that will eliminate those jobs, not a $15
minimum wage.

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anthony_james
That's not necessarily true. A $15 minimum wage is a doubling of the wage rate
in most states, and as a result, doubles the incentives for someone who
automates the minimum wage jobs out of existence.

It's all relative. If we assume entrepreneurs want to deliver a million
dollars worth of value and the minimum wage was $8, they would have to
automate 125,000 jobs out of existence in order to achieve $1,000,000 worth of
value-added. With a $15 minimum wage, they now only need to automate ~67,000.
That's almost half the work they'll need to do now for the same result.

~~~
andrewclunn
The limitations of things like self checkout have been largely customer
driven, the expense of equipment (installation, repairs, etc...), and the
logistics of such a transformation. I think there are many more hard limits on
the ability to replace on site service workers with technology than most
people realize. The barriers are far greater than a few dollars an hour per
employee. If they weren't the low wage service workers would have already been
replaced. This is also not an area that drives technological innovation, but
rather benefits from advances made by other industries, so I do not believe
that raising the minimum wage would escalate this process.

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canthonytucci
Won't let me view article with 1blocker installed on iOS. Oh well.

