Well, it’s more like they should have been paying their workers more for a while. Now is as good a time as any to make good on a well deserved compensation increase.
Why do you think they should pay their workers more? Do you have data that they are paying below market wages? If they are paying below market wages, then how are they able to hire so many people?
Median pay for Amazon is $14 per hour, whereas median hourly wage for warehouse employees is $13, so it appears that Amazon pays a small premium over the market wage.
What makes you so special that your gut feeling of Amazon is something that people should pay attention to, rather than market wages?
I don’t believe it makes sense to expose each individual person to “raw market forces” such that without a job they would die. At least not in a society as wealthy as ours.
Much to your surprise you will find that I believe this can be done through libertarian means. This is an area of study and great interest for me.
But if you follow my theory to it’s conclusion you would find that nobody would be willing to work a shitty job for a low wage. And so, to make things work, the market would balance to higher wages. However it wouldn’t hurt anyone for Amazon to raise wages now. It seems inhuman to me what amazon workers are expected to go through. (I feel this way about other and more exploitative labor situations too.)
So the market would require higher wages if we weren’t all individualized. It’s my greatest hope to help bring us all closer together in a libertarian way such that no one wants for food or shelter.
> I don’t believe it makes sense to expose each individual person to “raw market forces” such that without a job they would die. At least not in a society as wealthy as ours.
Wow, cute.
Why do you think you can trust what you think should happen?
Do you have special training or is it a burning in your bosom?
Do you walk around saying "The price of raisins should be $3 instead of $2"? On what do you base these moral certainties?
More gut sense?
Or do you have an actual argument that a market wage is wrong and should be replaced with your own personal wage, and why do you think this is a sound argument on which to base an economy?
Don’t be a jerk. I answered your questions honestly.
> Why do you think you can trust what you think should happen?
Are you asking why I want to involve myself in philosophical debate? I’ll refer you to the existing wealth of information on the nature of philosophical debate. You’re certainly free to avoid making any presumptions about how the world should work, but judging by your comments about markets you haven’t done that either.
I want to say, explicit financial markets have their place. But we don’t use them for everything. You don’t charge your neighbor for each hello. Grandma doesn’t charge her children for Christmas dinner. Your friends don’t charge you for relationship advice even though paid equivalents do exist.
So the question is, could we ever possibly arrange the world such that we don’t always need to charge for material goods? The raw stuff of human survival? I think it’s possible if we’re willing to make some changes to society. None of what I advocate for is government based. We can do this with free markets. Markets are shaped by the conditions of our world. Can we create the conditions possible for free food to be as easy to give away as free Wifi?
As a robotics engineer I think we can. But the changes to our society would need to be pronounced. Is it worth it? Well some people might think so, and I want to explore this concept with those people.
In the Kashmir region of India there is a place called the Golden Temple. They serve 50,000 free meals a day using all volunteer labor, firewood, and huge iron pots. So I say “hey we could do this in Oakland with robots, and make the designs open source to share the engineering burden and help other cities do the same.”
So right now I’m employed designing a farming robot I hope will be open source some day.
When I meet people like you on the internet it’s all the same. I say people should have better living conditions and you folks immediately jump on me and say “how could you know that for sure” and “you don’t know what’s good for me”. Well fine. But I’m not asking anything from you. I don’t need anything from you. And I’m not going to make the government take anything from you. So chill out. There’s people in this world that just wanna help each other.
>Don’t be a jerk. I answered your questions honestly.
No, you evaded the question. All you see is morality. Your own personal morality. When a software developer says "we should not use this design pattern because it's immoral" that's a person you either remove from their position of power or you mock. Complex phenomena are not subject to childish morality, they are subject to the question of whether they work or not and how well they work.
An economy is a complex system. You want the economy to produce a large amount of goods and services. Once it does, you can always tax the economy and seize output for public spending, so that's the place where we stick your moral sentiments. You do not apply moral reasoning to individual price vectors to insist that it's "wrong" that a tomato costs this much, or that a haircut costs that much.
Morality is an evolved sentiment design to govern your behavior in small tribal groups. You can't apply it to things like an airline scheduling system or a price vector.
>Are you asking why I want to involve myself in philosophical debate?
God, no. I know exactly why you do it. The world is filled with people like you, and indeed all teens go through a casuistry phase. It's a type of self-righteous disease that is the plague of the modern era. Once people lost faith in religion, they redirect their religious fervor to going on various moral crusades like banning straws or building "moral societies" that kill hundreds of millions of people. You might grow out of it at some point when you realize the world is much more complicated than you think, and what matters is that things actually work rather than conform to some mawkish moral sentiment that was never suited to design complex systems but to govern your own personal behavior in simple tribal situations.
No, what I'm wondering is why you think price vectors are "moral" concerns and why you think you are qualified to pronounce on them philosophically.
I’m going to get millions killed by advocating for open source robotics and cooperative businesses? Give me a break. You’re seeing Stalin just because I think we should help one another. We’ve got hungry people sleeping on the streets in the wealthiest nation on earth. We’ve got jails filled with people of color whose only crime was being poor and black. If you don’t think concerned adults can reasonably discuss these subjects without “killing hundreds of millions” you’re a fool.
> You want the economy to produce a large amount of goods and services. Once it does, you can always tax the economy and seize output for public spending, so that's the place where we stick your moral sentiments.
You think the height of moral achievement is to use the government to tax incomes? Well that government also uses tax dollars to bomb weddings and school busses in the Middle East. And asking the government to help means deadlock fighting with people who don’t give a shit about your cause or the people you want to help. Excuse me for considering how we can help one another directly, without government intervention. Sheesh, I’m surprised on HN to find someone that thinks taxes are the best way to behave morally.
And what of the adults who advocate for better social programs through government spending anyway? Are you going to call them children too? You can always feel superior in your arguments if you call your opponents children.
> You’re seeing Stalin just because I think we should help one another.
No, you are not talking about "helping one another". You are talking about coercion. Amazon is offering an above market wage. Hundreds of thousands of workers want to work for this wage. And along comes Mr. Morality trying to prevent this exchange from happening because it seems "wrong" to him. Him and his 35 years of deep insight into the nature of morality. Why do you have a hard time seeing that a lot of people are sickened by this behavior?
> You think the height of moral achievement is to use the government to tax incomes?
No, I think part of growing up is understanding that economic systems don't conform to your morality, and frankly, neither does the world. Please get off of your high chair and stop talking about price vectors being moral or immoral. When you are able to see to the end of things and understand complex systems you can begin to think about weighing in on what you think is moral or immoral about them. Until then, just worry about your own behavior and let other people transact how they want. Nothing prevents you from starting a business and paying whatever wage you want, if you think you can do it better.
"The market" is determined by people's choices, not fundamental laws of physics. We absolutely can dictate how it should work and the existence of any law that restricts the market from being completely free - from forbidding child labour to setting a minimum wage to antitrust - does exactly that.
