Experts are worried about children and tablets.
What interning at Google is really like.
Adam Ozimek continues to chip away at the notion food-stamps-are-corporate-welfare meme.
According to a study, pessimism overlaps with happiness.
The deleterious effects of marijuana usage. Patrick Kennedy is setting off alarm bells.
Red light camera usage has, for the first time, declined in usage. My opposition to red light camera is outlined here.
Even though I know this means that I have forfeited any right to object to the government parking drones outside my bedroom window, I actually think the “ebooks are reading you” phenomenon is pretty cool.
These cake fakes are pretty cool. The pitcher makes me want cake and a beer.
The Los Angeles Times is calling on the California State Bar to release data to researchers looking at affirmative action.
Speaking of preferred admission criteria, children of Texas lawmakers who go to the UT School of Law are more likely to struggle once they get there.
In the future, computers will be invisible and telemarketing will be done by cyborgs.
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Google’s internship experience probably isn’t unusual for companies in the technology fields. Internships in glamorous fields such as fashion and publishing are the really dreadful ones.
That’s likely true. The ones you have to worry about most is where supply (the number of people who want a job in the industry) outstrips demand (the number of places within said industry) the most. A company like Google has some of that, but fashion companies doubtlessly have more.
Ozimek’s got his head wedged. Yes, it’s rational for WalMart and McDonalds to pay their employees as little as possible, but that doesn’t mean the situation is ideal. There’s some basically wrong with a society in which workers cannot support themselves with their labor and must be subsidized by the state. In a better world, there would be enough demand for labor that the 8 or 10-dollar per hour employees at these companies would quit en masse for 15 or 20-buck per hour jobs elsewhere and McDonalds et al would be forced to raise wages accordingly. Granted, this isn’t a near term possibility with the existing economy, but only a madman would claim the way things are now is sweet and wonderful.
I mean… 40 years ago, worker wages and productivity generally rose at about the same rate, and most people could count on steadily rising incomes. This was not seen as a failure of capitalism; it was viewed as the way advanced capitalistic economies were supposed to work, as the way they naturally worked. Existing market-based economies refuted the claims of socialism! And then, in the early 1970’s or so, the linkage between wages and productivity was broken and most people have seen very little gain in real income. So something major has gone really wrong with our economy, with the very nature of our society, and economists and politicians have no idea of how to fix things. Worse, many economist and politicians refuse to admit anything has gone wrong. Sooner or later, this is going to lead to considerable trouble.
The situation isn’t ideal, though it’s not clear to me that the ideal response is to force employers to pay more. Especially given the considerable percentage of low-wage workers who aren’t in a position requiring that they make $15/hr. Increasing wages on 100% of minimum wage workers so that we can take care of the 25% of those (I can’t remember the precise number) that are independent, sole-earners comes across to me as misguided.
The other issue I have with “these people should just be paid more because the balance is coming out of the taxpayer pockets” is that it isn’t clear that it should be their responsibility to increase their wages to meet our definition of minimalism. If it’s our demand, it is kind of our responsibility to meet it, if we think they should have it.
A bit part of the rationale behind tagging government-subsidized wages is that it allows employers to pay their employees less. If we really believed that, we would stop subsidizing the workers because the result would be that they would be paid more. Our revealed belief that this is not the case – because we don’t want to cut the subsidy – says a lot, in my view.
So where does this leave us? In my mind, a system not unlike what we have now. Employers pay whatever they have to, and then taxes then raise the wages as needed. Among other things, it allows us to focus the money on people trying to get by instead of on 17-year old Trumwill, who had a job hovering around minimum wage. It’s more easily targeted that way.
I am open to rearranging the formula if we think it is being exploited. It also may be a good idea to subsidize workers more, increasing taxes on the wealthy in order to do it. It doesn’t make as much sense to me to place that burden on those employers that are actually employing people. Partially because of the employee-targeting problem, and partially because at least they’re supplying jobs and we’d be rewarding those companies that don’t (self-checkout, fast food ordering kiosks, etc.).