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Effectronica posted:The funnest part of any economics thread is when people start straight-up denying empiricism by saying they can divine what studies are left-wing and thus wrong but won't explain how. To be fair, it is pretty usual for leftists in these threads to vacillate between the two positions of "economics is a bogus science" and "economic surveys show . . . (some really weak effect which bolsters my point)", depending on whether it is ideologically convenient or not. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Jun 16, 2015 |
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Jun 16, 2015 16:57
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Effectronica posted:Most people, when using the word "poor", are referring to their economic position in terms of what they can buy, rather than whether they are above or below the official poverty line. But let's take a look at some costs. The poverty threshold for 1 person is $11,770/year. The cheapest studio apartment I can find in my area is $400/month, so $4800 in expenses just for housing. Using the USDA thrifty food plan for one person, groceries add another $2683, and utilities roughly another $2400. Monthly transportation costs are $1018/month for the average household in my area, so taking 40% of that for having one car and driving less frequently (to be excessively fair), that's another $4886 a year. Average clothing costs add another $1079 yearly. So we're sitting at $15,848 without considering entertainment, healthcare, or other expenses. We're already $4000 above the poverty line in costs with a single-room apartment, not having any health insurance, buying the absolute cheapest food possible, no children, no entertainment, nothing. Even sharing your studio apartment with someone else still has us $2000 above the poverty line. Your point is taken, but I just wanted to point out that your transportation cost is pretty high, and that people who are on a budget don't need to pay that much. 40% of 1k per month is a pretty high number. That average number is pulled up because of all those people who drive pickup trucks, SUVs, luxury cars, which are pretty wasteful. Unless I am missing something, $400 a month should be able to pay for a lease for a brand new subcompact car, fuel for it for 1k miles a month, and insurance. That cost can be knocked down if you buy used and drive less than average. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Jun 17, 2015 |
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Jun 17, 2015 15:32
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asdf32 posted:This is why I've been stressing that you need to consider the dollar impact of a minimum wage increase. That amount is what gets absorbed by the economy and there are actually only a few places it can hide over the long run: prices, or profits (theoretically it could come from non minimum wages but that's unlikeely, it can also be blunted by build in saving like lower turnover or higher productivity, though don't forget that those "savings" come from someone's pocket. Also reminder: all expenses become some other company's profit or wage). According to the paper that VitalSigns posted, ~20% of the increased labor costs in fast-food restaurants which happen due to raising the minimum wage to $15 would be absorbed by lower turnover. Qualitatively, it makes sense that higher paying jobs have less turnover. The authors extrapolated the results of two studies regarding the cost of turnover of fast-food employees and how turnover is a function of wages of fast-food employees to arrive at that conclusion. If I am understanding the table correctly, the remaining 80% of the increased labor costs are paid for by 3% price increases per year and by a projected increase in fast food sales. Regarding using the wages of employees paid above the minimum wage to pay for the minimum wage employees' new salaries, the calculation in VitalSign's paper assumes the opposite. Fast food employees who make larger than the minimum wage are also given raises, although their raises are "compressed," i.e. their wages are increased at a lower percentage than the employees making less than minimum wage, in accordance with previous data that economists collected earlier.
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Jun 17, 2015 22:46
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asdf32 posted:For example they use surplus from sales increases to pay for minimum wage. But if you assumed the same constraints (no change in profit or employment) while removing the wage increase prices would have gone down. So did sales increases pay for part of it or did price increases pay for all of it? It could be interpreted either way. I'm not really getting what you are trying to say here. I don't think that it is up to interpretation--you'd have to carefully look at the paper to see the assumptions in their calculation regarding what proportion the sales increases and what proportion price increases pay for the increased cost of labor. In their calculation, they assume sales growth will slow somewhat due to price increases. asdf32 posted:Similarly the hypothetical assumed zero change in employment over 4 years. Is that "no increased unemployment" or not. We know jobs need to grow just for unemployment to stay the same. So the answer may be no. You maybe could take issue with their numbers, but they did assume that the employment growth in the fast food industry would slow from the current 2% trend to 1% per year when making their prediction.
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Jun 18, 2015 06:12
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asdf32 posted:I'm saying the assumed sales growth is external to the minimum wage variable. As I said above prices, would have decreased (given their assumptions) had the min wage not been increased. I'm not taking issue with their numbers, I'm saying they can be interpreted differently. I still don't really get what you are trying to say. Are you just saying that a consequence of their assumption of 1% instead of 2% employment growth, is that they are assuming that unemployment will increase in their calculation? Yeah, it's not a surprise that VitalSigns did not emphasize that aspect of their calculation. OwlFancier posted:Competition drives prices down, not reduced costs for the people selling the thing. Yeah, but the reduced costs are needed for the price lowering to be sustainable, obviously. VitalSigns posted:Why would the business decrease prices rather than taking those extra sales as profit. Is this one of those times when businesses selectively don't actually want profit. You aren't getting what asdf32 is saying. He, like the authors of the paper you posted, is assuming a constant profit rate. Yes, businesses, in the absence of competition from other businesses, would prefer to increase profits instead of lowering prices. I don't think anybody is questioning that.
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Jun 18, 2015 18:04
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VitalSigns posted:That's because they're trying to calculate the maximum that prices would increase, assuming businesses don't want to decrease profit if they can avoid it. I don't really understand his point, but I am sure that that is not what he is saying. Read his most recent post. asdf32 posted:It's price here because this paper assumed "no change in profit". In real life most businesses would try and keep the profit if they could. Edit: OwlFancier posted:True, but the argument that reduced cost leads to reduced prices isn't true, reduced cost alone simply means increased profit. I don't think that anybody in this thread would argue with this or propose something otherwise. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Jun 18, 2015 |
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Jun 18, 2015 18:16
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Raskolnikov38 posted:I'm not a physicist but my non-swamp related education has lead me to believe that he is talking about physics on an atomic or subatomic scale which is pretty much all probability related. While the theory of quantum mechanics does say that things are intrinsically probabilistic, and so physicists do use and have some education in probability, if we are playing the game of what disciplines do we appeal to authority on the subject of statistics, I would say that the social scientists use it more often, and at least should be more fluent. Although a lot of social scientists are pretty bad at math. Physicists often tend to have the belief that they are the best at everything and are better than biologists at biology, mathematicians at math, computer scientists at computer science, and so on. Statistics isn't really as important of a part of a physics education as it is in the social sciences. That's because physicists bend over backwards to study the simplest systems and since the theory is better for the simple systems, they don't have to resort to statistics as often to understand them. You tend to lean on statistics more heavily when you have no idea what is going on and need to do trial and error experiments to try to figure stuff out.
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Jun 22, 2015 17:40
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Akumu posted:It might not be a huge part of your core physics curriculum (BS/MS), though it is a part. But if you're talking about using huge quantities of data to measure very small effects, you are going to get familiar with statistics pretty quick. Today's high energy physics is very much in this realm, as are things like trying to check if certain quantities (like the electron electric dipole moment) are zero or just very close to zero. Haha, ok, ok fair enough. Some physicists do spend their entire careers trying to measure astonishingly weak effects, so I am willing to believe that they would become statistics experts so that they could continue to study stuff like that.
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Jun 22, 2015 18:19
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I love how a ton of posters dog-piled on asdf32 regarding his statement about the null hypothesis and told him he was totally wrong. He actually was right. When hypothesis testing, the choice of the null hypothesis is an ideological choice. There is no Law of Statistics telling you to select a certain null hypothesis. That's a pretty common misconception.Dr. Fishopolis posted:well this thread is complete poo poo but now that the primary shitters are probated can we at least accept that: Did anybody actually claim A? It pretty much was the consensus (even asdf32 eventually admitted as much, although that didn't stop other posters from putting words in his mouth) that raising the minimum wage helped the bottom class, but I don't know if that was considered a boost to the overall economy. Edit: I guess I really meant to replace "bottom class" with "minimum wage workers" in the section above. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Jun 23, 2015 |
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Jun 23, 2015 01:03
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edit: nvm
silence_kit fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Jun 23, 2015 |
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Jun 23, 2015 03:55
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 16:25 |
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edit: nvm, already brought up
silence_kit fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Jun 23, 2015 |
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Jun 23, 2015 06:12
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