Raise the Damn Minimum Wage

This might not be topical, but I think it’s important.

The real value of the US federal minimum wage peaked in 1968 at $8.60 in 2018 dollars (using a chained CPI - using a traditional CPI measure its closer to $11.50). If you were a naïve optimist, this would be surprising, since the United States is much richer today than it was in 1968, with GDP per person, productivity, and average wages all having grown significantly since then.

In 1968 the US had a (real) GDP per person of $23,000; that’s comparable to modern day Uruguay, Romania, Croatia, and Panama. Today our GPD per person is $53,000. That means that our society has more than twice the amount of resources per person we did in 50 years ago – though it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it.

Over the past 50 years, average wages in the US have increased significantly, while the federal minimum has increased, much more slowly.

In 1968, the minimum wage was about half the average hourly wage. In 2018 the minimum is less than a third. Note that this data excludes supervisory workers, so underestimates the growing divergence.

Productivity has also increased since 1968, with output per hour being 2.4 times what is was in 1968. Meanwhile, average hourly earnings are only 1.4 times what they were 50 years ago.

So what’s my point here? That raising the damn minimum wage is hardly the end of the fucking world, and people shouldn’t fucking panic about it.

Assuming perfectly competitive markets (stop laughing!), somebody who was paid $8.60 an hour in 1968 produced at least $8.60 of value an hour in 1968. I’ll be conservative and say productivity growth has been slower for minimum wage work than work on average, so their productivity has only increased by half as much – a mere 70%. Then an hour that created $8.60 of value 50 years ago should create $14.72 today.

Or we could take another track, and ask what the minimum would be if we tried to keep it at half the average. Since hourly average wages in 2018 are 22.60, the minimum wage would be $11.30.

Autism and Egalitarianism

I am a very high-functioning autistic. What that means is that I go through life oblivious to what you find obvious.

You see, dear reader, to me it is as if the people around me are dancing to some silent music and I, I have no choice but to try to dance with them.

So I try very much to be my best self without regard for how others think of me. This is not courage, but necessity. Were I to be concerned with others opinions I would be paralyzed by fear and doubt.
For only with the greatest of difficulty  can I come to know those opinions unless I explicitly ask them - and even then, would I hear the truth?

"Fitting in" for me is thus a fools errand. Better not to try, and be my best strange self. I have some coping mechanisms to help me function in society.

First, I use  intellect when others would use  instinct. Happily, I'm intelligent enough for this to work, but deciphering social relations intellectually does not help me participate in real-time interactions. For that, I have other strategies. I am kind and generous, I try to be polite and when I do give offense I seek to make it clear that there is no malice.

Essentially, I try to be a nice, likable person, so that people will be patient with me, interpret my words and actions generously, and generally put up with my excentriccities. And I am honest. An effective lie is only effective if I can juggle who knows who, who "knows" what, and what people want to believe. Thus keeping up even a small lie is for me very burdensome. Or to quote Mark Twain: "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything".

How does this inform my politics?

Well for one, I'm an egalitarian. Now, I could offer various moral or practical arguments for this position. But I won't. Because fundamentally, my egalitarianism is an instinct born of my autism.

How am I supposed to move through the dance-floor if there is not single tune music and dance, but different musics and different dances that change depending on, say, relative social status?

I cannot.

The present world is an unequal world.  It tries to force me to navigate social hierarchies and power relations, relationships between superior and inferior, to divine and then flatter the sensibilities of the powerful.

I rebel against this world. It is cognitively difficulty for me. I long for a world where it is enough to enough for me to treat people as people, with kindness and generousness, and none find that confusing or remarkable.

That world I could bear.

How Automation Will Change Management

So, for my job I do quite a bit of reading about “the future of work” and I have some opinions about how some emerging management challenges that future implies. Now the key feature of work in this future, which has been coming at us, really, since the start of the industrial revolution, is automation.  Continual progress in labor-saving devices, increasing productivity, allowing us to all enjoy a higher standard of living (at least in the long-run). And the ultimate in saving labor, of course, is automation, performing a task without any human input at all. This has been the trend since steam-power replaced muscle power. As time goes on, the easiest jobs to automate are automated away, and humans do more work that’s difficult or impossible to automate.

What’s easy to automate? Machines excel at routine and predictable tasks – anything that can be fully described in formal, logical, precise terms (“if this do that”) or are totally repetitive (“every 1.74 seconds swing downward with between 1000 and 1050 kiloNewtons of force) is, bluntly, a job perfectly suited for machines – and a job that will be automated away as soon as economical. But sorting good art from bad, understanding spoken language, driving a car – any sort of work that might at any point require a modicum of actual thought (which is quite a bit of “unskilled labor” in the service sector) is difficult or impossible to automate completely. Answering a question like “is this a good investment” is something only a human can do, even as that human uses (hopefully!) a variety of sophisticated machines to help them make that decision.

Why is all this a problem for management? Because the work that’s being automated away is also the work that’s easiest to manage. Evaluating performance is easy for predictable and routine tasks, observing effort is straightforward when the work takes place almost entirely outside a worker’s head. Traditional management techniques and organizational structures are well suited to incentivizing effort (using Motivation 1.0 and 2.0, for those of you who’ve read a certain book) and evaluating performance.

But increasingly, more and more work will take involve complicated tasks that are costly or difficult to monitor, and more of that work will take place inside people’s heads. This isn’t an insurmountable problem, but managers will have to lean increasingly on intrinsic motivation (Motivation 3.0) in order to accommodate this. And bluntly, I don’t think business leaders (or at least American business leaders) are able or willing to deal with this problem. Grappling with this problem requires a (in the American context) radical rethink of employer-employee relations; conceiving of an employment relationship a social as well as economic relationship. The fundamental human in human relationships is reciprocity – why should workers be loyal to your company and emotionally invested in its success, if the company doesn’t feel the same way about them?

The alternative response is for management to spend whatever it takes on monitoring in order to 

avoid giving up any sort of control over workers and the workplace – even if it would be costlier. 

Hopefully profits are more important to capitalists than power.