poverty

Should we raise the minimum wage?

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JDN 2456949 PDT 10:22.

The minimum wage is an economic issue that most people are familiar with; a large portion of the population has worked for minimum wage at some point in their lives, and those who haven’t generally know someone who has. As Chris Rock famously remarked (in the recording, Chris Rock, as usual, uses some foul language), “You know what that means when they pay you minimum wage? You know what they’re trying to tell you? It’s like, ‘Hey, if I could pay you less, I would; but it’s against the law.’ ”

The minimum wage was last raised in 2009, but adjusted for inflation its real value has been trending downward since 1968. The dollar values are going up, but not fast enough to keep up with inflation.

So, should we raise it again? How much? Should we just match it to inflation, or actually raise it higher in real terms? Productivity (in terms of GDP per worker) has more than doubled since 1968, so perhaps the minimum wage should double as well?

There are two major sides in this debate, and I basically disagree with both of them.

The first is the right-wing view (here espoused by the self-avowed “Objectivist” Don Watkins) that the minimum wage should be abolished entirely because it is an arbitrary price floor that prevents workers from selling their labor at whatever wage the market will bear. He argues that the free market is the only way the value of labor should be assessed and the government has no business getting involved.

On the other end of the spectrum we have Robert Reich, who thinks we should definitely raise the minimum wage and it would be the best way to lift workers out of poverty. He argues that by providing minimum-wage workers with welfare and Medicaid, we are effectively subsidizing employers to pay lower wages. While I sympathize a good deal more with this view, I still don’t think it’s quite right.

Why not? Because Watkins is right about one thing: The minimum wage is, in fact, an arbitrary price floor. Out of all the possible wages that an employer could pay, how did we decide that this one should be the lowest? And the same applies to everyone, no matter who they are or what sort of work they do?

What Watkins gets wrong—and Reich gets right—is that wages are not actually set in a free and competitive market. Large corporations have market power; they can influence wages and prices to their own advantage. They use monopoly power to raise prices, and its inverse, monopsony power, to lower wages. The workers who are making a minimum wage of $7.25 wouldn’t necessarily make $7.25 in a competitive market; they could make more than that. All we know, actually, is that they would make at least this much, because if a worker’s marginal productivity is below the minimum wage the corporation simply wouldn’t have hired them.

Monopsony power doesn’t just lower wages; it also reduces employment. One of the ways that corporations can control wages is by controlling hiring; if they tried to hire more people, they’d have to offer a higher wage, so instead they hire fewer people. Under these circumstances, a higher minimum wage can actually create jobs, as Reich argues it will. And in this particular case I think he’s right about that, because corporations have enormous market power to hold wages down and in the Second Depression we have a huge amount of unused productive capacity. But this isn’t true in general. If markets are competitive, then raising minimum wage just causes unemployment. Even when corporations have market power, if there isn’t much unused capacity then raising minimum wage will just lead them to raise prices instead of hiring more workers.

Reich is also wrong about this idea that welfare payments subsidize low wages. On the contrary, the stronger your welfare system, the higher your wages will be. The reason is quite simple: A stronger welfare system gives workers more bargaining power. If not getting this job means you turn to prostitution or starve to death, then you’re going to take just about any wage they offer you. (I don’t entirely agree with Krugman’s defense of sweatshops—I believe there are ways to increase trade without allowing oppressive working conditions—but he makes this point quite vividly.) On the other hand, if you live in the US with a moderate welfare system, you can sometimes afford to say no; you might end up broke or worse, homeless, but you’re unlikely to starve to death because at least you have food stamps. And in a nation with a really robust welfare system like Sweden, you can walk away from any employer who offers to pay you less than your labor is worth, because you know that even if you can’t find a job for awhile your basic livelihood will be protected. As a result, stronger welfare programs make labor markets more competitive and raise wages. Welfare and Medicaid do not subsidize low-wage employers; they exert pressure on employers to raise their low wages. Indeed, a sufficiently strong welfare system could render minimum wage redundant, as I’ll get back to at the end of this post.

Of course, I am above all an empiricist; all theory must bow down before the data. So what does the data say? Does raising the minimum wage create jobs or destroy jobs? Our best answer from compiling various studies is… neither. Moderate increases in the minimum wage have no discernible effect on employment. In some studies we’ve found increases, in others decreases, but the overall average effect across many studies is indistinguishable from zero.

Of course, a sufficiently large increase is going to decrease employment; a Fox News reporter once famously asked: “Why not raise the minimum wage to $100,000 an hour!?” (which Jon Stewart aptly satirized as “Why not pay people in cocaine and unicorns!?”) Yes, raising the minimum wage to $100,000 an hour would create massive inflation and unemployment. But that really says nothing about whether raising the minimum wage to $10 or $20 would be a good idea. Covering your car with 4000 gallons of gasoline is a bad idea, but filling it with 10 gallons is generally necessary for its proper functioning.

This kind of argument is actually pretty common among Republicans, come to think of it. Take the Laffer Curve, for instance; it’s basically saying that since a 99% tax on everyone would damage the economy (which is obviously true) then a 40% tax specifically on millionaires must have the same effect. Another good one is Rush Limbaugh’s argument that if unemployment benefits are good, why not just put everyone on unemployment benefits? Well, again, because there’s a difference between doing something for some people sometimes and doing it for everyone all the time. There are these things called numbers; they measure whether something is bigger or smaller instead of just “there” or “not there”. You might want to learn about that.

Since moderate increases in minimum wage have no effect on unemployment, and we are currently under conditions of extremely low—in fact, dangerously low—inflation, then I think on balance we should go with Reich: Raising the minimum wage would do more good than harm.

But in general, is minimum wage the best way to help workers out of poverty? No, I don’t think it is. It’s awkward and heavy-handed; it involves trying to figure out what the optimal wage should be and writing it down in legislation, instead of regulating markets so that they will naturally seek that optimal level and respond to changes in circumstances. It only helps workers at the very bottom: Someone making $12 an hour is hardly rich, but they won’t benefit from increasing minimum wage to $10; in fact they might be worse off, if that increase triggers inflation that lowers the real value of their $12 wage.

What do I propose instead? A basic income. There should be a cash payment that every adult citizen receives, once a month, directly from the government—no questions asked. You don’t have to be unemployed, you don’t have to be disabled, you don’t have to be looking for work. You don’t have to spend it on anything in particular; you can use it for food, for housing, for transportation; or if you like you can use it for entertainment or save it for a rainy day. We don’t keep track of what you do with it, because it’s your own freedom and none of our business. We just give you this money as your dividends for being a shareholder in the United States of America.

This would be extremely easy to implement—the IRS already has all the necessary infrastructure, they just need to turn some minus signs into plus signs. We could remove all the bureaucracy involved in administering TANF and SNAP and Medicaid, because there’s no longer any reason to keep track of who is in poverty since nobody is. We could in fact fold the $500 billion a year we currently spend on means-tested programs into the basic income itself. We could pull another $300 billion from defense spending while still solidly retaining the world’s most powerful military.

Which brings me to the next point: How much would this cost? Probably less than you think. I propose indexing the basic income to the poverty line for households of 2 or more; since currently a household of 2 or more at the poverty line makes $15,730 per year, the basic income would be $7,865 per person per year. The total cost of giving that amount to each of the 243 million adults in the United States would be $1.9 trillion, or about 12% of our GDP. If we fold in the means-tested programs, that lowers the net cost to $1.4 trillion, 9% of GDP. This means that an additional flat tax of 9% would be enough to cover the entire amount, even if we don’t cut any other government spending.

If you use a progressive tax system like I recommended a couple of posts ago, you could raise this much with a tax on less than 5% of utility, which means that someone making the median income of $30,000 would only pay 5.3% more than they presently do. At the mean income of $50,000, you’d only pay 7.7%. And keep in mind that you are also receiving the additional $7,865; so in fact in both cases you actually end up with more than you had before the basic income was implemented. The break-even point is at about $80,000, where you pay an extra 9.9% ($7,920) and receive $7,865, so your after-tax income is now $79,945. Anyone making less than $80,000 per year actually gains from this deal; the only people who pay more than they receive are those who make more than $80,000. This is about the average income of someone in the fourth quintile (the range where 60% to 80% of the population is below you), so this means that roughly 70% of Americans would benefit from this program.

With this system in place, we wouldn’t need a minimum wage. Working full-time at our current minimum wage makes you $7.25*40*52 = $15,080 per year. If you are a single person, you’re getting $7,865 from the basic income, this means that you’ll still have more than you presently do as long as your employer pays you at least $3.47 per hour. And if they don’t? Well then you can just quit, knowing that at least you have that $7,865. If you’re married, it’s even better; the two of you already get $15,730 from the basic income. If you were previously raising a family working full-time on minimum wage while your spouse is unemployed, guess what: You actually will make more money after the policy no matter what wage your employer pays you.

This system can adapt to changes in the market, because it is indexed to the poverty level (which is indexed to inflation), and also because it doesn’t say anything about what wage an employer pays. They can pay as little or as much as the market will bear; but the market is going to bear more, because workers can afford to quit. Billionaires are going to hate this plan, because it raises their taxes (by about 40%) and makes it harder for them to exploit workers. But for 70% of Americans, this plan is a pretty good deal.

The Rent is Too Damn High

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Housing prices are on the rise again, but they’re still well below what they were at the peak of the 2008 bubble. It may be that we have not learned from our mistakes and another bubble is coming, but I don’t think it has hit us just yet. Meanwhile, rent prices have barely budged, and the portion of our population who pay more than 35% of their income on rent has risen to 44%.

Economists typically assess the “fair market value” of a house based upon its rental rate for so-called “housing services”—the actual benefits of living in a house. But to use the rental rate is to do what Larry Summers called “ketchup economics”; 40-ounce bottles of ketchup sell for exactly twice what 20-ounce bottles do, therefore the ketchup market is fair and efficient. (In fact even this is not true, since ketchup is sold under bulk pricing. This reminds me of a rather amusing situation I recently encountered at the grocery store: The price of individual 12-packs of Coke was $3, but you could buy sets of five for $10 each. This meant that buying five was cheaper in total—not just per unit—than buying four. The only way to draw that budget constraint is with a periodic discontinuity; it makes a sawtooth across your graph. We never talk about that sort of budget constraint in neoclassical economics, yet there it was in front of me.)

When we value houses by their rental rate, we’re doing ketchup economics. We’re ignoring the fact that the rent is too damn high—people should not have to pay as much as they do in order to get housing in this country, particularly housing in or near major cities. When 44% of Americans are forced to spend over a third of their income just fulfilling the basic need of shelter, something is wrong. Only 60% of the price of a house is the actual cost to build it; another 20% is just the land. If that sounds reasonable to you, you’ve just become inured to our absurd land prices. The US has over 3 hectares per person of land; that’s 7.7 acres. A family of 3 should be able to claim—on average—9 hectares, or 23 acres. The price of a typical 0.5-acre lot for a family home should be negligible; it’s only 2% of your portion of America’s land.

And as for the argument that land near major cities should be more expensive? No, it shouldn’t; it’s land. What should be more expensive near major cities are buildings, and only then because they’re bigger buildings—even per unit it probably is about equal or even an economy of scale. There’s a classic argument that you’re paying to have infrastructure and be near places of work: The former is ignoring the fact that we pay taxes and utilities for that infrastructure; and the latter is implicitly assuming that it’s normal for our land ownership to be so monopolistic. In a competitive market, the price is driven by the cost, not by the value; the extra value you get from living near a city is supposed to go into your consumer surplus (the personal equivalent of profit—but in utility, not in dollars), not into the owner’s profit. And actually that marginal benefit is supposed to be driven to zero by the effect of overcrowding—though Krugman’s Nobel-winning work was about why that doesn’t necessarily happen and therefore we get Shanghai.

There’s also a more technical argument to be had here about the elasticity of land supply and demand; since both are so inelastic, we actually end up in the very disturbing scenario in which even a small shift in either one can throw prices all over the place, even if we are at market-clearing equilibrium. Markets just don’t work very well for inelastic goods; and if right now you’re thinking “Doesn’t that mean markets won’t work well for things like water, food, and medicine?” you’re exactly right and have learned well, Grasshopper.

So, the rent is too damn high. This naturally raises three questions:

  1. Why is the rent so high?
  2. What happens to our economy as a result?
  3. What can we do about it?

Let’s start with 1. Naturally, conservatives are going to blame regulation; here’s Business Insider doing exactly that in San Francisco and New York City respectively. Actually, they have a point here. Zoning laws are supposed to keep industrial pollution away from our homes, not keep people from building bigger buildings to fit more residents. All these arguments about the “feel” of the city or “visual appeal” should be immediately compared to the fact that they are making people homeless. So 200 people should live on the street so you can have the skyline look the way you always remember it? I won’t say what I’d really like to; I’m trying to keep this blog rated PG.

Similarly, rent-control is a terrible way to solve the homelessness problem; you’re created a segregated market with a price ceiling, and that’s going to create a shortage and raise prices in the other part of the market. The result is good for anyone who can get the rent-control and bad for everyone else. (The Cato study Business Insider cites does make one rather aggravating error; the distribution in a non-rent-controlled market isn’t normal, it’s lognormal. You can see that at a glance by the presence of those extremely high rents on the right side of the graph.)

Most people respond by saying, “Okay, but what do we do for people who can’t afford the regular rent? Do we just make them homeless!?” I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cato Institute or Business Insider were okay with that—but I’m definitely not. So what would I do? Give them money. The solution to poverty has been staring us in the face for centuries, but we refuse to accept it. Poor people don’t have enough money, so give them money. Skeptical? Here are some direct experimental studies showing that unconditional cash transfers are one of the most effective anti-poverty measures. The only kind of anti-poverty program I’ve seen that has a better track record is medical aid. People are sick? Give them medicine. People are poor? Give them money. Yes, it’s that simple. People just don’t want to believe it; they might have to pay a bit more in taxes.

So yes, regulations are actually part of the problem. But they are clearly not the whole problem, and in my opinion not even the most important part. The most important part is monopolization. There’s a map that Occupy Wall Street likes to send around saying “What if our land were as unequal as our money?” But here’s the thing: IT IS. Indeed, the correlation between land ownership and wealth is astonishingly high; to a first approximation, your wealth is a constant factor times the land you own.

Remember how I said that the average American holds 7.7 acres or 3 hectares? (Especially in economics, averages can be quite deceiving. Bill Gates and I are on average billionaires. In fact, I guarantee that Bill Gates and you are on average billionaires; it doesn’t even matter how much wealth you have, it’ll still be true.)

Well, here are some decidedly above-average landowners:

  1. John Malone, 2.2 million acres or 9,000 km^2
  2. Ted Turner, 2 million acres or 8,100 km^2
  3. The Emmerson Family, 1.9 million acres or 7,700 km^2
  4. Brad Kelley, 1.5 million acres or 6,100 km^2
  1. The Pingree Family, 800,000 acres or 3,200 km^2
  1. The Ford Family, 600,000 acres or 2,400 km^2
  1. The Briscoe Family, 560,000 acres or 2,270 km^2
  2. W.T. Wagonner Estate, 535,000 acres or 2,170 km^2

I think you get the idea. Here are two more of particular note:

  1. Jeff Bezos, 290,000 acres or 1,170 km^2
  1. Koch Family, 239,000 acres or 970 km^2

Yes, that is the Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com and the Koch Family who are trying to purchase control of our political system.

Interpolating the ones I couldn’t easily find data on, I estimate that these 102 landowners (there were ties in the top 100) hold a total of 30 million acres, of the 940 million acres in the United States. This means that 3% of the land is owned by—wait for it—0.000,03% of the population. To put it another way, if we confiscated the land of 102 people and split it all up into 0.5-acre family home lots, we could house 60 million households—roughly half the number of households in the nation. To be fair, some of it isn’t suitable for housing; but a good portion of it is. Figure even 1% is usable; that’s still enough for 600,000 households—which is to say every homeless person in America.

One thing you may also have noticed is how often the word “family” comes up. Using Openoffice Calc (it’s like Excel, but free!) I went through the whole top 100 list and counted the number of times “family” comes up; it’s 49 out of 100. Include “heirs” and “estate” and the number goes up to 66. That doesn’t mean they share with their immediate family; it says “family” when it’s been handed down for at least one generation. This means that almost two-thirds of these super-wealthy landowners inherited their holdings. This isn’t the American Dream of self-made millionaires; this is a landed gentry. We claim to be a capitalist society; but if you look at who owns our land and how it’s passed down, it doesn’t look like capitalism. It looks like feudalism.

Indeed, the very concept of rent is basically feudalist. Instead of owning the land we live on, we have to constantly pay someone else—usually someone quite rich—for the right to live there. Stop paying, and they can call the government to have us forced out. We are serfs by another name. In a truly efficient capitalist market with the kind of frictionless credit system neoclassicists imagine, you wouldn’t pay rent, you’d always pay a mortgage. The only time you’d be paying for housing without building equity would be when you stay at a hotel. If you’re going to live there more than a month, you should be building equity. And if you do want to move before your mortgage ends? No problem; sell it to the next tenant, paying off your mortgage and giving you that equity back—instead of all that rent, which is now in someone else’s pocket.

Because of this extreme inequality in land distribution, the top landholders can charge the rest of us monopolistic prices—thus making even more profits and buying even more land—and we have little choice but to pay what they demand. Because shelter is such a fundamental need, we are willing to pay just about whatever we have in order to secure it; so that’s what they charge us.

On to question 2. What happens to our economy as a result of this high rent?

In a word: 2009. Because our real estate market is so completely out of whack with any notion of efficient and fair pricing, it has become a free-for-all of speculation by so-called “investors”. (I hate that term; real investment is roads paved, factories built, children taught. What “investors” do is actually arbitrage. We are the investors, not them.)

A big part of this was also the deregulation of derivatives, particularly the baffling and insane “Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000” that basically banned regulation of derivatives—it was a law against making laws. Because of this bankers—or should I say banksters—were able to create ludicrously huge amounts of derivatives, as well as structure and repackage them in ways that would deceive their buyers into underestimating the risks. As a result there are now over a quadrillion dollars—yes, with a Q, sounds like a made-up number, $2e15—in nominal value of outstanding derivatives.

Because this is of course about 20 times as much as there is actual money in the entire world, sustaining this nominal value requires enormous amounts of what’s called leverage—which is to say, debt. When you “leverage” a stock purchase, for example, what you’re doing is buying the stock on a loan (a generally rather low-interest loan called “margin”), then when you sell the stock you pay back the loan. The “leverage” is the ratio between the size of the loan and the amount of actual capital you have to spend. This can theoretically give you quite large returns; for instance if you have $2000 in your stock account and you leverage 10 to 1, you can buy $20,000 worth of stock. If that stock then rises to $21,000—that’s only 5%, so it’s pretty likely this will happen—then you sell it and pay back the loan. For this example I’ll assume you pay 1% interest on your margin. In that case you would start with $2000 and end up with $2800; that’s a 40% return. A typical return from buying stock in cash is more like 7%, so even with interest you’re making almost 6 times as much. It sounds like such a deal!

But there is a catch: If that stock goes down and you have to sell it before it goes back up, you need to come up with the money to pay back your loan. Say it went down 5% instead of up; you now have $19,000 from selling it, but you owe $20,200 in debt with interest. Your $2000 is already gone, so you now have to come up with an additional $1,200 just to pay back your margin. Your return on $2000 is now negative—and huge: -160%. If you had bought the stock in cash, your return would only have been -5% and you’d still have $1900.

My example is for a 10 to 1 leverage, which is considered conservative. More typical leverages are 15 or 20; and some have gotten as high as 50 or even 70. This can lead to huge returns—or huge losses.

But okay, suppose we rein in the derivatives market and leverage gets back down to more reasonable levels. What damage is done by high real estate prices per se?

Well, basically it means that too much of our economy’s effort is going toward real estate. There is what we call deadweight loss, the loss of value that results from an inefficiency in the market. Money that people should be spending on other things—like cars, or clothes, or TVs—is instead being spent on real estate. Those products aren’t getting sold. People who would have had jobs making those products aren’t getting hired. Even when it’s not triggering global financial crises, a market distortion as large as our real estate system is a drain on the economy.

The distorted real estate market in particular also has another effect: It keeps the middle class from building wealth. We have to spend so much on our homes that we don’t have any left for stocks or bonds; as a result we earn a very low return on investment—inflation-adjusted it’s only about 0.2%. So meanwhile the rich are getting 4% on bonds, or 7% on stocks, or even 50% or 100% on highly-leveraged derivatives. In fact, it’s worse than that, because we’re also paying those rich people 20% on our credit cards. (Or even worse, 400% on payday loans. Four hundred percent. You typically pay a similar rate on overdraft fees—that $17.5 billion has to come from somewhere—but fortunately it’s usually not for long.)

Most people aren’t numerate enough to really appreciate how compound interest works—and banks are counting on that. 7%, 20%, what’s the difference really? 3 times as much? And if you had 50%, that would be about 7 times as much? Not exactly, no. Say you start with $1000 in each of these accounts. After 20 years, how much do you have in the 7% account? $3,869.68. Not too shabby, but what about that 20% account? $38,337.60—almost ten times as much. And if you managed to maintain a 50% return, how much would you have? $3,325,256.73—over $3.3 million, almost one thousand times as much.

The problem, I think, is people tend to think linearly; it’s hard to think exponentially. But there’s a really nice heuristic you can use, which is actually quite accurate: Divide the percentage into 69, and that is the time it will take to double. So 3% would take 69/3 = 23 years to double. 7% would take 69/7 = 10 years to double. 35% would take 69/35 = 2 years to double. And 400% would take 69/400 = 0.17 years (about 1/6, so 2 months) to double. These doublings are cumulative: If you double twice you’ve gone up 4 times; if you double 10 times you’ve gone up 1000 times. (For those who are a bit more numerate, this heuristic comes from the fact that 69 ~ 100*ln(2).)

Since returns are so much higher on other forms of wealth (not gold, by the way; don’t be fooled) than on homes, and those returns get compounded over time, this differential translates into ever-increasing inequality of wealth. This is what Piketty is talking about when he says r > g; r is the return on capital, and g is the growth rate of the economy. Stocks are at r, but homes are near g (actually less). By forcing you to spend your wealth on a house, they are also preventing you from increasing that wealth.

Finally, time for question 3. What should we do to fix this? Again, it’s simple: Take the land from the rich. (See how I love simple solutions?) Institute a 99% property tax on all land holdings over, say, 1000 acres. No real family farmer of the pastoral sort (as opposed to heir of an international agribusiness) would be affected.

I’m sure a lot of people will think this sounds unfair: “How dare you just… just… take people’s stuff! You… socialist!” But I ask you: On what basis was it theirs to begin with? Remember, we’re talking about land. We’re not talking about a product like a car, something they actually made (or rather administrated the manufacturing of). We’re not even talking about ideas or services, which raise their own quite complicated issues. These are chunks of the Earth; they were there a billion years before you and they will probably still be there a billion years hence.

That land was probably bought with money that they obtained through monopolistic pricing. Even worse, whom was it bought from? Ultimately it had to be bought from the people who stole it—literally stole, at the point of a gun—from the indigenous population. On what basis was it theirs to sell? And even the indigenous population may not have obtained it fairly; they weren’t the noble savages many imagine them to be, but had complex societies with equally complex political alliances and histories of intertribal warfare. A good portion of the land that any given tribe claims as their own was likely stolen from some other tribe long ago.

It’s honestly pretty bizarre that we buy and sell land; I think it would be valuable to think about how else we might distribute land that didn’t involve the absurdity of owning chunks of the planet. I can’t think of a good alternative system right now, so okay, maybe as a pragmatic matter the economy just works most efficiently if people can buy and sell land. But since it is a pragmatic justification—and not some kind of “fundamental natural right” ala Robert Nozick—then we are free as a society—particularly a democratic society—to make ad hoc adjustments in that pragmatic system as is necessary to make people’s lives better. So let’s take all the land, because the rent is too damn high.