Couple of things
- Been away for the past few days taking care of some family business, as well as directing the IHN of Athens annual fundraiser dinner on Sunday and its golf tournament on Monday. Looks like we're going to raise anywhere between $13,000 and $15,000 for the weekend, which is quite good.
- In a story which has fallen through the Athenian blogosphere cracks, Larry McKinney is leaving the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce, and a good number of folks in the community (as well as the chamber) all say 'don't let the door hit you on the way out.' During his tenure as president, membership grew, but the organization became incredibly uncooperative ... and it dove into politics, but was terribly unsuccessful. He's heading to Daytona Beach, which means if history is any indicator he'll probably live in Orlando and commute, right?
- Don Nelson put together a great column highlighting the difficulties and challenges of living in poverty. Upon joining the board of IHN a few years back, it was required that I go through a training session, complete with a poverty simulation. The latter was an incredible experience, and I think everyone should have to experience it just once.
- This whole moving-the-fraternities could get mighty ugly, particularly in light of the weird grey area where the fraternities own the house, but the university owns the land. This has legal troubles written all over it.
- In a story which has fallen through the Athenian blogosphere cracks, Larry McKinney is leaving the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce, and a good number of folks in the community (as well as the chamber) all say 'don't let the door hit you on the way out.' During his tenure as president, membership grew, but the organization became incredibly uncooperative ... and it dove into politics, but was terribly unsuccessful. He's heading to Daytona Beach, which means if history is any indicator he'll probably live in Orlando and commute, right?
- Don Nelson put together a great column highlighting the difficulties and challenges of living in poverty. Upon joining the board of IHN a few years back, it was required that I go through a training session, complete with a poverty simulation. The latter was an incredible experience, and I think everyone should have to experience it just once.
- This whole moving-the-fraternities could get mighty ugly, particularly in light of the weird grey area where the fraternities own the house, but the university owns the land. This has legal troubles written all over it.
posted by Jmac at 7:12 AM
13 Comments:
The Don Nelson column was excellent. Whenever I see someone rabbitting on about how the minimum wage is such a terrible thing to have (much less to raise!) and being poor isn't so bad and why don't they do this or that and blah blah blah and just get a job yadda yadda... well, I wonder how that person can walk around with out all their privilege constantly smacking them in the face, ass, back, eyes, etc. This kind of heavy dose of reality is exactly what we need a whole lot more of. (pardon the shitty grammar.)
Amber, the minimum wage is terrible because it harms the economoy (higher unemployment, for starters) in such a way that affects the poor more than everyone else. It hurts the poor. Broken, record, I know...
As Rob says in The Day No Pigs Would Die, "Hear me God, it's hell being poor." I agree with this in every way I could possibly agree with it without actually being poor myself. But the minimum wage (at all, raising it, whichever) makes the poor even worse off.
While I can see your point Xon, and we actually agree on not instituting an automatic 'living wage' no matter the moral argument for it, but I don't still don't completely agree with you regarding the minimum wage.
If we lacked a minimum wage, I don't think we'd see a drastic rise in wages and/or increase in employment. Any increase in employment would come at lower wages which isn't necessarily helping the process.
Minimum wage issues aside, I do recommend a poverty simulation for all. In fact, the minimum wage wasn't even brought up in my scenario. Rather it was simply 'you've got X amount of money' and then you go through one month of making ends meet. And different groups got different scenarios thrown at you (I believe my group had a sick child who missed some days of school, meaning I missed work and a change in bus routes which meant I had to adjust my schedule ... it was a good while ago, though so I may be confusing actual scenarios from IHN).
Right now we have a minimum wage, and there are a number of people who do not have jobs. If the minimum wage were eliminated/reduced, then there would be more jobs available. At least some of those currently without employment would find a job willing to hire them.
Yes, the wage would be low, but low wages are better than no wages. Right? You have to start somewhere.
Well, yes and no (depending on the context of social support programs - both public and private). For instance, from the public sector perspective, in Georgia any type of employment hinders or prohibits receiving TANFF money (welfare), which for many families is necessary to get by. They end up making less money than if they were unemployed.
But that's an aside. My point would be that, yes, you'd possibly see an increase in employment, but you even concede said employment would come at a lesser wage than the existing $5.15 an hour. More people working is good, to be sure, but they're working jobs with tenuous security for lousy wages.
This leads to a whole variety of factors - they may have to work two (or sometimes three) jobs to get by ... meaning they aren't around to watch their children ... meaning they have to find day care ... meaning they automatically are paying $500 a month for someone to watch their kids ... meaning they have no ability to save money ... meaning they're stuck in a cycle of poverty.
It's more than simply creating more jobs which offer little advancement or low wages. Poverty is a complex, societal issue.
And I'm not suggesting you don't know that or are indifferent to it. I'm just saying that lifting people out of poverty goes far beyond this issue and simple solutions like abolishing the minimum wage or instituting a 'living wage.'
I don't want these people to have to work minimum wage jobs ... I want them to have secure, well-paying jobs.
I agree, as you already acknowledged that I would, that poverty is complex. But I'm not suggesting that we "merely" refrain from raising the minimum wage (or, even better, abolish the minimum wage altogether). I am simply reacting to the claims of those "progressives" whose misguided idea of progress has the unintended effect of saddling the poor with habitual unemployment. I agree that the minimum wage is not the only, nor probably even the most important, issue in the fight against poverty. But it is an issue, and handling it the right way would help while handling it the wrong way (as we've been doing for over 70 years and as progressives want us to continue doing) hurts.
As to your point about how working interferes with other benefits, that's a good point and one I almost brought up in my earlier comment (trying to be shorter and pithier...good luck with that, right?). Don't get me started on the unintended bad consequences of paying people not to work. This creates a lower incentive to get a job (and who can blame such a person?), and perpetuates the cycle of poverty even further.
To sum this up.
"More people working is good, to be sure, but they're working jobs with tenuous security for lousy wages."
Right, but that first part of the sentence is all I'm going for here: more people working is good. Like I said before, you've got to start somewhere in the "war" against poverty. Finding people jobs who didn't have them before is a good start.
Of course your yebbuts still apply, though. Low-skill jobs are tenuous and low-paying. It's still hard to make enough money to make all ends meet and to take proper care of your children. Absolutely, it still sucks to be poor. But paying people not to work and trying to put a price floor on wages are two things that have made it even suckier, and even harder to get out of poverty, than it would otherwise be. I simply want to remove those two obstacles, as a humble and definitely incomplete first step towards helping the poor get by a little easier than they are currently.
Ned, good and reasonable questions.
I do not think that there would be a "race to the bottom" in the absence of a minimum wage, just as there is not a "race to the bottom" in other things that are not mandated to a certain price by the law. Stores and customers are allowed to negotiate whatever price they want for things like yachts and computers and yet the producers of these goods are still able to survive.
Labor is an economic good--a scarce resource subject to the laws of supply and demand--just like any other. If the price for labor goes down, the demand will go up. If a person cannot get work at 5.15/hr, he should be free to offer his labor at 4.75/hr, and see if he gets any bites.
This is not a "race to the bottom", because there are still many people who are worth more to their employers. Employers have to compete with one another to get good employees.
But there are certain "low-skill" jobs that are always going to be at the bottom of society's range of payscales. In any society, assuming everyone does not have precisely equal income, some people will make more than others, and some people will be at the top of this range while others are at the bottom. The problem with current "progressive" approaches to poverty, as I see it, is that they want to somehow make these folks at the bottom end of the range better off by simply forcing their employers to pay them more money. But this only results in many of them being put out of work, just as raising the price of corn would cause more cans of corn to be left on the grocery shelves. Economic effects apply to human beings just as much as cans of corn.
On top of this, progressives also want to then compensate those who cannot find employment, which then has the unintended consequence of encouraging these people to remain unemployed. (Because as JMac already pointed out a few comments ago, getting a job does not offer you as much of a gain in your situation as it did before: working full-time to make $400 a week is not as tempting of an option if I am already guaranteed $200 a week for not working. It might not be worth it to me to work 40 hours for only 200 extra dollars.) You get more of what you subsidize, and less of what you penalize. When we subsidize people for being out of work, we get more out of work people.
It is not the moral rectitude or the good intentions of progressives that I question, but their seeming unwillingness to consider the unintended consequences of their economic recommendations.
What would make far more sense to me--though I should add that I am skeptical of any attempts by government to control the economy so I doubt that this would not also fall victim to unintended bad consequences--is to subsidize people who actually have jobs. If you have a job, say, and it pays less than such-and-such, then you get some sort of compensation from the government to help make ends meet. If you are out of work, then you need to find a job, any job, then apply for the same compensation. (I am aware of a few obvious economic probles with this even as I write it, but it's time we at least get outside of the typical progressive box on this...) Stop coercing employers to pay what you think people "deserve," and use the freaking public fund to make up the difference if it is so important to you.
If you are simply unable to find a job, then it is better to return to the (much) older method of poverty relief: private (generally religious) charity. The institution of the "half-way house" should probably make a comeback. Your basic needs are met (as well as though of your family), and you are put to work if you are able. It is not a fun place to be, but neither is outright destitution. All the more reason to do whatever you have to do to get out of there, and once you're out, to stay out.
I do find Xon's argument to be rationally persuasive when it comes to the basic economics of it: if you treat a working wage as a quantification of the value of a human being, and if you accept a marketplace of complete, rational flexibility with continuous stabilization (I admit to not knowing the proper econ terms for the things I'm invoking here), then at some point the marketplace will achieve parity in what a worker's labor value is with what an employer is willing to pay for that human body. Who can deny an old-fashioned capitalist argument?
What I find disturbing is that, no matter whether one is conservative or progressive or liberal, it is inescapable to do what Johnathan alluded to doing: attach a moral dimension to the ascription of human labor. While Marx did attempt to do that in his criticism of the capitalist economy, it seems to me that those who wish to raise the wage and those who wish to abolish it still operate, even when they put the moral issue explicitly aside, in the discussion on the basis of this number as a quantification of moral worth. This is made all the more apparent when Xon compares human beings to cans of corn: he intends this example to show how human beings are no different from cans of corn when it comes to the value of the body, but the very fact that he has to attempt to establish this moral dissassociation shows how powerfully we already make that association. There is already something peculiar going on when we start to pay a human being for work, something that is too closely tied to morality for it to be ignored.
That is why I think that we haven't really gotten to a truly leftist understanding of what is going on in the wage relationship: we're still too caught up in thinking of labor and work in moral categories. No doubt: it has been this way for thousands of years that our labor is a distinctly moral thing, from Plato's carpenters to today's shaming of poverty. One way to take Marx was precisely to eliminate the moral dimension, render it even more secular than the invisible hand had begun to do, and then the other ideological mechanisms in place disrupting the proper and just exchange in the wage relationship could be dealt with.
But it seems as though these moral problems just keep returning their heads. Hydra and Hercules and all that. And it seems that eliminating them is only possible if, on the whole, people give up on the gods, whether they actually believe in any or not. That's the problem, I take it: there's too much distributed, ironic belief rather than any sincere, confident atheism. I guess this is why no leftist position is actually possible in the United States anymore, and becoming harder and more difficult with every passing generation. People are too busy finding newer and more entrenched ways to believe.
Which is upsetting to me, but perhaps not to other people.
Still, I agree with Johnathan on this point: simulating poverty may help someone to reconsider the situation of the poor. But, again, there is simulation, and then there is living the simulation. For those of us who find ourselves on the higher side of the minimum wage, living the simulation is already our fact of life. The habits and limits of our culture are inscribed continuously by the living reality of poverty, to such an extent that the life of wealth is mediated through images and symbols of poverty. The suburban life, turned exurban, already is a fabrication and a simulation built upon certain myths established by the war between the highest and the lowest classes. And this war is, itself, already something that has passed into oblivion, since the only class that really still believes in it is the only one who calls itself by that name: the middle class. This is why it is a moral issue still: because the wage for the work of the body is more a function of the identity of the middle class than it is for the rich or the poor, and it is for the middle class to choose who lives and who dies by the wage. And that is also why it is a simulation we live within.
I'm sorry. This is probably totally inappropriate and out of place here, and belongs at my spot. I'm just working through some things, and it's usually Xon's conservative remarks that sets them off.
Charles, I am by no means fluent in Marxist philosophy (but neither am I a first-time visitor to this strange country), so I don't understand how you can say that (perhaps) the wage relationship needs to be de-moralized altogether so that "proper and just" exchange in the wage relationship can be restored. What it does mean to want some human activity to be proper and just (just?), without also wanting it to be moral? What is "amoral" justice?
Consider Aristotle's accounts of justice. Justice need not be thought purely in terms of a moral category, but can be treated as the regulation of the exchange of goods or services. or monies.
Again, that we want to think justice is only to be regarded as morally relevant is something I'm not sure we've gotten past.
I mean, ask yourself: why do we think justice as the equal or right proportion in an exchange—which is what I take Marx to be after in his criticism of capitalism and what gets lost when socialism took on a humanist orientation—must therefore be a moral category? We do not think that the equal or proper distribution of nitrogen molecules in a room is moral.
Now, perhaps by demonstrating how unjust situations hurt people, we could show then that justice is connected to morality. But that's an argument that does not assume justice directly is a moral category, and it's an argument we often just take for granted and assume (much like, for instance, we just take for granted that the infinite in mathematics has been traversed since Cantor or that mathematical computation is a useful language for judgment among scientific models of physical behavior since Galileo).
"I mean, ask yourself: why do we think justice as the equal or right proportion in an exchange—which is what I take Marx to be after in his criticism of capitalism and what gets lost when socialism took on a humanist orientation—must therefore be a moral category? We do not think that the equal or proper distribution of nitrogen molecules in a room is moral."
Because morality has to do with human activity. That's what morality is all about, traditionally conceived. The "proper" arrangment of molecules has nothing to do with morality, because it has nothing to do with human activity.
Within the realm of human activities, of course, some will say that there are things that do not pertain to morality. Usually called "pracical" or something like this: assuming you seek a particular end, what are the best means to achieve that end? If I want to stay alive, I need to eat, but eating is not a "moral" activity.
I don't really agree with this (Kantian) conception, but in any case, it's not the same as what you're putting forth, either. So I remain puzzled. My puzzlement is, I guess, rooted in the simple definition of "morality" as I understand it. I suspect that you and I are simply talking about different things.
Another way of putting my puzzlement, I think, is like this.
If Marxists want to go back to being "non-(anti-?)humanists" and say that humans are, fundamentally, no different from things like nitrogen molecules, then that's interesting. But what is still not clear is how exactly they can say this and then turn around and make prescriptions about the way the wage relationship should be arranged. In what way can they say that it "ought" to be a certain way, given that their talk about it is now removed from the realm of "morality?"
If the oxygen molecules in the room are arranged in a certain way, we can say that it is "proper" in the sense that it is conducive to some other end--like breathing. But there is nothing "moral" about the oxygen molecules being in that particular arrangement, and thus there is nothing "wrong" or "unjust" about them being in that arrangement. Or so it seems to me.
So, how are these Marxists going to say that the wage relationship needs to be such-and-such in order to be "proper" or "just", without putting their statement in the same category as someone who says "That cat should stop torturing that mouse" or "There should be fewer chlorine molecules in this pool." At best, it seems that all they are saying is that, if we care about so-and-so, then the wage relationahip needs to be such-and-such. But what is the "so-and-so", and why are the rest of us obligated or rationally compelled to accept it?
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