A Higher Standard of Living, Not a Corporate Conspiracy
28th March 2013
Freeberg performs a public service.
Elizabeth Warren: ‘If we started in 1960 and we said that as productivity goes up, that is as workers are producing more, then the minimum wage is going to go up the same. And if that were the case then the minimum wage today would be about $22 an hour,” she said, speaking to Dr. Arindrajit Dube, a University of Massachusetts Amherst professor who has studied the economic impacts of minimum wage. “So my question is Mr. Dube, with a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, what happened to the other $14.75? It sure didn’t go to the worker.‘
Not so fast, Cherokee breath: ‘It did go to the worker – in the form of lower prices. Once upon a time, almost all banks charged fees; the increases in technology enabled them to give banking services away for free. Increases in production technology enables people to pay less for better cars. Everyone who is reading this is benefiting from the increases in computer technology that enable them to buy a WiFi enabled tablet for about a tenth of the price of a late 1980s Apple IIE. As Thomas Sowell repeatedly points out, more houses were connected to the internet at the end of the twentieth century than were connected to running water at the beginning. But if we were legally required to pay inflation-adjusted salaries to plumbers to install water pipes into our house, to account for the increased ease of doing so, it’s likely that fewer people would have running water, let alone internet.‘