Thanks for the small reminder!

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Agree in principle to the concept of a minimum income, would term it a basic income across the board for all citizens. The problem is the social, economic imbalances, poverty, real or relative, standards of living ,quality of life, quality of our environment/s etc etc. We even try to ‘identify’,’measure’,’quantify’ the ‘system’ with defunct theory and erroneous terminology,skewed data etc etc. The implementation of a living wage where applicable under our currently flawed system will assist in transcending the current system to a fairer and more harmonious one, ultimately with more equitable outcomes in all spheres. Most of our current and former economic theory is actually, by and large defunct, relative to a better future. Anything from socialism, capitalism, neo liberal economics, freemarket idealogy etc,etc is an anathema to a future system.

Hey, thanks for your comment.

There are a number of areas where I disagree – I think I can split them along more objective and subjective lines of difference.

Starting on the more objective side, these things are not “easily identifiable”. We need an understanding of the trade-offs involved, and principles of fairness, before we can identify any targeting of individual groups – this is hard, and important, work. Calling something easy, or obvious (which is the more common one I hear), demeans the process of us trying to figure out what is going on and asking society what it believes is fair.

The next one is the use of inequality when discussing relative poverty. They are very different:

http://www.tvhe.co.nz/2014/01/06/absolute-minimums-and-relative-poverty/

If we want to do something about poverty, let us talk about poverty.

On the more subjective side, I dislike the inference that we can pick these specific workers as “deserving” in some way. There are two reasons why this doesn’t make sense to me:

1) It terms those who are unable to get work, often the most vulnerable, as less deserving
2) It mixes up the idea of a fair minimum standard of living in society with the price of labour – leading to people “misallocating” the education they get, where they decide to work, and their future opportunities.

My preference, as I say in the post, is the introduction of a minimum income with the removal of a minimum wage.

Your concern is that firms owners are taking advantage of people without the ability to demand a higher wage, leaving them in a position of poverty. If we give individuals an outside option, so they can decide to change their skills or leave the labour force entirely, we give them market power – if the value of the jobs you’ve identified is higher, and firms are just “extracting rent”, this will also lead to a situation with relatively high wages for this group!

Unless we truly identify “the problem”, “the trade-off”, and “our view of fairness” we can’t say much about policy. And we certainly cannot say “just increase these wages and it will fix ‘the system'” without a description of what the system is, and what this all means.

A combination of high EMTRs, on job risk, and job location (where households would need to severe social capital from their community – which is costly). They are all relevant factors but when it comes to discussing a “minimum standard” in a poverty sense it is a bit of a separate issue (outside of high EMTRs leading to a “poverty trap”, which is indicate of a lack of opportunity).

Fully agree that these questions are much more complicated than they are often made out – as you imply jobs and people are heterogeneous!