Author: Adam (Southern California)

Here’s an article in the L.A. Times about day laborers in a Southern California suburb (near where my wife’s parents live) demanding $15.00/hour minimum wages. Pretty cool that they’re able to organize like that, although there is a relevant point made by a dissenting worker that the wages should be tied more to the type of work. Banding together for one minimum wage is strong; perhaps if they wanted to implement some sort of graduated scale for the type of work, they could draw up and approve a relatively simple wage schedule that still ensures good pay.

Slate has an article on the Michael Lerner religious left vs. the Jim Wallis religious left.

Geno’s has instituted an English-only cheesesteak-ordering policy.

As a mitigating factor, “Vento said his staff is glad to help non-native speakers order in English and has never turned someone away because of a language barrier.”

Does Geno’s have any bilingual workers? If both customer and worker speak the same language, doesn’t it slow down business to force them to translate their order into English?

The article only talks about language problems vis-a-vis immigrants; what about foreign tourists?

And what, exactly, is the point of this policy, anyway?

The idea that minimum wages lead to unemployment is so ingrained in a lot of people who think they’re intelligent about economics that it’s essentially taken on faith from first principles rather than backed up with research. This article in the Knoxville News Sentinel isn’t a controlled scientific study, but it does present some data that suggest that a higher minimum wage correlates with lower unemployment and a healthier economy in general. Continue reading “Minimum Wage”

Here’s an interesting article in the New Yorker about relative vs. absolute poverty. A number of people, self included, have pointed out that many poor people in America routinely own items once considered luxuries or are in some other ways better off than poor people, or even, to a certain extent, the middle class were a generation ago. The article takes this as a starting point but then makes the argument that relative poverty, not absolute poverty, is what actually counts, and that relative poverty has real effects. In other words, just because poor people are likely to own TVs now doesn’t mean that poverty isn’t still a bad thing. (Another way of looking at that would be to say that owning a TV or a dishwasher doesn’t really matter much when discussing “poverty” as a concept.)

The article doesn’t really go much into what sort of nutrition the poor in America are getting now vs. a generation ago, and it would be worth examining ways in which the poor might be worse off even in absolute terms than in years past.

And of course, we’re speaking of “the poor” as one large group that might include everyone from the absolutely destitute to those who might be better off but not exactly comfortable. Disaggregating the stories could make a more vivid picture of the situation.