The amount of work we do is such a complicated issue. Here are a few primer questions to get you started:
How do we quantify amount worked on the continuum of knowledge workers vs. physical laborers?
How much are working hours determined by personal preferences and desires (getting promoted, actually enjoy job, etc) vs. demands imposed by management/project requirements?
How much of time worked depends on the culture (of a company, of an industry, of a country)?
How to quantify work "in the office" vs. at home "answering a few emails? Some people like being really flexible. I personally prefer very binary working/not working lifestyle.
How much should we work throughout our careers (I prefer the idea that we can "turn down the volume" on work during child rearing years, but this is in direct opposition to typical career advancement timelines)?
Is there any reasonable definition of a "full work week"? What is it (40 hours?)
Should we have a minimum wage at all? Does a minimum wage increase productivity by artificially making labor more expensive?
All of these come after the question: “What is life worth?”
In both the US and in most Asian cultures work is worth more than life for the vast majority of the average lifespan. Working long hours is considered a badge of honor. In the US you work towards retirement—that’s the goal. That’s the endgame.
The fundamental question is: is that right? Is it worth it? Should we spend 40 years trying to make as money as we can so that we can then do nothing? The entire system, from top to bottom, is designed for this. And we give little breaks in between those 40 years so people don’t become depressed and kill themselves.
Whenever I hear about people justify why they work so hard it’s almost always because they want to become rich so they won’t have to work. It makes me think of that line from Office Space, “You don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my
cousin. He's broke and he don't do shit.“
We do what the media tells us because we never stop to think about what we actually want.
> In the US you work towards retirement—that’s the goal. That’s the endgame.
To further your point, I think this is more a utilitarian societal lie (like cheaters get caught etc.) than anything.
The age of retirement is set to get non efficient people out of the market, and as people get fitter and fitter it gets pushed ahead (right now it is raised (or is discussed to be?) 65 in a number of countries for instance).
Doing everything one dreams to do during retirement is lunacy, chances are this time is spent in an hospice or retirement isn’t even reached.
I've been working towards early retirement for a decade now, but I've never thought about this perspective before. Seeing it from a devil's advocate perspective, you could consider retirement a beautiful dream that people will tirelessly work towards until they are practically spent.
Retirement age as the age where most people are not net contributors any longer, is a very different perspective than the age where most people have enough savings to live for the rest of their lives without working. Of course, there is no sinister cabal that deliberately shapes society in this direction, but there are certainly powers that would want (and probably try to) to pull society in this direction.
If most people could choose how to spend their time (working productively, working on stuff that no one pays for, not working) by the age of 40, there would be a smaller supply of in-demand specialists. And that would mean higher salaries and less return on capital!
> Whenever I hear about people justify why they work so hard it’s almost always because they want to become rich so they won’t have to work
I think most people want to work so they can afford certain things - depending on their values either a really neat place to live, a bunch of experiences, etc, but then find that in order to work to afford those things you get caught up in a cycle. There's plenty of people who aren't optimizing for retired life in their 60s and 70s - but at the same time recognize that after they actually CAN'T work any more they need to take some care of themselves.
We tend to talk about work and jobs as if they're always mind-numbing drudgery - I think that's what people buy into, especially by having families and needing to be a breadwinner. You don't need to have a family. You don't need a big house. But for a lot of people, they want a family, and they want a big house. I wish there were more society did to set up alternate lifestyles, but it is sort of the engine that keeps society going.
Counter point to the question "what is life worth?", which I think is a bit of sophistry in that it complects the discussion to tangential subjects like the price you would pay to save a life.
I would rather ask "what is the value of not working?" To me, an American and a male, work is the number one way I choose to be valuable. If I chose not to work, or to work less, I would unquestionably provide less value to my society and my loved ones. I like being valuable. I like doing, hard frustrating things so my loved ones don't have to. I like working, even if (and because) I fucking hate it sometimes. Therefore, I love that I work. It is the most valuable thing I do.
To me, an American and a male, work is the number one way I choose to be valuable. If I chose not to work, or to work less, I would unquestionably provide less value to my society and my loved ones.
Don't sell yourself short. Your loved ones love you too - for who you are, not for the money you bring in.
Quality time spent with your loved ones should be waaaay higher up the valuable list. Maybe ask them: If I earned 30% less, but had an extra day of time off per week with you guys, would you day that was worth it?
Of course, there's basic provision - providing enough that off time can be quality time. Providing enough that schooling can be decent... But your value is way greater than your income.
Yeah, that's just millennial nonsense. I spend time with my family AND I work. If I chose not to work anymore, my wife would leave me and my kids would remember me as a valueless deadbeat. And they'd be right. Unless I had a reason of course, like disability. Which I don't.
This also assumes I'd want to spend 30% more of my work time with my family. I wouldn't. It would drive me crazy. I can't handle that much emotional fuckwittery in a week. The workplace is nice because feelings don't really matter. It's refreshing.
You need to consider what work and, more generally, what society is. Society is fundamentally a group of people working together to satisfy each others needs and wants. Work, or productivity, is making progress towards this goal and is something we tend to reward with money, though not always.
I think a fair analogy for society's productivity is a grocery store. Imagine there was a grocery store, the only grocery store in existence that also happened to be the only way to get food. Everybody would come in and take whatever they needed, but you didn't necessarily have to pay. If only some people don't pay this isn't that big a deal - the grocery store as a whole eats the losses but continues working more or less fine. And for those that simply cannot pay at all, well - there's not really any other option. But then there are those that could pay, but for whatever reason, do not. If enough people did this - the store would eventually go out of business as it would not be making enough to sustain itself. If everybody just did as they want, society would collapse.
More generally here money is an indicator of how much you've contributed to society. People look at disbelief at how much Jeff Bezos is worth, yet somehow think nothing of how much Amazon has completely revolutionized the world of purchasing things as well as brought prices to lower than ever levels. The reason he's worth as much as he is is because he has contributed immensely to society.
Of course the system isn't ideal and some people manage to make enormous amounts of money while contributing next to nothing to society - people who deal with finance are the prototypical example here. And similarly there are also people that contribute immensely to society, yet never see much in the way of reward from it. Herman Melville is now seen as one of the more important individuals in our literary history, yet received no recognition during his life and died without his work ever really being recognized, let alone rewarded.
Yet for all of its flaws, our system does generally do a good job of creating a system where people who contribute to society are rewarded which creates a strong incentive system to contribute to society, even if only to make yourself rich in the process.
If Jeff Bezos' contribution to society is so immense that he deserves all the billions he has amassed, what about the scientists and mathematicians of the world who died in poverty, but on whose shoulders the modern world is built upon?
"Poverty" is a strong word. I could have used a different word.
What I really wanted to convey is that Gutenberg, Marie Curie, Enrico Fermi, Tesla, Gauss and plenty others deserved to be billionaires if Bezos deserves his billions.
- Tesla was a multi millionaire during his life who decided to risk, and lose, his wealth pursuing ideas that did not work out.
- Gutenberg was granted royal title along with all the privileges of such including an endless stipend and industrial volumes of grain and wine during the 15th century. Works from his press sold, during his life, for what was years of salary per copy. He was almost certainly a millionaire, though my point was primarily related to capitalist societies. The 15th century was still more feudal come mercantalistic.
- Curie won the nobel prize which entailed a prize of hundreds of thousands of dollars and a solid gold medal - almost certainly totaling in the millions of dollars as well.
And so on. And in many ways a billionaire of today is what a millionaire of times past was. I don't mean because of inflation but in terms of relative scarcity and effective 'power.' Ramanujan is the closest to a reasonable example, but there are significant extenuating circumstances there. He was religious to the point of bordering on insanity, grew up in colonial India, and had no interest in anything other than the private pursuit of his mostly abstract mathematical works. Whatever he may have 'deserved', he certainly was able to live his life as he wanted.
The big point here though is that this is not a coincidence. When people contribute to society, they tend to be rewarded. There are certainly some exceptions, but the great thing is that they are now a days, without doubt, the exceptions.
"The big point here though is that this is not a coincidence. When people contribute to society, they tend to be rewarded."
Getting rich and contributing to society are very different things. A footballer is almost always going to be richer than a professor in a top-class university. Drug barons are rich, but I doubt they are contributing to society.
Bankers are getting richer. They created the recession and profited from it. The hardworking common man paid for their success. I do not think it is as simple as you say it is.
As I said, "poverty" was the not the right word. Otherwise, the examples are just fine. Curie in particular. She refused to patent Radium. It is hard to comprehend in an era where even simple geometric figures, colors and fonts are being patented.
You're conflating contributing with some sort of subjective utilitarian type view. People want drugs, drug barons facilitate their availability - this is a substantial and highly productive contribution to society. To emphasize how arbitrary value systems can be, you might consider an opera singer to be contributing to society. But they're providing the exact same product to society that a footballer does - entertainment.
But back on the scientists, poverty was not just the wrong word - it was the wrong idea. Most of the people you listed lived lives as pleasant as they desired and could have retired in complete comfort at various points in their career. Of course that would not make these sort of people happy. Instead they mostly lived normal lives (in terms of standard), and put their money back into furthering their research and in many ways right back into society.
The same is true, though in a different way, for Bezos. He will likely never, in his entire life, spend more than a tiny fraction of a percent of his wealth on himself and his family. The vast majority of it will end up going back to society working to do his part to try to bring humanity into the space age. This isn't to say he lives modestly, but rather it exposes an interesting difference. When most people think of being a billionaire most don't think of what they could create, instead they think of what they could buy. Yet the former mindset creates wealth and the latter destroys it.
When Bezos was in his teens he worked one summer at a McDonalds. He hated it. The next summer decided to found the 'Dream Institute' which was a 10 day camp for younger kids. He only got 6 signups, but at $600 a child he probably earned vastly more than he did at McDonalds and provided a great service to society at the same time. No doubt his idea was heavily incentivized by money and that's the beautiful thing about our system. When you create things, you tend to be rewarded. And on that note, I'm going to dodge the banker issue. I do agree with you there and while productivity tends to be rewarded, it's not an exclusive relationship. E.g. - those that are nonproductive can also find substantial reward at times. However, I think the issue with banks is far more complex than 'they create [and profit from] recessions so they're bad' or 'they lend money to create businesses so they're good'.
I'm not entirely certain what you're trying to suggest, but there is very little in society that it is completely automated. The vast majority of systems today require an immense amount of effort and management just to maintain, let alone expand, themselves. Those that do not, invariably rely extensively on systems that do.
Just look at your desk right now and think about all of the things on it and the path that they took to get from raw materials to finally ending up shaped to what's in front of you. Think about this site, and these messages we're exchanging and how many thousands of different components, products, and pieces that are required to build and then maintain the capacity that just let's us post some text to one another.
Think about all the maintenance you have to do in a year just to keep your house from turning into a dilapidated pigsty. Now imagine that on a global scale with immensely complicated and interdependent infrastructure.
My father in law worked nights and weekends his whole life with big plans for what to do after retirement. Then he passed away unexpectedly at 57. My father on the other hand just didn’t retire, because he loves working too much, but he goes on a lot of vacations.
> The fundamental question is: is that right? Is it worth it? Should we spend 40 years trying to make as money as we can so that we can then do nothing?
Consider that 100-200 years ago, you had to work your entire life just to stay alive. There was no retirement.
The problem with being broke and lazy is that the quality of life totally sucks and that a single health emergency probably means you are going to die. Food for thought.
Also, it sucks but I can tell you firsthand that having a million dollars isn't that helpful. I don't worry about bills, but I can't really retire young. Well, I could, but I would never be able to travel, pay for my kids' college, or have any unexpected expenses for the rest of my life, which would totally suck.
I don’t see how wealth should effect an individuals ability to survive a medical emergency. In the US they really try and brainswash people with nonsense like this
"Should we have a minimum wage at all? Does a minimum wage increase productivity by artificially making labor more expensive?"
The goal of minimum wage is not to increase productivity, but provide a "safety net" for people at the bottom of the pyramid salary-wise.
Public education and healthcare also artificially reduce the price of these services, but the goal again is to provide a safety net to all those that otherwise would not be able to afford them.
The goal of a minimum wage is difficult to pin down, because laws are written by large groups of people with potentially differing motivations.
That being said, I hope it isn't about a safety net. What a minimum wage really does is outlaw jobs that provide less value than the minimum wage (eg, if I have cleaning work that requires 1hr of labour and generates value of $10, it theoretically will not happen under a minimum wage regime of $11/hr).
With this frame, there does seem to be much debate about the interaction between the market price for labour and the value-add of different work. People want to make decisions here and I suspect they don't consider have all the facts. Politics as usual :].
"The goal of a minimum wage is difficult to pin down"
In the most general sense it's straightforward.
Your salary is a function of your economic power vis-a-vis your employer - and nothing else. That power is usually derived as a function of the necessity (i.e. value creation) and scarcity of your skills, and possibly some other non-market forces.
Skilled workers have some modicum of leverage and can get a decent salary. Or have powerful guilds (like doctors).
'Capital class' will use their status as major asset holders, and non-market things like class, relationships, political patronage, lobbying, direct control of political systems etc. to manage their careers.
But unskilled workers have a problem. Basically, if there was no minimum wage (or other social intervention), workers would be paid the absolute minimum necessary to survive, and economies to support those very low levels would develop (i.e. 'Dollar Store' would be the '25 cent store) and there'd be favela like living conditions just as they already exist in advanced economies like Hong Kong and almost advanced economies like Brazil. (Obviously, if there is 'welfare' than the amount of welfare comp. would set the floor on this, i.e. 'work for the government and do nothing' would be the 'lowest alternative' to paid work.)
But especially without welfare, or non-market interventions in general ... that floor would be very, very low. Just take a trip outside of the 'rich world', it's easy to find workers working for 'a bowl of rice a day' whilst owners make considerably more, and by that I mean, there are definitely surpluses in the system to allow for higher salaries, but pure market power doesn't provide any impetus at all for employers to provide it.
So - 'minimum wage' is a non-market intervention, much like a 'union without membership' to establish a kind of meta collective bargaining.
Non market interventions are basically essential and they exist in one way or another in all advanced nations (either social services, welfare, min. wage. etc..). Should note that some argue that social intervention is correlated but not causal to wealth creation, but I disagree with this ... but that's for another discussion.
I think what you're saying is that there are jobs that are worth e.g. $25/hour but they only pay e.g. $5/hour because there are many people willing to do them for that price.
But that only happens when there is fairly high unemployment. Otherwise there will be an employer with a job worth $25/hour who can't find an employee for $5/hour and will offer $6/hour because $19 in net yields is better than none. Then the original employer will have to offer $7 because they don't want to lose their productive capacity either, and so on until the wage rises enough that employers stop raising their wages even if it means they can't hire someone.
For unskilled workers that doesn't really happen, because as a segment they typically have a high unemployment rate. But in that case you have a problem: Some of the employers paying $5 have employees who are worth $25, but some of them are actually only worth $5. Raise the minimum wage and the first group gets a raise while the second group loses their jobs.
It's basically a tax on hiring low wage employees where the tax revenue goes to subsidize the employee's wages. Which like any tax may cause the work to fall below profitability and cease to exist. But is especially distorting because the burden falls exclusively on employers who hire low earning workers, which is a very narrow base that makes the "rate" quite high -- if they have to pay $12 instead of $4 it's effectively a 200% tax on the original wage.
The better solution is a UBI, which is very similar on the "give lower income people some extra money" side but gets funded from broad based taxes so the effective rate doesn't get out of control like that.
> That's not true though. Surplus value is produced all the time
What I mean is that the surplus isn't that large unless there is high unemployment. At low unemployment the marginal employer might pay a $24 wage producing $25 worth of value, not a $5 wage producing $25. In which case a) a low minimum wage does nothing because everybody already makes more, and b) you can't raise it to e.g. $30 or you're back to causing unemployment.
At high unemployment the employer producing $25 worth of value and the employer producing $5.25 worth of value can both pay $5. A higher minimum wage extracts more from the first but prices the second out of the market and causes their employees to lose their jobs. Which is quite silly when there are known alternatives that don't do that.
>the surplus isn't that large unless there is high unemployment. At low unemployment the marginal employer might pay a $24 wage producing $25 worth of value
That's still not true. You're confusing market price with value, and the more difficult to define term, worth.
What's the water you drink valued at? What's its price? There's a huge difference.
When you buy an expensive toy and spend more money on it than your water, it's not because it has more value than you living beyond 3 days, but it's because you are spending until your marginal value-add reaches equilibrium with marginal price. Same thing goes with jobs, which is just a business buying labor.
> What's the water you drink valued at? What's its price? There's a huge difference.
Because water is not particularly scarce. If it was scarce (more demand than supply), the equivalent of low unemployment, then its price would approach its value, i.e. be much higher.
Consider your example and then walk along the demand curve for water at your new supply curve (your scarcity scenario). There is still surplus value created.
The price already approaches its value, but only at the margin.
I'm just trying to explain why this argument about surplus value that I always hear in this context is not accurate.
> Consider your example and then walk along the demand curve for water at your new supply curve (your scarcity scenario). There is still surplus value created.
It's not that there is exactly none, it's that there is relatively less.
Suppose it takes a unit of water to live and there are a thousand people and a million units. Then the price is near zero and the surplus is huge -- the value of not dying is maybe a million dollars for the average person and more for people with access to more money, and they all get it for free.
Now suppose there are still a thousand people but only a hundred units of water. The price of a unit rises to five million dollars. At the [new] margin the surplus has gone from five million dollars to zero. The surplus for the person willing to pay six million has fallen from six million to one million etc. Everyone has lost five million in surplus and everyone with less than five million in original surplus has been priced out of the market.
Now suppose you want a "minimum price" for water. If the market price is just under five million dollars and you set the minimum price to five million even, you aren't pricing many people out of the market who weren't already. But you also aren't doing much to raise the price.
On the other hand, if the market price is zero (or, say, $5) and you set the minimum price at five million, you're causing widespread economic harm and pricing lots of people out of the market.
Just to point out, for the record, that Hong Kong has had a minimum wage in operation for 7 years, and while of course there are people living in crappy conditions at the bottom end of society, "favela like living conditions" is a pretty loaded term...
I think that 'favelas' are better than the conditions those at the bottom of the HK spectrum are living in [1] though I can only speak from journalism, only having viewed some of this from afar myself.
At least favelas have some space, some basic amenities however hacky, some community, sunshine - and mobility at least during the day there are vast spaces for people to access including some of the world's best beaches.
I think why people support a minimum wage is complicated and varied. Great Britain did not pass a minimum wage until 1998. I don't it was full of favela like living conditions throughout the 20th century.
"The goal of a minimum wage is difficult to pin down"
No, it isn't. The point of minimum wage is to outlaw jobs that cannot reasonably* feed people doing them. (*Subject to societal norms.)
Existence of such "jobs" is immoral, and is not very different from slavery. If the society cannot pay enough for some work, it simply shouldn't be a job (and should not be called such).
Despite what some economics schools try to make it, people are not apples. Apple doesn't care what is its market price. But a human almost always does. Survival of apple and human depends on their respective market price, but we as a society, I hope, value human survival more.
> The point of minimum wage is to outlaw jobs that cannot reasonably feed people doing them. (Subject to societal norms.)
OK, how does a society put a dollar figure on what a reasonable minimum wage should be, subject to societal norms, as you put it?
Keep in mind that what an unskilled worker 'll end up with at the end of any given week will be:
- agreed hourly rate x hours worked
If the unskilled worker ends up with pneumonia for that week, s/he essentially gets nothing since no hours were worked, so a minimum wage doesn't really insure against inability to work due to circumstances beyond one's control. That's a separate issue on its own.
> eg, if I have cleaning work that requires 1hr of labour and generates value of $10, it theoretically will not happen under a minimum wage regime of $11/hr
True, but I think the far more common scenario is this: I have cleaning work that generates value of $25/hr. Since the labor is unskilled and there is ample supply I can pay my workers the minimum wage and still find plenty of applicants. If there was no minimum wage I could pay them $5/hr and would still have plenty of applicants who would be even more impoverished.
I know a lot of people who make minimum wage (e.g. fast food jobs). When minimum wages rise (like when they got to 7.25 in the US), they don't get fired, they get a raise.
Just because minimum wages go up, doesn't mean humans are getting replaced. Instead, people often adjust their price limits (e.g. if cleaning was thought to generate $10, and then you don't clean for a while, you'll feel it warrants $11) and workers get better pay. The workers who do get fired due to financial constraints can now get a job elsewhere for more money.
I agree that there is a breaking point and that point does vary by company, but that breaking point (for the vast majority of things) happens to be far greater than zero
The big drop goes from June 2008 to October 2009 - which is indeed when we had not one but two increases to federal minimum wage.
However, look at all the other times when we had minimum wages increase - even when employment decreased, there was a pretty quick recovery. I'd argue that 2008 and 2009 minimum wage increases also happened during a recession, and that they were only part of the contribution to the large drop. Am I missing something?
"I know a lot of people who make minimum wage (e.g. fast food jobs). When minimum wages rise (like when they got to 7.25 in the US), they don't get fired, they get a raise."
This reminds me of someone who once argued that schools cannot reduce their costs when the number of students that need educating declines, because e.g. you can't stop renting a building just because there are 10% fewer occupants.
The motivator to give people raises is that you must meet minimum wage and that you still need those workers.
You don't need a larger building when there are less people in it, and you don't need more teachers when there are less students.
The argument you described is very different from mine. Mine is more like "schools say books are worth $10, but the prices of books raise to $11. Nevertheless, schools continue buying books"
If you don't believe this, there's data on the subject of minimum wage increases and percent employment. Look at this comment and my explanation below it:
"you don't need more teachers when there are less students"
You don't need fewer, do you? You can't fire a teacher because their class now has 27 people instead of 30 - those 27 people still have to be educated.
Do you think teachers are not essential to schools in the way that minimum wage employees are to restaurants? How does that work?
I'm not debating whether simplistic supply and demand analysis applies to the restaurant workers - clearly we have empirical results that say it does not.
I think that to understand something, you have to have data, but you also need to have a theory that is consistent and leads to further insight.
The theoretical argument would be that one teacher gets sacked and their 27 students get distributed amongst the other teachers bringing the student:teacher ratio back to 30:1.
Indeed, if this doesn't happen (which is fully possible) you get an interesting avenue of inquiry about market inefficiencies.
As an aside, I personally know of a case where a school needed to cut costs, and they did that by increasing the student:teacher ratio. That ratio is a metric that gets attention and consideration; at least in the Australian system it is not some arbitrary number.
Schools have fixed costs and marginal costs, just like everything else. Fixed costs consist of capital, like buildings. Marginal costs are like teaching time and books. Increasing your capital is usually relatively slow, e.g. buildings take a while to build and land takes a while to sell.
I would say society produces a social safety bet, corporations aren't completely separate.
They would like to be, but they are heavily supported, between society educating their workers, providing them basic health care, the emergency services, allowing their owners limited liability, the odd massive bail out, etc. Etc.
You're so confident in this opinion, it seems, that you won't attach it to a real account.
Many accomplished economists have publicly put their marks down both in favor of and opposition to minimum wage, so why not at least have the decency to own your own words and engage in a genuine debate?
Fundamentally you have to choose. Does society serve the market, or does the market serve society?
I realize that legislating that it not rain on Saturday is ridiculous. But it is certainly reasonable to influence the market. Save in the good times, spend in the bad. Ensure market participants are well equipped to make informed decisions, tax what you don’t want and subsidize what you do.
I (think I) understand that the market is incredibly powerful, and should be harnessed for the advancement of society, like oil. But it requires careful thought. It’s not as simple as a u shaped harness for a horse.
Of course, I’m just here for the points, so feel free to disregard, rather than having an actual conversation.
Okay, but tons of educated economists who's entire job is thinking about this stuff and peer reviewing other expert's work suggest that evidence doesn't back up the claim that minimum wage kills jobs at scale.
They cite as evidence a full time labor demand thst does not seem to contract in anything but a temporary manner when minimum wages are altered. We've got lots of examples of this all over the world.
But what do I know, I just listen to experts and read their papers and articles.
I see you're clearly not a fan of Card and Krueger.
But it's deeper than that. I'm happy to vote away minimum wage if (and it's a big if) there's something we replace it with that continues to serve society. what would you like? basic income? some complicated tax credit scheme?
I think minimum wage workers in general aren't good at negotiation, and as such they're paid below the actual floor of supply and demand. they're not capable of extracting fair compensation the value they provide. The other possible effect is humans aren't regular market objects. They make a little more money, their life is stable, they do better work. One example might be falling recidivism rates when compared to minimum wage. [1] crime is expensive. probably not as expensive as bumping minimum wage a dollar, but has the effect of making everyone a little safer.
But again. you enjoy your papers, i'm just here for the points.
> Minimum wage ensures the most marginal at risk employee becomes unemployed.
Working as intended. Now they can look for jobs that treat them like human beings, instead of being forced to work ten hours while a toddler is waiting at home just because they physically can.
It's the job of the government to keep these people from starving while they are unemployed.
Who is suggesting forcing people to do anything? You are so confident in what is the best interests of the poor. You are actually suggesting it is better for people to live in squalor feeding their children breadcrumbs than to work below minimum wage.
How about letting people decide for themselves what jobs they want to work and at what wages instead of coming in here mandating what "should" be done without any evidence that it will actually benefit the people you claim to care about?
You are the only person in this discussion interested in forcing and mandating people to do anything.
Your post commits a common oversight, the fact that coercion beyond agreements perfectly a rational Homo Economicus would make is a reality.
Picking a different job isnt an option when ALL of the jobs require that, the situation in SK really is that extreme, and thats why this law was brought in.
In your libertarian model society, poor people can choose for themselves... between working 10 hours a day to earn less than minimum wage, with no time left for learning new skills or searching for a better job, or not working and starving.
If you want give people the power to choose for themselves, they should be able to take a break. They should be able to take risks, without equating losing (or quitting) a job with financial doom. Otherwise the "choice" poor people have is only on paper, in the same way the old joke plays: in America people have the freedom to criticize the American government, and in Soviet Union people had the exact same freedom - to criticize the American government.
What you derisively call "breadcrumbs" is the foundation of modern welfare society, a recognition of its duty to each individual in the society.
(I'm not saying South Korea is a model society: clearly it isn't, when it has to tell business owners to stop overworking people. But we're moving in the right direction.)
Without min wage laws, the most disadvantaged person (low skill etc) has more OPTIONS to choose from. Wanna "take a break"? Sure, she can try choosing that. Wanna work below min wage? Sure, its their choice.
You are saying its "better for them" if we take options out of them. Now, how is that even possible..?
ps. I won't point you at anything, but try looking for historical reasons behind min wage imposition. They simply wanted to exterminate those "disadvantaged persons" (because most of them were blacks, and those who imposed this law were racists).
How do we quantify amount worked on the continuum of knowledge workers vs. physical laborers?
How much are working hours determined by personal preferences and desires (getting promoted, actually enjoy job, etc) vs. demands imposed by management/project requirements?
How much of time worked depends on the culture (of a company, of an industry, of a country)?
How to quantify work "in the office" vs. at home "answering a few emails? Some people like being really flexible. I personally prefer very binary working/not working lifestyle.
How much should we work throughout our careers (I prefer the idea that we can "turn down the volume" on work during child rearing years, but this is in direct opposition to typical career advancement timelines)?
Is there any reasonable definition of a "full work week"? What is it (40 hours?)
Should we have a minimum wage at all? Does a minimum wage increase productivity by artificially making labor more expensive?