How Stories Control Our Economic Reality
Economy | Information | History | Online | Facts | World | Global | Money
HELP ME MAKE MORE VIDEOS: http://www.patreon.com/nerdwriter TUMBLR: http://thenerdwriter.tumblr.com TWITTER: https://twitter.com/TheeNerdwriter Email me here: thenerdwriter@gmail.com SOURCES AND FURTHER READING Nick Hanauer, "A report that analyzed every minimum-wage hike since 1938 should put a bunch of nonsense ideas to rest" (via Business Insider) 2016 http://www.businessinsider.com/minimum-wage-effect-on-jobs-2016-5 Drew Desilver, "5 Facts About The Minimum Wage" (via Pew Research Center) http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/23/5-facts-about-the-minimum-wage/ Molly Ball, "A Plutocrat's Case for Raising the Minimum Wage" (via The Atlantic) Feb 2016 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/a-plutocrats-case-for-raising-the-minimum-wage/419130/ David Johnson, "See the Minimum Wage in All 50 States" (via TIME) 2016 http://time.com/4274938/minimum-wage-state-map/ CBO, "The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2013" https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/114th-congress-2015-2016/reports/51361-HouseholdIncomeFedTaxes_OneCol.pdf Blanca Torres, "A year in, ‘the sky is not falling’ from Seattle’s minimum-wage hike" (via The Seattle Times) 2016 http://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/a-year-in-the-sky-is-not-falling-from-seattles-minimum-wage-hike/ Caroline Fairchild, "Minimum Wage Would Be $21.72 If It Kept Pace With Increases In Productivity: Study" (via The Huffington Post) 2013 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/13/minimum-wage-productivity_n_2680639.html Lawrence Mishel, "The Wedges Between Productivity and Median Compensation Growth" (via the Economic Policy Institute) 2012 http://www.epi.org/publication/ib330-productivity-vs-compensation/ Matthew Yglesias, "The most important chart about the American economy you'll see this year" (via Vox) 2014 http://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/9/25/6843509/income-distribution-recoveries-pavlina-tcherneva
Comments
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We'll done. Thank you for taking the time to make this.
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automation weeds out the bottom-feeders- the unskilled and unwilling to change. if you really wish to help, try voting in a different educational system and a system of incentives that is less skewed. people need to be taught how to learn, adapt, and acquire new skills instead of being pandered to. envy is a disease that will use politics to kill the global society. if you have nothing to offer, and want everything in return, you are the greedy one! nobody owes you shit.
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why does everyone get their panties in a twist about income inequality? if you think that someone with mediocre to nonexising skills deserves a share proportional to someone with fantastic knowledge, skill, intelligence, insight and/or positon, you are negating the very mechanism that keeps us alive and well as a species. as long as there is evidence of substantial social mobility (which there is), we are more than fine. some people ae just superior to others, and this system rewards it. if anything, it should do more of the same.
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increasing the minimum wage gives a short term boon but why would a business especially a small one every hire someone who has never worked before for $15 and hour your basically taking away the only competitive advantage unskilled workers have so if they cant get a job they will never get the skills they need. this is the reason so many young people are complaining that they cant get a job your making the market too competitive for those wanting to start in the job market while taking away the only way they can compete. look at Sweden, Denmark and Norway, the so called socialist countries none of them have minimum wages and yet the average wage is still high. this guy also talk about the middle class the minimum wage doesn't affect the middle class after all they wouldn't be the middle class if they where earning at minimum wage, i dont really know why he brought it up.
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What a video
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Very interesting
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Hello,
I had a couple comments about your video. Firstly I would point out that most capital gains tax, that is, taxes on profits from a stock, should not be highly taxes because it deincentivizes any investment in capital markets. Secondly your arguments about stories about economic realities have turned empirical data into normative arguments. I do not disagree with your position on minimum wage but min wage should not be raised to 15 dollars everywhere except for the rich states mainly because a 15 dollar job in Oklahoma is different than a Seattle job with the same money mainly because the value of 15 dollars is vastly different on oak is different than the value in Seattle. Maybe that's a good thing but one could argue it hurts the mom and pop shop in oak whereas one does not see a lot of mom and pop in Seattle. Now one could argue a federal min wage that keeps one above the poverty line and even argue a wage increase annually based on productivity that combats worker alienation and one could also argue for greater taxes on the very very rich but there's a reason these theories are the way they are. I don't agree with all of them but a number of them are axioms of economics and normative arguments shouldnt be applied to them.
thanks. -
I find it interesting that nerdwriter spends the first half of the video explaining that the economy is this, ghastly, nebulous force, that the rich and educated rig to abuse the poor, and that economic theory's are just stories that the rich smart people lie us into believing, but then spends the second half of of the video explaining how his economic theory would fix all (or most) of the economy's problems. Beyond that the economy isn't the afore mentioned ghastly, nebulous force that he makes it out to be. Now it may very well be intangible but that doesn't mean its non-existent. This is why socialist super states like the Soviet Union collapsed, This is why countries like Greece run out of money and go bankrupt, while capitalist powerhouses like America rule the world, because it doesn't matter how wealthy the one percent are, or by what margin they are more wealthy, there is and always will be a way to make the economy (an objective measure of reality) rise and a way to make the economy fall, it's objective reality folks. So if you want to have an honest discussion about what those ways are, I'm willing to have that discussion. But don't frame the argument with "there's no objective way to make the economy rise or fall, it's just all stories" and then slip in "oh yeah by the way my way of making the economy rise is the only objective truth and if you believe otherwise you're just a victim of the eveel rich people who want to put you back in chains".
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The problem with picking this particular issue is that you're not really going to help out the middle class and what you're really doing is creating an inherently regressive method to try and elevate people. Rich people - the one whose money you're trying to get to and spread out a little bit more - are not massive consumers of minimum wage services. People who work minimum wage jobs are generally providing service to other people on the lower side of the economic spectrum, which inherently limits the amount of gain that you could hope to achieve. Go out and find an actual economic argument that establishes that a minimum wage is a good thing. You won't find it. You'll find some economists making political arguments about why having a minimum wage can be good to leverage other things, but there's no good economic reason to have it. You're trying to solve a problem (poor people not having enough money) in the most backwards, silly way possible - by putting price controls in place, which never, ever, ever, ever, EVER makes a market more efficient or effective.
The better policy is pretty damn simple - raise taxes on the wealthy and establish a standard minimum income. That, at least, is addressing the actual goal you want to achieve, and doing so in a non-regressive way, since the money that funds the event is quite specifically coming from the rich with an impact proportional to the amount of total economic wealth they hold, as opposed to making hamburger joints and superstores more expensive and sucking a large chunk of that money out of the very people you're trying to help. You're probably still going to find out that your wildest dreams won't be achieved (the thing about the poverty line is that it's always going to move to leave some significant chunk of people below it - that's just how prices and markets work), but you'd be acting directly on the problem and not trying to build some weird Rube Goldberg machine of bad economics.
One thing, though - it is severely and dramatically inappropriate to suggest that doing pretty much anything to the minimum wage will have any effect whatsoever on the middle class. They aren't the beneficiaries or the targets of the minimum wage. At most, you could argue that it will allow more people a reasonable shot at graduating into it, but so far as actually benefiting the middle class and expanding the wealth therein, it's a complete non-event. Leaving that line in this essay really does injure your credibility - if I were you, I'd reword or remove it entirely, since it's not strictly germane to your point anyway and only serves to make you sound like you don't know what you're talking about. -
If experiment's work out, we should raise the minimum wage, but be careful of how small businesses react vs big business
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This isn't really true. You ignore laws of supply and demand, which is the guiding law in any economic theory. While raising the minimum wage isn't a doomsday inflicting decision, it's just incorrect to say that the cost of living will not go up as a result of it. Both side of the argument has some truth, and both sides of the argument has a lot of bull shit as well. But both sides also ignore the problem, which is the top 1% IN PART. But more importantly than them, is the government regulations who put the top 1% in the top 1% in the first place. The Government is just as wicked and corrupt and that's the problem that should be addressed first.
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This is wrong is so many levels. If you're going to speak about economics, please don't regurgitate clichés.
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This reminds me of the writing by Philosopher Bertrand Russell "In praise of Idleness". What can we do to change this situation and save ourselves from a virtual serfdom?
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Your argument is well constructed but it relies on the idea that telling someone how low they can pay is morally good, which I think it isn't. Like it or not freedom means not commanding the market to selfishly have the money by force. Your asking for a government of Robin Hoods: thieves with misguided morals.
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I generally like your videos but this was really weak, if your gonna talk about something political then your gonna need facts to back up your ideas, real world example would be good. This was just basically pure conjecture, you didn't address opposing arguments, and give counter arguments, all you did was say "economics is like a story" no. economics is a science, often poltiicized ,but a science, and science relies on hard facts and data. Maybe instead you could've discussed economic thinkers who would be opposed to minimum wage and those that support it, you can do a comparison and make an argument for one side. This kind of analysis that relies solely on emotion can work when reviewing films but it doesn't work when your analyzing a science that people go to university. fancy editing doesn't cut it here.
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As an entrepreneur, respecting the minimum wage was a difficult challenge; in the end the numbers just couldn't cut it & I had to close up shop. At first I thought, perhaps there was no demand; then the spark hit me, there was demand, but my target market, 20s-30s in BPO's & call-centers, just didn't have enough purchasing power. They wanted it but just couldn't afford it; higher priorities like bills & schooling (of siblings) come first. Thus, increasing the minimum wage definitely wouldve solved our problem before. It's not that we couldn't afford our staff; it's just that there's simply not enough customer inflow. If only my customers had bigger wages/salaries, I think I wouldve come around. Sadly, this isn't the case.
(Fyi, my business was a house cafe that served also as a platform for local songwriters to share their original works during the weekends.) -
Awesome vids man. I rarely do this but right now a 4minute ad is running and I wont even skip it. Tiny tiny thing but you deserve it bro. ;)
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Can you do a video about the movie Bern After Reading how they develop good Tension over nothing how the whole movie is an awesome Red Herring
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Can you express those thoughts only in that cautious way in the U.S.? I mean, it's important to be said, but it could be said more clearly: Warren Buffet: "There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning." in New York Times, 26. November 2006. I don't think, this was a joke. Do you feel the war? No? But it is here.
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The challenge is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.
Hillary Clinton
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