Obama to raise federal minimum wage via executive order

Nothing in the past 20 years altered the paradigm of continued technological improvement? Off the top of my head, what about the evolution of the internet? Email? Smartphones? Laptops?

 

You're right, about the appropriate logical fallacy.

 

He didn't say that there haven't been technological improvements, he just asserted that there have always been technological improvements and the last 20 years is no different from the previous 20 years.

 

If you take your point to an absurd level (quintupling the existing minimum wage overnight), then there would certainly be negative impacts. However, nobody has proposed such absurdity except you and the fine folks on Fox "News."

 

I don't want to put words in CW's mouth, but that "paradigm" could be Moore's Law. That law is the driver behind the evolution you speak of.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

 

It shows the weakness in your argument. That's why good arguments are properly detailed/quantified and poor ones are intentionally vague.

Additionally, you don't even need to quintuple it. Even doubling it proves my point. And since people have already been calling for a minimum wage increase to $15, you can't claim it's an "absurd level". An increase to $15/hr would be a 107% increase. The "data" you keep citing is based on a 19% increase. And you still think the results of the "data" would still hold true?

 

Doubling it "proves" your point? How, exactly? Do data exist which show that such an increase would cause companies to dramatically increase efforts to automate?

 

It demonstrates the flaws in your interpretation of the "data". In any case, I don't need to provide evidence proving my point in order to disprove yours. Your continued insistence on this just demonstrates a failure in your common sense and analytic ability.

I'm not going to go over my arguments again. You look back a few posts and reread the post where I thoroughly dismantled your interpretation of the "data". Honestly though, I think you know I'm right, but you've argued so long and so hard that you think you'll embarrass yourself by admitting it. I hope that's the case, b/c the alternative would be much sadder.

Good luck.

 

If 100% was the threshold that proved your point then prove it. You haven't proved it and you have no data to prove it. You have nothing. Literally, nothing. Since you like analogies so much, you're basically saying that if it rains it floods but there's a point at which it floods. Raining in and of itself doesn't cause flooding until it reaches a certain threshold. This is just basic stuff.

The internet changed everything just like any number of advancements before it. Not altogether different than electricity or the telephone or the steam engine or any number of other advancements before it. You don't get it, at all.

 

Just so I'm clear, do you agree with GladiatoRowdy's interpretation of the study performed 20 years ago and also think that its results will hold true today?

 

Thanks for agreeing with me. That's been one of my points this whole time. Based on GladiatoRowdy's interpretation of the "data", you can continually keep increasing minimum wage, and it'll never have any affect on unemployment.

 

How is any of that more world-changing than the invention of computers? Or the invention of electricity? Or the telephone? Or the wheel? There is nothing unique about the last 20 years when it comes to world-altering technology. It's a continuation of what has been going on for thousands of years.

 

I think you could certainly make the case that more "world-altering technology" has been put out in the last 20 years than in any other 20 year period of time. The world is changing faster and more drastically today than ever before. Go back just 200 or 300 years and technology was at a standstill compared to today. This technological boom started within the last 150 years when the industrial revolution really hit America and has been getting progressively accelerated every year since then

Around 60 billion dollars worth of commerce every quarter is done online today, that is a marketplace that effectively didn't exist 20 years ago (technically it has existed since the 70's....sort of, but it wasn't a significant option till the mid to late 90's). That's a pretty radical change and I doubt you can say that about the 20 years before that.

 

Sure - technology progresses faster and faster, but it's also from a higher base. The relative shift in technology is no different over time. The invention of the internet doesn't revolutionize the world more than the invention of electricity or the invention of the railroad or the invention of the wheel. It has a larger absolute impact simply due to the larger scale of the economy we have today, but in a relative sense, new technologies have been changing the world dramatically since forevver.

The last 20 years would cover about 1994-2014. The previous 20 years were 1974-1994. That was the period where the personal computer came about into everyone's lives. That changed the world just as much as the internet did, if not more. It revolutionized every sector of society. Before that, you had airlines revolutionizing transportation, creating the ability for the world to truly globalize. You had the TV (and phone before that), which changed the way the world communicated. You had the light bulb, which fundamentally changed the hours people even could work. On and on and on.

 

I'm saying there probably is a point at which raising the minimum wage will have an impact but there's no evidence provided to show at what wage that happens and that wage will vary depending on the country's economic dynamics. Of course the idea of the minimum wage is that it's the lowest acceptable wage and $35 in our society isn't a low wage. The minimum wage acts to reduce poverty while balancing the interest of business. If you raised the minimum wage to $10 in Vietnam there'd be an implosion of the economy because of the nature of their economy and cost of living but our country is far different in those respects so the effect is different. You're trying to make an absolutist argument but it doesn't work that way. The fact is the minimum wage has lagged far behind inflation and this has all served to favor big business over worker's rights.

 

You don't think electrification had the same impact?

 

Sure, but inventions like that were MUCH more spread out in those days. It was also during the period of time after the industrial revolution hit America and technology began speeding up.

There have always been amazing world altering inventions, but these days those kinds of things come out much more often and the pace of invention is ridiculous.

Think about it this way, the best computer a person could own in their home 20 years ago was almost certainly less powerful than my cell phone. The amount of automation available today would have been nearly unthinkable in 1994.

The sheer volume of technological advancements in the last 20 years is more than ever before. That's not to mean that there haven't been crazy jumps in technology before, just not nearly as many.

 

"Common sense" is a crutch used by people who have no evidence to prove their points.

You haven't "dismantled" anything, except in your own mind. I will continue to believe the story the data tells, I can only assume you are believing what you believe due to an ideology which causes you to ignore the facts. Have fun with that.

 

I love how you put data in quotation marks, as if it isn't actual data. Ignorance must be blissful for you.

 

Mail order did massive amounts of commerce for its time, then they introduced the telephone and phone orders skyrocketed. It is the same old market, just with a different front end. I don't dispute that technology has improved, it has, dramatically. However, there is no data that shows me that raising the minimum wage a moderate amount, as we have done a dozen times in the past, will cause companies to rush out to automate their businesses. The up front capital investment alone could pay those firms' minimum wage labor costs for quite some time.

Technology does, and will continue to, replace human labor in a great many fields. Manufacturing experienced it, and humans moved to maintaining and replacing the machines instead of directly working on the items being manufactured. Humans moved to programming and building those machines, and those jobs became higher pay jobs than the ones they replaced. Self service kiosks do not eliminate human workers for retail or fast food, they supplement human labor.

The point is that the people who believe that companies are going to rush out and invest in extremely expensive technologies to replace minimum wage labor are believing in something which the available evidence shows just isn't true. I'll continue to believe the evidence, rather than the musings of someone whose ideology causes them to ignore the facts.