> This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable.
This is a debatable goalpost. It seems more reasonable to me to assume that meeting basic shelter needs includes having a private room to oneself. The only reason to argue otherwise is to try to drive down the wage further, and is that at all necessary? Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago, and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades, while housing costs have soared in recent times. Yet this whole time, GDP continues to rise. It seems that our society can easily support much higher minimum wages (and this would likely have only a positive effect of stimulating the economy), but simply chooses not to.
Having a private room is not the same as living alone (having a private apartment/house).
I think it's reasonable for young people to have flatmates and share an apartment, for example.
If a person is working 40 hours a week to contribute to society, then they should be able to afford housing from that society. If a person on minimum wage needs to have a roommate to get by, then that means that their 40 hours a week is not enough to afford their own shelter. Without that roommate, the person goes without a home despite having done their time for society. This is not reasonable.
If it is reasonable for a young person to have flatmates, then that should be because they are a student or an artist and are working only part-time while devoting the rest of their time to their studies or their art.
But a person working full-time? Who may be a single mother or father with a child to support? They should be able to afford a place to live, without roommates.
I would only add that young people or anyone should be able to afford to live alone as you say OR opt to live with roommates to share expenses and save and build wealth. It shouldn't be necessary for anyone working 40 hours a week to pool their resources with other people in similar situations simply to survive.
A minimum wage should not necessarily afford you a median home, that's why it's called a minimum. But for a functional developed nation I argue it should afford you a private room or a very small apartment. Ideally the cost between the two wouldn't be that different, but due to decades of building restrictions the latter does not really exist. This isn't true in Japan for example, where you can find arbitrarily small apartments at correspondingly low prices.
A living wage is for living indefinitely, not just surviving. That should afford more comforts like a reasonable amount of space, a car if needed, and saving for retirement or emergencies.
Is it reasonable for two people who are dating to have to keep their shared apartment when they break up? What should happen if a roommate becomes flaky or moves out?
These are all real situations that make me think that pinning "living wage" to a level where you have to have roommates is not a good goal. You're basically asking people to survive by accepting unstable living conditions and potentially taking strangers into their homes, which isn't exactly "having your needs met."
Its reasonable, but as we've advanced humanity in so many other fields (medical, technical, agricultural) why shouldn't the base standard of living also be increasing.
The base standard of living has increased throughout pretty much all of humanity over the past 50 years, and through huge parts of humanity over even 20 years.
Theres also lots more people, and as more people consume more resources it does not follow that better technology in some field will translate to increased every aspect of life.
I agree with the sentiment, but the premise of capitalism is that those advances also become cheaper due to market efficiencies. In other words, people should be able to have a higher quality of life for relatively lower cost. If/where that actually occurs is a whole different discussion.
A living wage shouldn't be based upon what wages a student could be comfortably living on for a couple years before they get their $500k/yr new grad quant job. It should be based upon what people could live on comfortably indefinitely.
It's not "student wage". It's not "struggling young person" wage. It's "living" wage. It's for living - at any age.
Does this then imply some jobs are not intended to supply a living wage?
Eg does that quants internship get a lower pay because they are expected to graduate beyond it? If so, how do we define what jobs are stepping stones and which are long-term careers?
I think all full time jobs should at a minimum pay a true living wage where one can live comfortably, save for emergencies, etc. If the job cannot pay that then it shouldn't exist.
There are many ways to accomplish this beyond simply raising wages. Better government programs, lower the cost of housing/medical/transportation/food/etc. (these are surprisingly simple but many vested interests don't want this to happen), better retirement programs, etc. etc. etc. You see more of this in more socially democratic countries.
I’m not against that idea but there are some knock-on effects we should be careful of. For example, it will make it hard for younger people to get a job. If I have to pay a teenager the same as someone with a decade or more of work experience, that teenager probably won’t get a job.
With a lot of these discussions, we need to be careful about the seductively simple solutions.
If the minimum was the actual minimum, then why would the person with a decade of experience ever work for it?
The issue of "which jobs should exist" should be left to the market only. If typical low-end jobs throughout the country pay wages that do not guarantee a minimum living income, the government should simply make up the difference for everyone in a fair way (subject to clawback rates as earned income increases, in order to keep the overall arrangement viable).
(Lowering the cost of essential goods and services is also something that can be done by leveraging the open market. It doesn't take yet another wasteful government program, which is the typical approach in socialist and social-democrat countries.)
Any adult with a full-time job should be able to afford a studio or small apartment. Probably making concessions on the location depending on where they want to live. It's not a matter of being young or not
In the US, this is trivial to do. Theres plenty of states where unskilled entry lever wages easily allows this life, for most of the locations, with the exception of extremely high cost city centers.
Pick IL for example. Min wage $15, so $30k a year income fulltime. Most every adult that’s worked even a little should be able to earn decently more than min, which is for completely unskilled, new workers. Median il wage is 66k.
Even at $30k, the rough 30% rule on housing is $750/mo. At 66k it’s over $1500/mo.
Dig through smaller cities, and you’ll find apartments to rent in either end of this range. This works in any state.
Part of the issue is those smaller cities don’t offer a large supply of job opportunities. So people are often not able to pick and choose their location.
This is an underappreciated argument for basic income/UBI: you need a lot less of it since its very existence enables recipients to move to lower cost of living locations.
(Which in turn opens up opportunities for others to move in to the higher-cost places and boost their own productivity.)
Historically it's reasonable for anybody to have roommates. It's a modern scenario where having your own place is supposed to be the standard.
Historically housing was much smaller. And people lived with their families for a lot longer commonly. A lot less was also spent on domestic appliances (not just washer & dryers) and at-home entertainment (a lot less was spent on entertainment in general).
> Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago, and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades
50 years ago, in high cost of living areas, you could rent an SRO, but now they're either banned or practically banned because they're strongly disincentivized against. Combine this with not building enough new housing and you get a recipe for rent increases. Even if a minimum wage works as intended, it can only subsidize demand, which would do nothing when the bottleneck is the supply.
Yes the decline of the SRO (or boarding houses in general) is a terrible thing. That said, a living wage should probably afford more than that.
> Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago
I think others pointed this out but I don't think you can find any data to prove this because its not true.
I'm not a historian but I have seen a number of old movies and in those movies it was very common for the characters to be some poor schlub with a full time job at the factory living in some sort of group home/flophouse situation. Movies tend to reflect stories that resonate with the public at the time so I suspect that is because this was a common situation. I'd much prefer a single roommate in an apartment to a flophouse.
50 years ago was 1976. I would be surprised if large numbers of adults in 1976 in the US were living in the same room as other adults, unless they were romantically involved.
> It seems more reasonable to me to assume that meeting basic shelter needs includes having a private room to oneself
Why would that be reasonable? College students and young adults usually have roommates. I don't feel it's inhumane.
> The only reason to argue otherwise is to try to drive down the wage further
Another reason to argue otherwise is because you care about the truth. Even if you and I agree on the ends, if you use the means of exaggerating or stretching the truth to get there, you are never on my side. Saying that you need to not have roommates to live is an exaggeration.
> Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago
You will never find any data to support that because it isn't true. 50 years ago, flophouses were common. You would share a bedroom room with others, with shared kitchen and bathroom between multiple bedrooms. In college, I lived in a housing-coop network where we slept two to a room. 50 years ago, they slept 4 or 6 to a room in my exact house.
> and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades, while housing costs have soared in recent times
This is true. But there is a very natural reason why. Look at nearly any US city, and see how many more jobs there are in that city than there were 50 years ago. Then look at how many more homes there are in that city than there were 50 years ago. You will see that the number of new jobs far exceeds the number of new homes. The result is that wealthier people bid up the housing, while poor people are forced to live outside the city and commute. So why have no new houses been built? It can't be helped by the fact that building new homes is illegal. (e.g. buildings with 3 or more apartments are illegal in 70% of san francisco.)
Please direct your anger in the right direction! It's not generally the case that billionaires own thousands of homes, hoarding them while the poor live on the street. It's more often the case that the population has increased while the number of homes in places people want to live has stayed the same. The *only* solution is to increase the number of homes in places people want to live. Raising the minimum wage, taxing the rich, fighting corporations, adding rent control laws, none of that will help solve the root of the problem, the growth rate of homes in cities is far slower than the rate of people wanting to live there!