The question is rather: What is a meaningful thing for an affected govt to invest in, so that people can help themselves?

It sounded like the minimum wage was the fix for some specific problem we had articulated.

@Undead Mockingbird I'm as doubtful of the minimum wage as the next guy, really. The question where you reentered my field of attention was aimed at alternatives to the minimum wage, remember?

> at alternatives to the minimum wage, remember?

Yes, but if we both agree it's not needed, why search for an alternative?

What do you replace a tumor with?

Do we want people being unable to make ends meet?

People are less able to make ends meet with no job at all.

It simply raises the bar for what an employer has to pay and if they had not hired you at that wage before, it means that afterwards the price for your labor is overstated, which means they are not going to hire you after.

I approve of that, mostly. If they have jobs and dig themselves into payday loans, maybe no job would actually save them keeping to try unsuccessfully.

The people who do get hired at the increased minimum wage after come at the expense at the total demand for labor.

> maybe no job would actually save them

No, I am saying that they are not going to have a job if the minimum wage prevents them from being hired.

That is a fact up to the point where markets are actually np-complete themselves, therefore not self-regulating in certain short time frames.

I am not sure if this can be related to NP-completeness.

howso?

I am not aware that there is a precise calculation of prices happening in markets to that degree.

but that means that it's impossible to predict the prices up to a sufficient precision, and what exactly the reasons are that made them so.

Which is why every attempt to design an economic system that relies on their prediction has failed.

There are many heuristic processes occurring that are vastly distributed.

What determines a good price in one industry might be completely different from the pricing mechanisms in another.

And you are right to point out that there is some lag inherent in the system.

That lag, that degree of misstatement of the price, is where people speculating on price shifts make money or lose money.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2284 😃

I knew I've seen it pop up somewhere 🙂

There are many NP-complete problems in nature.

That does not mean that there aren't many processes that provide good approximations thereof.

> I knew I've seen it pop up somewhere 🙂

Yes, which is why you shoehorned it in.

random digression: I hate the smiley being the laughing one, colon-closeparen shouldn't be equal to colon-D

People don't usually bring up classes of algorithmic complexity in the context of market economies.

so, the question on whether and how a govt should act about people ending up on the wrong side of the fence of life seems still unanswered at this point.

The how not I can propose.

One way not to do it is to mess with the market forces, which is what the minimum wage does.

It is like heating a thermometer to make it warmer outside.

Likely true, yes.

Neither do you gain an increase in employment numbers.

Black unemployment, for example, has been lower before introduction of the minimum wage in the US than after.

If you want to hand people money, at least do that, but do not misstate the value of a good or service. That is the function of the pricing mechanism.

It is simply a measure what a good or service is worth in relation to another and deluding yourself to it does not mean that the demand for coal miners (or journalists) has suddenly increased.

The reason why a coal miner might get paid half as much as some other job X is because there is half as much demand for coal miners at that price point.

The question what should be done with people who cannot make ends meet doesn't really enter into it.

If you artificially raise their wage, then you might as well just hand them the difference between what they would have been paid and what you think they ought to be paid. At least that way the market correctly reflects the price of coal miners.

But all you are doing is handing them welfare through the government then, so you are achieving the same thing with more side effects and extra steps.