Minimum Wage: Bad for Humans, Good for Robots 

It's almost like economics is a thing.

"Evil right wing think tank"😂😂 MIT

Next step : tax robots

"Evil right wing think tank MIT " I died

Not to mention companies respond with raising prices. So your $15 now buys less. More inflation is what we want?

They just raised the minimum wage where I live in Ontario. My grandma, who earns minimum wage, is now making less money, because her hours were cut. The boss was forthcoming that the reason for the cuts was indeed the minimum wage increase. She's been priced out of the market. She didn't mind working for the old minimum wage, but now she's not allowed to... It's so fucking unfair for the government to force her to sell her labor at these uncompetitive rates.

As an engineer (who happens to sell robots in NY), i support the $15/hr min wage.

That way I can use hate mail to heat my house. Hilarious!! Heaton is just as funny as Jon Oliver without the holier-than-thou pomposity.

You get a like for the westworld music. This is probably.the best series you guys are making right now. I dare you to make a video supporting free association.

RU-vid has recommended to me 3-4 of this channel's videos in the last few days. All of them have been good and the wit and wisdom in this one finally earned my subscription.

There is no such thing as a livable wage; there is only a wage that someone can afford to pay. You have to tailor your living around your wage, not have government tailor your wage around your living.

Step 1. Get a job for money and experience. Step 2. Don't be useless. Step 3. Increase your skillset through school, training, and promotions. Step 4. Don't have kids if you make minimum wage. Solved.

Step 1: Raise the Minimum Wage Step 2: Build Skynet XD

There is a $15 minimum wage in Australia and it frustrates me. I'm 24 and I haven't worked for 6 years nor do I have any skills because I've struggeled a lot with my mental health. My capacity to work much is low so I want the ability to say to an employer I'll work less than the next person in line because most people easily have a better resume than me and don't have the baggage I do. The minimum wage being so high and existing at all means I don't have another way to get a leg up on someone else. I'd even work for $1 an hour to begin with as to prove I'm a good employee and then once I've demonstrated my worth to the buisness and I knpw I can do the job long term I'd ask for a raise. I get that the intent of having a minimum wage is to help people but it really does hurt the worst off in society and its not just people with no skills, its people with disabilities and (mental) health problems to.

Raising the minimum wage increases the number of unemployed. That means more people vote Democrat and the minimum wage goes higher. Eventually, only Billionaires will be able to work and everybody will vote Democrat. Love it.

"If you raise the minimum wage, then its going to raise the rent.When it raises the rent then your'e going to have to build affordable housing, when you have to build affordable housing then you tax the people to build the affordable housing.When you tax people to build the affordable housing the people move out of the city and you have to raise taxes on the people who live in the city. That is how you hollow out the income of a major metropolitan area" Ben Shapiro

Wal-Mart raised the wages and cut hours, they even did away of some positions. Once someone quits or gets fired they rarely replace them. When I started there were almost 30 people working in my area, now there are 10.

Was that the Westworld theme at the end?

I for one welcome our new robob overlords

Yeah, our hours are already cut. And I'm paying more in taxes. Yay, thanks for the help.

Minimum wage needs to be renamed as wage discrimination. That's all it is. It discriminates against lower-wage earning workers.

It is not about what people deserve or what is fair or what is just; it is about what the market will bear. Blame the consumer for shopping for the lowest price and blame the voter for voting for government to fix their problems.

Robots don't just cost less than people on minimum wage, Andrew. They cost less than feeding people. They have an initial development cost, but after that they're practically free, as it only takes electricity and rare instances of maintenance (which can be done by other robots) to keep them running.

reasonTV needs to be all Andrew, all the time

Middle class is a byproduct of a market economy without excessive regulation, it isn't manufactured by government redistribution of wealth, minimum wage laws or a politician's tax gimmicks.

What we should do is create an agency that sets min wages on a case by case basis. Based on each company's specific gross profit margins.

These are hilarious! I can't believe it took me so long to find these!!!😀

What I love is that Andrew Heaton got replaced by RoboHeaton after this episode, hence the different suit and lack of a beard.

Heaton is hilarious in a good way. Love these videos!

It is about supply and demand. If you have an easy time filling your employee needs, you offer lower wages, if you have a hard time filling your employee needs, you offer higher wages; because if you do not your competition will and you will be out of business.

Through a complicated process called basic mathematics I found that you can in fact live decently on 9$ an hour working 40+ hours a week the reason you can't in states like California isn't due to cost of living being so high it's because income tax is so high

hahaha that ladder clip... I remember seeing that in the early days of the internet. God damn that took me back...

Your argument is only partially correct. In Scandinavia we too don't believe in minimal wages (and we don't have them). Instead wages are effectively set by sector or industry through collective bargaining. We have strong unions and liberal rules regulating strikes and lock-outs, yet we seldom see long, destructive cases of either. With this model we end up with high salaries, even for our non-educated work force - though several workers remain un-organized and in fact sometimes work for lower wages than set by the sector. The high costs of labour force has several interesting effects, both in the market and in society as a whole. It forces business owners to organize their operations effectively, and that means investing in machines to do tasks where ever possible and hiring skilled labour/investing in training employees where it is needed. Automatization is generally not seen as a bad thing at all (not even by the workers), and automated machinery has indeed replaced manual labour decades ago, for functions that are still done by manual workers in the US. For example, Norway was the first country in the world to employ automatic highway toll stations 33 years ago. Today, no-one pays hard cash for traveling on roads, even private dirt tracks in the middle of nowhere are payed by SMS or other automated means. The system is standardized so my digital ticket works all across Norway, and if I happen to not have one, my car reg. number is automatically captured and I am billed by mail. Implementing automated tasks saves businesses money, some of which are collected by the state as taxes. We have a high taxation level in Norway, which pays for our nearly free health care system, free higher education, care for elders, our welfare system and pensions for state employees. Free education means we have amongst the highest educated population most efficient workforce of the world. The effectivization by automation of our work places and employing our (compared to the US) highly educated workforce, have amongst many, three noticeable effects: #1 ..Getting rich by starting/buying/owning a business is far easier than in the US (despite higher taxations and public spending) - we have far more billionaires per capita than in the US #2 ..social mobility is far higher than in the US. Statistically, in Norway the level of education, income, social status and race of your parents etc.. play a significantly lesser role in your chances to succeed in life financially, than in the US and most other countries in the world. #3 ..and our unemployment rate is 5,10 % to the US 14,7% When US and other investors wanted to buy up Norwegian oil back in the 1970's, we (against the "better" judgement of our conservative party) nationalized our oil production and almost immediately reaped the benefits from doing so. Our tax funded education of engineers and public investments in off-shore drilling payed back in many-folds. Since then our state oil has been registered on the stock market with the main share held by the state, but several privately owned companies are involved in the industry (and they are heavily subsidized, just like the US fossil fuel industry). Almost all of the profits from our oil are re-invested in our future pension fund (currently (per 26th of May) this investment fund is worth: 1,036,436,286,378.39 USD - we are 5,4 million people in Norway). We are one of a very few countries that don't run a public spending deficit. We have true liberals and conservatives in our country, too, but none of them are suggesting radical changes to our generous welfare system, our free education, our free health care system and otherwise high public spendings, because it is generally accepted across the political spectrum that our system - the Scandinavian Model - works. It is not perfect, for sure, sometimes our bureaucracy is inefficient and our public spending is too wasteful, and our conservative and liberal politicians are naturally always looking for giving (especially the wealthy people) tax breaks, but generally - as of today - we don't see existing alternatives to our economic structure, that on the whole offer better deals for neither capitalists, nor the work force. The liberal and neo-conservative arguments about minimal state ownership and intervention, their communist fixation, aggressive opposition to a universal health care plan or their ridicule of free education, seems to most of us - liberals and conservatives included - at best to be some exotic cultural thing rooting back to the failed Reaganomics or even to the cold war propaganda and McCarthyist paranoia - at worst it is just ill informed or straight out dumb. So yeah, minimum wages are bad, but e v i d e n t l y not for the reasons you give. And the American dream lives - in Norway.

This series is so great. Keep it up, ReasonTV!

Even the biggest fast food corporation would have to lay off thousands of employees and cost more than double for thier food if you raised it to 15.

I mostly love Mostly Weekly

Seems like the best argument for minimum wage I've heard so far. Automation is coming whether you like it or not. All you're doing is kicking the can down the road.

I worked at the YMCA for minimum wage and they offered 'benefits", like college tuition help, to full time employees. I was a college student at the time. Therefore the YMCA made sure to never give me full time hours. Companies will always screw the employee, even Christian non-profits. Now, I'm a RN and when enough people are getting sick and injured in the ER, what do they do? Send nurses home, cut your hours. I bet the people in the offices, on salary, are not making those sacrifices. We get punished for not having enough patients to take care of. Do we get MORE money when the lobby is full and don't even have a minute to eat? Well, of course not! Companies always do the minimum.

"Spay and neuter you roomba" funny

Before I retired I was happy when the minimum wage increased. If the minimum wage increased by 3%, my wages usually increases between 6 ~ 8%, the gap kept getting larger in actual dollars earned per hour. I haven't been to a McDonalds for many years. I was on a long drive and hungry so I pulled into one. # kiosks and 1 person working a register. the person working would take care of one customer while each kiosk would 2 to 3. Then the person would walk away for a while then come back to take another order. I was wondering if this person was trying to lose his job. My wife and I would always stop at a coffee shop when we went to the doctor or pharmacy We liked chatting with the waitresses about their children, husbands and what was happening. Since california increased the minimum wage they are all gone and part time waitresses work there now. Hooray minimum wage increases.

The other problem is that a few months later after minimum wage goes up all the prices go up. Making the raise pointless.

UBI > Raising minimum wage

The biggest rule of economics: You can NOT create wealth from nothing. So where does the wealth from raising minimum wage come from?

I stop watching to find that video of that guy eating his shit on that ladder. I lost my shit! Lol!

Bullshit. Before we got a minimum wage in Germany, all companies screamed death and warned about the consequences. Now we have it and it had almost no impact on our unemployment numbers. And even if you lose jobs - if your company cannot afford to pay people more than the bare minimum they need to survive, your company sucks. If a minimum wages makes your company bankrupt, you have already exceeded your capabilities and now you're being punished. Period. It's fine if some people are willing to work for almost no money, but thankfully not everyone is that brainwashed.

The real problem is not the minimum wadge being too low, it's too many people not being able to eventually get work that pays more than minimum wage. (Assuming that's true and there is actually a problem that needs solving at all.) If the average person can't progress to a job that pays well above $15/hr (because the work the job involves is worth enough to justify that), lets solve *that* problem. Side note, I suspect one of the most effective things that could be done to increase average wages is to increase mobility, both in jobs and in places of living. If wages are higher relative to cost of living somewhere else, then people moving in that direction helps the people who move (better pay) the people who hire them (more labor holds down labor costs) the people who stay behind (few people results in more damned for their work and less demand for housing). The only people who lose are the "evil capitalists" who are "profiting off the backs of the working poor". And improving mobility should be possible without any government involvement; just make information about jobs and cost of living available to whoever goes looking. Oh, and by the way, union mandated pay scales are also de facto minimum wadges: if they want more money, they should figure out how to create more value for the people paying them.

Self Service Technology is facing a potential renaissance as the increases in minimum wage makes prohibitively expensive automation options ever more affordable by comparison. This presentation is a brilliant illustration of that fact.

Well I agree with the argument, what it lacks to point out is is it's not just minimum wage workers that would get a hourly increase but also anyone making below the new minimum wage. For example, if the minimum wage is $9/hr and someone is currently making $10/hr; if the minimum wage gets raised to $12/hr, then they automatically go to $12/hr ($2/hr increase) as well. Not to mention this generally levels out the seniority wage that many people worked up to. New worker gets $12 same as old worker that has put in some years at a company.

The balance of affordable things to buy and the income to buy them. No politician can set either.

I used to work as a manufacturing engineer at a radiator plant. Part of my job was evaluating how much certain machines/policies saved the company in labor costs, so I had access to all the payroll information. Do you know how much it cost our company to employ one worker for 1 hour being paid $20 an hour? $120 fucking dollars an hour, once you factor in payroll tax, social security, insurance, etc. etc. etc. You want to raise people's wages? Stop forcing companies to pay these ridiculous fucking fees. We could easily pay employees DOUBLE their wage if these regulations were laxed.

Step 3 is ALWAYS "Profit!"

Local governments could set unenforced recommended "minimum wage" and "living wage" levels, so employees have a general idea what they should be aiming for when negotiating their wages. But no one, including government, has the right to violate the natural rights of humans to make mutually consented agreements and exchanges, like wages for labor.

Was always against min wage but the robots changed my mind. Go home and sit on the couch. I'll be an automation technician. Bwahaha.

All that would be solved by a workers council. *takes care of wages *takes care of hours & jobs since they use machines to lower hours, increase pay and let the working class use the extra time to construct a better society

I really like this video and mostly weakly as a whole, but can you provide links to the sources for the statistics and data used in the video? i actually agree with you and would like to research this better.

Remember, the worker is selling their labor to their boss

Saw goldstar beer in the beer photo and got excited. How the hell did that end up in your video?

Such a fun and informative video! Keep up the good work 😀💪

The problem is if you eliminate minimum wage, they lower pay; if they raise minimum wage they call you an independent contractor (or cut hours, automate, outsource.) Solution, boycott companies that don't pay a decent living.

Skip raising the minimum wage; let's go straight to building Skynet!

Norway, A country often praised by the American Left does not have a General minimum wage. All salaries are decided between the employer and the employee, something that the Worker Unions also prefer as it gives them more opportunity to negotiate for a better salary or perks.(some branches do have a minimum wage, but that is to make sure foreign workers are not mistreated.)

Also, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but one effect of raising the MW is that those paying minimum wage will raise prices to keep the same profit margin thus raising cost of living for everyone. This means that the new MW earner is effectively making the same amount as before in relation to the COL and those who make above MW will get a pay cut. Let's say an independent contractor who may charge $25/hr will, under the new MW be effectively making only $20/hr in relation to the new COL and so he raises his price to $30. Wouldn't that spur on inflation?

A message so important Andrew shaved off his beard to play the robot part.

It may take a few years to see how the big increases in minimum wages impact the number of small business startups. I don't know if any of the higher minimum wage city officials actually consulted with accountants who had small business startups among their clients but that would have been a wise thing to do before passing higher minimum wage laws. But government officials are noted for passing laws with unintended consequences. Simply logic should make it clear (as an example) that an employee receiving $15/hr must produce value in the neighborhood of at least $18/hr because every employee carries part of the business overhead burden. Let's say a very small business overhead burden exists as fixed costs each month: rent, telephone, maintenance, fire insurance, accident insurance, liability insurance, errors & omissions insurance, bookkeeping wages, receptionist wages, order entry wages, production wages, employer matching FICA taxes, allowance for sick days, and many other expenses. These are costs incurred even if there are no sales or if sales are not high enough to provide a gross margin to cover the fixed expenses. People who make minimum wage laws without considering & analyzing such things are derelict in their duty to both employees and business owner because wages that are too high in relation to the value of productivity can cause business owners to go bankrupt and employees to be without jobs.

The place where I work is in my hometown. Housing was too expensive there so I have to move farther away into the country. I work at a tech company and now that min wage is $15 it's more financially viable for me to work at the KFC near where I live than it is for me to assemble cameras in a nitrogen chamber or any other work I do that it is more complex than "work the fryer". I used to make 6 bucks more than minimum wage. Now I make 2. I've been demoted because some people are surprised that working minimum wage only affords you a minimum life. From Canada BTW.

I support raising the minimum wage precisely so that it increases automation and possibly lead to more investments in robots. Yes, I am probably a horrible person.

Good, but it's also missing a key point almost never mentioned when this topic is discussed: raising prices (whether on labor, or a price floor) is only guaranteed to raise PRICES. It doesn't guarantee more INCOME or wealth on the selling side. When most people think of prices increasing (whether by inflation or mandate), they assume someone on the selling side will somehow become richer, but it doesn't work that way. Higher prices just make consumers (all of us) poorer (our own contributions to the economy which lead to our wealth are worth less since we can get less for our money) without a guarantee that income will go up for the seller...demand may simply decrease (perhaps plummet).

Here’s how to solve this. Low minimum wage, big taxes on giant corporations.

This says more about how the usage of robots needs to be taxed than minimum wage. If you think about it the other way around: no minimum wage whatsoever=employers that hire people for 2 bucks an hour can get higher profits than competing companies, therefore no stimulus to be paying the least skilled employees anything more than enough to keep them working for you. Minimum wage needs to be according to the basic cost of living in a certain area. First you say it's ridiculous that NYC raised the minimum wage to 15 an hour but then you do admit that life there is a lot more expensive there than other parts of the country. So people in NYC without minimum wage would be the most screwed of all groups in the US. The Big Companies are not just beating the Mom and Pop shops because of their "magical corporation abilities". They beat them because they have their headquarters in tax paradise countries and let most of the stuff they sell get produced in countries with less than 0.5 dollars an hour. If you want the mom and pops shops to have a chance you need to make sure the billion dollar multinationals play by the same rules as them. If governments in Bangladesh, Indonesia etc. started progressively increading minimumwages then the US big companies wouldn't be using all this foreign labour and bring a lot of jobs back to the US. Why does a mom and pop store have to go through all this paperwork+taxes whenever they hire someone while a company that uses robots has to pay 0 dollars in taxes for their "employees"? Economies need to be run to help regular people in their pursuit of happiness not cheap corporations.

Increase the demand for labor, workers have a backbone and don't let themselves to be exploited (this is includes offshoring as well), workers demand more businesses will have to pay more. The only asset a business really has is its people (until robots take over). And if they cannot find workers either they go out of business or do things to attract workers like paying more.

Love these videos. Keep it up!

It’s kinda crazy how people still don’t get this.

The ladder analogy is great

Apperently, this channel has right to call itself "reason". Becase this is one of very few youtube channels about politics where you find find "reasoning"

I had to automate cutting welding and machining these last 5 years. Because rising minimun wages drags all others up and up so i had to buy, install and train people on how to use robots just to stay in bussiness.

This is like arguing over which type of rope makes a better noose. Whether you raise the minimum wage or not, robots are still going to take jobs. Raise the minimum wage, robots take many of the jobs because they are cheaper. Lower the minimum wage and people stop working jobs that pay too low to live on, which are then replaced by robots. You just have to look to history (there are a plethora of examples) where a labor based economy (one where labor has significant worth) transitioned to a resource based economy (where labor has little to no worth) to see the parallels. Technology is just hastening a transition that was already going to happen. But people are too busy arguing over how to prevent it/deny that it exists to realize that we can't go back, and we need to focus on how to move forward. But we all know that'll never happen. The left/right are too busy pointing fingers at each other while the politicians/media on both sides stoke the fire for personal gain.

When I go to Starbucks, I tell them my name is Kind Of Andrew Heaton.

Even in larger cities like New York the minimum wage has costed lots of people jobs. Car wash employees there lost their jobs and started working illegally out of vans.

When I was telling this to my dad, he said, "if a small company doesn't have enough money to pay workers for a higher minimum wage, they shouldn't be a company"

one of the bigger drivers behind increasing minimum wage is union contracts that are indexed to minimum wage. Let's say the contract is indexed at 3X, and minimum wage is $8. Union worker makes $24. Raise the minimum wage to $12, union worker gets (maybe, if there aren't massive layoffs) a $24K/year raise.

Great points you make here!!

The minimum wages mentioned may make sense in Seattle or New York City. What doesn't make sense is raising the Federal minimum wage to a reasonable level for New York City, since cost of living and average wages vary so much. I guess he made that point toward the end too. Why isn't it obvious to everyone?

I think there is a balance between a minimum wage that guarantees the absolute basics of living, and not too high so companies see no incentive to fire people. If you're the only small business in you town, that can actually offer jobs to people, you shouldn't be able to pay them 5$/hour

Of the historical data we have on US cities raising minimum wage, there has actually been a slight INCREASE in jobs, on average. It's not a huge increase, but certainly not a loss. Raising too much at once could feasibly cause some adjustment issues, but the numbers just don't support the broad claim made here.

Very interesting, I don't think the argument "because robots" is very good because they can work for cents an hour, so jobs are going to be toast no matter how low minimum wage is. But I certainly think that "higher minimum wage is better" is too simplistic to work.

NYC is still 13 an hour depending on number of employees

I'm not sure about the minimum wage, but I _am_ sure that the arguments against the minimum wage presented in this video are almost entirely unsupported by citations of research or agency and are almost exclusively based on _assumed_ common sense and only supported by unrelated analogies. It is a style of pseudo-logical argument that leads you to believe you've seen facts when all that's been demonstrated is an exercise in semantics.

Higher minimum wage is great for those who manufacture, maintain, and repair robots.

I tend to favor a universal basic income. While increasing minimum wage may speed up the push to automation, that push is there regardless.

Robots do take away some entry level jobs, such as cashier, but what would really bring jobs back into the economy is if private prisons couldn't lease out their prisoners as forced, unpaid labor in fields and factories. So many jobs are done by prisoners for zero money, with threat of punishment if they don't work.

I like the ladder example!!

The minimum wage should only be in place in small towns were there is only one or a couple large employers

That westworld theme is fucking hilarious

bring back Mostly Weekly!

Automation is going to happen regardless of what the minimum wage is or is not. Middle class wages hasn't risen from the 1980 levels but the automation has still seen a steady raise.

Love the West world theme in the back when you mention robots

I think there are benefits to a minimum wage but I do think it should be scrapped altogether for small businesses.

There shouldn't be a minimum wage. Some jobs aren't worth $15/hr. Also, it takes ONLY ONE person that thinks you are worth $15/Hr to get $15/HR. If NO ONE thinks you are worth $15/HR then it is unanimous. Minimum wage is yet another government regulation used to control businesses BTW, my company makes products for automation. Raising the minimum wage has always been good for the automation business.

More Sarah, thanks.

I agree that raising the minimum wage is bad. When you raise the minimum wage, or taxes on corporations (no matter what their worth), you raise their company overhead, which raises the cost of their goods and services, which forces the blue collar man to pay more, which means that he needs to be paid more which raises the cost of overhead for his company, etc., etc. There is a problem, but more laws aren't going to help. If you really want to fix it, remove regulations and massively slow legal immigration and do whatever's necessary to hault illegal immigration.