It's quick, catchy, and convenient to call out a few corp's which pay their workers squat while the bosses rake it in.
BUT - what about the ever-inflating costs of basic daily living - housing, food, medical care, transportation, and education - for the 99% of Americans who aren't too rich to care? Does that not count as "affordability crisis", because denouncing it risks being non-performative activism? After all, if we somehow rolled back that inflation, it would hit the pocketbooks of the 1% pretty hard...
But for 99% of Americans, "affordability crisis" is the ratio between the wages they receive and the prices they have to pay.
So if you could (say) roll back rents to pre-RealPage levels - from the PoV of the ~25M rent-burdened (and worse) Americans, would that meaningfully differ from receiving a huge wage increase?
There's the concern that once we get, say, a $30 minimum wage, that will drive prices up further and then people will be saying we need a $50 minimum wage. So we could wind up back where we started except it is harder to plan for the future, interest rates are higher which drives up the cost of housing and housing construction, etc.
The counter to that is an increase in total factor productivity which really makes us richer by being able to do more with less. That is, Henry Ford changed the world by creating a production system where workers plus a reasonable investment in capital could produce cars that those workers could afford. Contrast that to child care, for instance, where it just takes a certain number of workers to take care of a certain number of children. In the case of child care you can subsidize it so along side "expensive and available" you will get a certain amount with is "affordable at point of service but rationed" that is never enough.
which I think has an element of truth to it but that it also comes out of a need people have to believe that all problems are caused by a conspiracy of a few sinister people. Like it or not, people don't believe in markets and they don't believe in government. Maybe they are right to not believe in these things but in a certain sense it becomes a self-reinforcing pose.
It's quick, catchy, and convenient to call out a few corp's which pay their workers squat while the bosses rake it in.
BUT - what about the ever-inflating costs of basic daily living - housing, food, medical care, transportation, and education - for the 99% of Americans who aren't too rich to care? Does that not count as "affordability crisis", because denouncing it risks being non-performative activism? After all, if we somehow rolled back that inflation, it would hit the pocketbooks of the 1% pretty hard...
The article also doesn’t say a lot about high prices but rather low wages.
True.
But for 99% of Americans, "affordability crisis" is the ratio between the wages they receive and the prices they have to pay.
So if you could (say) roll back rents to pre-RealPage levels - from the PoV of the ~25M rent-burdened (and worse) Americans, would that meaningfully differ from receiving a huge wage increase?
There's the concern that once we get, say, a $30 minimum wage, that will drive prices up further and then people will be saying we need a $50 minimum wage. So we could wind up back where we started except it is harder to plan for the future, interest rates are higher which drives up the cost of housing and housing construction, etc.
The counter to that is an increase in total factor productivity which really makes us richer by being able to do more with less. That is, Henry Ford changed the world by creating a production system where workers plus a reasonable investment in capital could produce cars that those workers could afford. Contrast that to child care, for instance, where it just takes a certain number of workers to take care of a certain number of children. In the case of child care you can subsidize it so along side "expensive and available" you will get a certain amount with is "affordable at point of service but rationed" that is never enough.
Not sure how your comment relates to my prior comments. I did not argue for wage increases.
And "increase productivity" does nothing to address ever-higher costs of living which arise from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking abuses.
Well I dunno what to think about the argument here
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/
which I think has an element of truth to it but that it also comes out of a need people have to believe that all problems are caused by a conspiracy of a few sinister people. Like it or not, people don't believe in markets and they don't believe in government. Maybe they are right to not believe in these things but in a certain sense it becomes a self-reinforcing pose.