But I am indispensable

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Milton Friedman – A Conversation On Minimum Wage

via Milton Friedman – A Conversation On Minimum Wage – YouTube.

The decline of marriage

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Healthier, living longer but many more workers on disability benefits

Graph: Newly Disabled Workers, By Diagnoses

In the past three decades, the number of people who are on disability benefit has skyrocketed.

There is no compelling evidence that the incidence of disabling health conditions among the working age population is rising. Autor (2006) found that disability rolls in the USA expanded because:

  1. congressional reforms to disability screening in 1984 that enabled workers with low mortality disorders such as back pain, arthritis and mental illness to more readily qualify for benefits;
  2. a rise in the after-tax income replacement rate, which strengthened the incentives for lower-skilled workers to seek benefits; (3) and
  3. a rapid increase in female labour force participation that expanded the pool of insured workers.

Autor found that the aging of the baby boom generation has contributed little to the growth of disability benefit numbers to date.

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David Autor and Mark Duggan (2003) found that low-skills and a poor education is predictor of disability: in the USA in 2004, nearly one in five male high school dropouts between ages 55 and 64 were in the disability program; that was more than double that of high school graduates of the same age and more than five times higher than the 3.7 % of college graduates of that age who collect disability. Unemployment is another driver of disability.

The proportion of working-age people receiving a Sickness Benefit, an Invalid’s Benefit or Accident Compensation weekly compensation  in New Zealand rose from around 1% in the 1970s to 5% in June 2002.

Figure 1 The Number of People Receiving Benefit as a Primary Recipient, All Age Groups, 1975–2005

The Number of People Receiving Benefit as a Primary Recipient, All Age Groups, 1975–2005

Source: DSW Annual Reports or Statistical Information Reports and MSD SWIFFT data from Dwyer and McLeod (2006).

Most other OECD countries also experienced a rise in the proportion of the working-age population claiming incapacity benefits over this period. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was common for around 4–6.5% of the working-age population to receive such benefits. Some European countries have up to 10% of their working age population on disability or sickness benefit!

When the UK undertook reassessments of those on its disability and sickness benefit, fewer than one in 10 people assessed for the new sickness benefit has been deemed too ill to carry out any work.

More than a third of the 1.3million people who applied for Employment and Support Allowance were found to be fully capable of working; a similar proportion abandoned their claims while they were still being processed. Moral hazard seems to be the main explanation of the rise in disability roles.

Before 15 July 1980, a victim of a workplace accident in the state of Kentucky received a payment proportional to his or her wage with an upper limit of $131 per week. On 15 July 1980, the limit was raised to $217 per week. This increase made a considerable difference to the best-paid workers: their periods of convalescence grew 20% longer (Cahuc and Zylberberg 2006).

Actual discrimination in the marketplace depends on the combined discrimination of employers, workers, customers, schools and governments – updated

A literature has developed on whether discrimination in the marketplace due to prejudice disappears in the long run. Whether employers who do not want to discriminate will eventually compete away all discriminating employers depends not only on the distribution of tastes for discrimination among potential employers, but critically also on the nature of firm production functions.

Of greater significance empirically is the long run discrimination by employees and customers, who are far more important sources of market discrimination than employers. There is no reason to expect discrimination by these groups to be competed away in the long run unless it is possible to have enough efficient segregated firms and effectively segregated markets for goods.

Gary Becker (1992).

When the disfavoured group had few members, the wage difference between the favoured and disfavoured would be very small or non-existent because they could find employers who had little distaste for working with them. For example, African-Americans suffered more from discrimination than did Jews because blacks constituted a much larger population. Becker explains:

Employee discrimination against minority fellow workers-such as a male worker who does not want to work for a female boss- cannot be so easily competed away by non-discriminating employers. For they have to pay discriminating employees more, perhaps a lot more, to work with minority members. A similar argument applies to consumers who do not want to be served by particular minorities…

Segregation can serve as a way to bypass the prejudices of other workers, consumers, and employers. When Jews could not get work in the banking industry at the turn of 20th century, they began to open their own banks that hired mainly other Jews. African-American doctors and dentists in the old South catered to other blacks as their patients

Competition from more rational firms might gradually eliminate employer discrimination, market forces alone would rarely erode discrimination rooted in the tastes of workers or consumers.

The market will not compete away customer discrimination because the market is good at giving customers what they want. It is not necessarily possible for disfavoured groups simply  to take jobs where there is no customer contact, particularly if they are large in number relative to the total population. It is also the case the customer discrimination is largely immune from antidiscrimination laws except in blatant cases.

Customer discrimination results in employment segregation, which adds further to the job search costs of minorities as they must find jobs with less customer contact. This lowers their asking wages to save on job search costs and time unemployed.

Customer discrimination can linger because their attitudes may change only slowly, and the preferences of a wide group of individuals may need to change.

An entrepreneurial opportunity arises to those entrepreneurs who are first to alert insert murders of the costs of the prejudice. This is a far more successful way of bringing racial segregation and discrimination to an end. Entrepreneurs put an explicit price on  each and every form of discrimination wherever it might be. 

In professional sport, for example, racial integration came from entrepreneurs risking the loss of some of their existing fans in return for the anticipated cost savings and greater commercial and sporting success from hiring talented minorities and foreigners. Consumer prejudices were eroded by entrepreneurship.

The art of business consists of identifying assets in low-valued uses and devising ways to profitably move them to higher-valued ones. Entrepreneurs profited from finding ways to eliminate discrimination as quickly as possible.

Educational standards and the Baumol disease

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Walter Williams Asks: “How Much Can Discrimination Explain?”

via Cafe Hayek

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Do enough businesses survive long enough for the inherent inequality of bargaining power between the bosses and the workers to emerge?

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Obamacare and the incentive to work

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The reversing gender gap in education

The difference in reading and verbal skills between girls and boys at the age of 15 is equal to 6-months extra schooling. Six months schooling explains a lot of the wage gaps with a long ethnic, racial and previously on gender lines.

Not surprisingly, fewer women do science and engineering degrees because their superior reading and verbal skills qualify them for medicine and other sciences that take advantage of these talents.

The quickening in creative destruction and CEO turnover

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HT: marginalrevolution

The Truth about the Minimum Wage

Video

Ideology and occupational sorting

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Milton Friedman on raising the minimum wage – the most ‘anti-black law in the land’

The minimum wage law is most properly described as a law saying that employers must discriminate against people who have low skills. That’s what the law says.

The law says that here’s a man who has a skill that would justify a wage of $5 or $6 per hour (adjusted for today), but you may not employ him, it’s illegal, because if you employ him you must pay him $9 per hour.

So what’s the result?  To employ him at $9 per hour is to engage in charity. There’s nothing wrong with charity. But most employers are not in the position to engage in that kind of charity.

Thus, the consequences of minimum wage laws have been almost wholly bad. We have increased unemployment and increased poverty.

via Milton Friedman responds to President Obama’s proposal to raise the minimum wage, the most ‘anti-black law in the land’ | AEIdeas.

Piketty and Pension Fund Socialism

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Any attack on capitalism these days is a direct attack of the retirement savings of ordinary workers. We live in the age of  what Peter Drucker called pension fund socialism in 1976. As Drucker added in 1991:

The rise of pension funds as dominant owners and lenders represents one of the most startling power shifts in economic history.

The first modern pension fund was established in 1950 by General Motors.

Four decades later, pension funds control total assets of $2.5 trillion, divided about equally between common stocks and fixed-income securities. Demographics guarantee that these assets will grow aggressively for at least another ten years.

The majority of equity capital is owned by pension funds and other collective investment vehicles corralling the savings of ordinary people. Much of the rest of physical capital is owned by workers through home ownership.

In the age of human capital, 70-90% of all capital in the economy is human capital. The notion of unskilled workers labouring away with the capital supplied by the bosses is 19th century throwback.

The rentier rich has been long replaced by the working rich. They make their fortunes in their own life times – sometimes as business entrepreneurs, sometimes through rent-seeking.

It is also the age of specific human capital, with a proliferation of technologies and products. The rising specialisation of firms and their production inputs has forced firms to try harder to find those inputs that suit their needs best. Management has the task of finding the right inputs. The role and reward to managers has therefore risen.

When the rise in returns on investments in human capital is beneficial and desirable, and policies designed to deal with inequality must take account of its cause. Growth in education levels has been a significant source of rising wages, productivity, and living standards over the past century.

The initial impact of higher returns to human capital is wider inequality in earnings, but that impact becomes more muted and may be reversed over time as young people invest more in their human capital.

The rentier class has been replaced by the working rich. The evidence on the top 1% is most consistent with theories of superstars, skill biased technological change, greater scale and their interaction of these factors.

Individuals who are really good at making money can now apply their skills to larger amounts of capital and reach far larger audiences  and markets for their products and services. That favours CEOs, athletes, celebrities, corporate lawyers, successful entrepreneurs and other working rich Who have a skill  or talent that can be supplied at little cost on a much larger scale. Some have a special dark place in their hearts for people who earned their money through honest hard work.

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