Accueil
Galerie
Publications
Rechercher
S'enregistrer
ConnexionSalaire minimum: Ce que Steven Benoit ne pourra jamais comprendre
3 participants
Page 2 sur 2
Page 2 sur 2 • 
1, 2
Salaire minimum: Ce que Steven Benoit ne pourra jamais comprendre
Invité Dim 8 Fév 2009 - 12:53
Rappel du premier message :
When you institute a price floor, the wage goes up, but the number of people employed goes down.
Under monopsony, things look different. Competitive employers have to offer a market wage, so they maximize production where the market wage is equal to the marginal product of a new worker. Monopsony employers, on the other hand, are not price takers; they can set the wage to maximize their profit. This means that they face an upward sloping marginal cost curve for workers, because raising the wage in order to hire another worker also means raising the wages they pay to their existing workers.
As I hope is easy to see from the graph above, which I shamelessly ripped off from Wikipedia, either a market wage or a minimum wage essentially gives you a horizontal marginal cost curve. Those employers simply pay the wage where MPR=S. But if they are monopsonists who control the wage, then they can probably maximize their profit with fewer workers, because they are only competing with staring home and staring at the wall. They maximize profit not by setting wages where MRP=S, but where MRP=Marginal Cost. That means a smaller workforce.
This looks sort of counterintuitive--why would the marginal cost be higher than the wage? But that's because they have to raise the wages of all the other people as well--thus, marginal cost increases faster than the wage. That's why the company can be better off having a smaller workforce at a lower wage than a bigger workforce at a higher wage, even if the marginal revenue produced by the additional worker is higher than their wages.
And that's why, if you set the minimum wage right, giving them a horizontal cost curve, you could increase both employment and wages (though if you set it too high, you'll still see disemployment effects, as you do in the graph above.)
That is one possible explanation. But I find it unconvincing, for several reasons.
First, there's pretty good evidence for explanation three. The original study was a phone study; when another study asked for actual payroll records, they found the same result the standard model would predict: fast food employment dropped in New Jersey. Additionally, as Kevin Murphy has pointed out, the survey started long after employers knew that a minimum wage hike was coming--he compares it to assessing a midnight curfew by comparing the number of teenagers on the street at 11:59 to the number on the street at 12:30.
But second, I have trouble arriving at a reasonable model for monopsony in minimum wage markets. The retail and fast food industries that employ most minimum wage workers have extremely low search costs on both sides of the market. The burger joints are all right there, next to the one you're already working at--if you can get to one fast food outlet, you can get to ten. Ditto retail stores. When they're hiring, they put signs right there in your window where you can see them. On the other side, the firms wait for someone to walk through the door, and put a hat on them. They don't spend six weeks calling your references and checking out your scholarly work.
Kathy G. likes heterogenous preferences between workers, which is to say workers liking different kinds of workplaces. This could also explain it. Except . . . in the fast food market? This seems unlikely. It's not like you're taking a lower wage at Wendy's because they have a great dental plan and they let you use the pool. The labor is unskilled, the wages are undifferentiated, and the benefits are nonexistent. Maybe there are some people out there who love Wendy's food, or Gap clothes, so much that they never want to consume anything else, making the employee discount super valuable. But I cannot believe that this group is sufficiently large to be driving the market. Besides, there's empirical evidence against this; most people do not stay in only one industry, much less only one firm.
There are a couple other small quibbles, each less convincing than the last; by the end of the debate, we were stuck on collusion, the most plausible thesis. Except it's not plausible. Fast food and retail are extremely fragmented, and also extremely competitive on extremely thin margins. Maybe this happens in some small towns, but they'd have to be awful small. My grandmother's town of 10,000 has dozens of minimum wage employers. Large cartels without legally enforceable deals almost always break down; the incentive to cheat is too high. They might not raise wages, but the perks would get nicer and nicer.
But more broadly, minimum wage markets don't look like we would expect a monopsony labor market to look. Retail and fast food employment is pretty sensitive to even pretty small changes in relative wages, which shouldn't be true if firms really have that kind of control over their labor force. Also, there's decent evidence that raising the minimum wage lowers employment among the groups most likely to be making the minimum wage, especially teenagers. Again, if monopsony were persistent in these labor markets, this is not what we would expect to see--at least, not if the government is doing a good job setting the minimum wage near the 'competitive' wage.
This long argument, which culminated in the (I hope not too boring) analysis above, is what I was thinking about when I wrote a two-sentence throwaway line. Kathy G. can certainly be forgiven for not knowing that; I hope that I can be forgiven for acting as if blogging were a conversation, rather than a lecture.
There's another lesson for new bloggers here, though, one that most of us had to learn the (very) hard way: when arguing with people you disagree with, it's better to leave yourself room to back down. Just off the top of my head, before declaring that the other person is an idiot who has no idea what they are talking about, you should be very, very sure that there is absolutely no possibility that they do know what they are talking about. You're coining a fact--Person X doesn't understand Theory Y. If it turns out that your analysis is wrong, my own hard-won experience is that you do more damage to your reputation than you could ever have hoped to do to theirs--I'd say the ratio is 3 or 4 to 1. So unless you're pretty confident that your opponent cannot demonstrate the basic familiarity you have confidently declared they lack, this one is almost never a win.
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/04/by_request_a_long_post_in_whic.php
When you institute a price floor, the wage goes up, but the number of people employed goes down.
Under monopsony, things look different. Competitive employers have to offer a market wage, so they maximize production where the market wage is equal to the marginal product of a new worker. Monopsony employers, on the other hand, are not price takers; they can set the wage to maximize their profit. This means that they face an upward sloping marginal cost curve for workers, because raising the wage in order to hire another worker also means raising the wages they pay to their existing workers.
As I hope is easy to see from the graph above, which I shamelessly ripped off from Wikipedia, either a market wage or a minimum wage essentially gives you a horizontal marginal cost curve. Those employers simply pay the wage where MPR=S. But if they are monopsonists who control the wage, then they can probably maximize their profit with fewer workers, because they are only competing with staring home and staring at the wall. They maximize profit not by setting wages where MRP=S, but where MRP=Marginal Cost. That means a smaller workforce.
This looks sort of counterintuitive--why would the marginal cost be higher than the wage? But that's because they have to raise the wages of all the other people as well--thus, marginal cost increases faster than the wage. That's why the company can be better off having a smaller workforce at a lower wage than a bigger workforce at a higher wage, even if the marginal revenue produced by the additional worker is higher than their wages.
And that's why, if you set the minimum wage right, giving them a horizontal cost curve, you could increase both employment and wages (though if you set it too high, you'll still see disemployment effects, as you do in the graph above.)
That is one possible explanation. But I find it unconvincing, for several reasons.
First, there's pretty good evidence for explanation three. The original study was a phone study; when another study asked for actual payroll records, they found the same result the standard model would predict: fast food employment dropped in New Jersey. Additionally, as Kevin Murphy has pointed out, the survey started long after employers knew that a minimum wage hike was coming--he compares it to assessing a midnight curfew by comparing the number of teenagers on the street at 11:59 to the number on the street at 12:30.
But second, I have trouble arriving at a reasonable model for monopsony in minimum wage markets. The retail and fast food industries that employ most minimum wage workers have extremely low search costs on both sides of the market. The burger joints are all right there, next to the one you're already working at--if you can get to one fast food outlet, you can get to ten. Ditto retail stores. When they're hiring, they put signs right there in your window where you can see them. On the other side, the firms wait for someone to walk through the door, and put a hat on them. They don't spend six weeks calling your references and checking out your scholarly work.
Kathy G. likes heterogenous preferences between workers, which is to say workers liking different kinds of workplaces. This could also explain it. Except . . . in the fast food market? This seems unlikely. It's not like you're taking a lower wage at Wendy's because they have a great dental plan and they let you use the pool. The labor is unskilled, the wages are undifferentiated, and the benefits are nonexistent. Maybe there are some people out there who love Wendy's food, or Gap clothes, so much that they never want to consume anything else, making the employee discount super valuable. But I cannot believe that this group is sufficiently large to be driving the market. Besides, there's empirical evidence against this; most people do not stay in only one industry, much less only one firm.
There are a couple other small quibbles, each less convincing than the last; by the end of the debate, we were stuck on collusion, the most plausible thesis. Except it's not plausible. Fast food and retail are extremely fragmented, and also extremely competitive on extremely thin margins. Maybe this happens in some small towns, but they'd have to be awful small. My grandmother's town of 10,000 has dozens of minimum wage employers. Large cartels without legally enforceable deals almost always break down; the incentive to cheat is too high. They might not raise wages, but the perks would get nicer and nicer.
But more broadly, minimum wage markets don't look like we would expect a monopsony labor market to look. Retail and fast food employment is pretty sensitive to even pretty small changes in relative wages, which shouldn't be true if firms really have that kind of control over their labor force. Also, there's decent evidence that raising the minimum wage lowers employment among the groups most likely to be making the minimum wage, especially teenagers. Again, if monopsony were persistent in these labor markets, this is not what we would expect to see--at least, not if the government is doing a good job setting the minimum wage near the 'competitive' wage.
This long argument, which culminated in the (I hope not too boring) analysis above, is what I was thinking about when I wrote a two-sentence throwaway line. Kathy G. can certainly be forgiven for not knowing that; I hope that I can be forgiven for acting as if blogging were a conversation, rather than a lecture.
There's another lesson for new bloggers here, though, one that most of us had to learn the (very) hard way: when arguing with people you disagree with, it's better to leave yourself room to back down. Just off the top of my head, before declaring that the other person is an idiot who has no idea what they are talking about, you should be very, very sure that there is absolutely no possibility that they do know what they are talking about. You're coining a fact--Person X doesn't understand Theory Y. If it turns out that your analysis is wrong, my own hard-won experience is that you do more damage to your reputation than you could ever have hoped to do to theirs--I'd say the ratio is 3 or 4 to 1. So unless you're pretty confident that your opponent cannot demonstrate the basic familiarity you have confidently declared they lack, this one is almost never a win.
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/04/by_request_a_long_post_in_whic.php
Invité- Invité
Re: Salaire minimum: Ce que Steven Benoit ne pourra jamais comprendre
Invité Mer 11 Fév 2009 - 17:27
Malice,
Tenons ce débat à un titre impersonel, juste pour maintenir une certaine objectivité. Si l'on devra déterminer qui est coupable ou pas, ce sujet se melera à la politique et deviendra impossible à débattre.
Je vais introduire une notion pour mieux expliquer ma position sur ce sujet: le Cout d'Opportunité.
C'est quoi cela dans le contexte ou nous parlons.
L'ouvrier haitien, sur le marché du travail, choisit entre un ensemble d'opportunités avant d'aller vendre sa force de travail à un patron. Les opportunités qu'il a sont:
a) rester dans le milieu rural, labourer ses champs, et vendre des journées de travail à d'autres agriculteurs
b) rentrer en ville et devenir gardien chez quelqu'un plus aisé ou une petite entreprise
c) aller en Dominicanie et devenir Braceros avec les risques que cela comporte
d) pran kanntè pour les Iles Turcs et Caicos, Bahamas ou Floride
e) aller travailler dans les factoris pour le salaire minimum
Pour ceux qui choisissent l'option e) travailler dans les factoris, cette option est la plus optimale car nous savons que nous avons affaire à des gens rationnels. Donc, en dépit du faible montant gagné, cet ouvrier a fait un choix parmi un ensemble d'autres qu'il avait car il a laissé tomber a), b), c), ou d).
Donc, si nous devrons apporter des améliorations, nous devrons plutot améliorer les autres choix ou carrément apporter d'autres opportunités. Nous devrons éviter à tout prix de mettre en péril de chomage ce qui ont déjà un morceau de pain.
Raisonnons maintenant à l'envers. Imaginons que cette loi sur le salaire minimum est acceptée par les industriels et est appliquée.
Les gens qui ont fait la rhéto ou philo ne feront plus un choix optimal lorsqu'ils resteraient dans l'enseignement primaire ou secondaire pour gagner moins de 5,000 gourdes par mois. Cela signifie que ces instituteurs vont carrément aller travailler au Parc Industriel pour gagner plus. Du meme coup, les ouvriers que nous voulons aider iront au chomage car les patrons trouveront des gens plus qualifiés pour faire leur travail.
Honnetement, je me demande si ces parlementaires réfléchissent ou débattent avant de voter une loi.
Tenons ce débat à un titre impersonel, juste pour maintenir une certaine objectivité. Si l'on devra déterminer qui est coupable ou pas, ce sujet se melera à la politique et deviendra impossible à débattre.
Je vais introduire une notion pour mieux expliquer ma position sur ce sujet: le Cout d'Opportunité.
C'est quoi cela dans le contexte ou nous parlons.
L'ouvrier haitien, sur le marché du travail, choisit entre un ensemble d'opportunités avant d'aller vendre sa force de travail à un patron. Les opportunités qu'il a sont:
a) rester dans le milieu rural, labourer ses champs, et vendre des journées de travail à d'autres agriculteurs
b) rentrer en ville et devenir gardien chez quelqu'un plus aisé ou une petite entreprise
c) aller en Dominicanie et devenir Braceros avec les risques que cela comporte
d) pran kanntè pour les Iles Turcs et Caicos, Bahamas ou Floride
e) aller travailler dans les factoris pour le salaire minimum
Pour ceux qui choisissent l'option e) travailler dans les factoris, cette option est la plus optimale car nous savons que nous avons affaire à des gens rationnels. Donc, en dépit du faible montant gagné, cet ouvrier a fait un choix parmi un ensemble d'autres qu'il avait car il a laissé tomber a), b), c), ou d).
Donc, si nous devrons apporter des améliorations, nous devrons plutot améliorer les autres choix ou carrément apporter d'autres opportunités. Nous devrons éviter à tout prix de mettre en péril de chomage ce qui ont déjà un morceau de pain.
Raisonnons maintenant à l'envers. Imaginons que cette loi sur le salaire minimum est acceptée par les industriels et est appliquée.
Les gens qui ont fait la rhéto ou philo ne feront plus un choix optimal lorsqu'ils resteraient dans l'enseignement primaire ou secondaire pour gagner moins de 5,000 gourdes par mois. Cela signifie que ces instituteurs vont carrément aller travailler au Parc Industriel pour gagner plus. Du meme coup, les ouvriers que nous voulons aider iront au chomage car les patrons trouveront des gens plus qualifiés pour faire leur travail.
Honnetement, je me demande si ces parlementaires réfléchissent ou débattent avant de voter une loi.
Invité- Invité
Re: Salaire minimum: Ce que Steven Benoit ne pourra jamais comprendre
Rodlam Sans Malice Mer 11 Fév 2009 - 17:50
J'aimerais bien continuer ce debat pour apporter un peu de lumière et aider nos pauvres ouvriers ,mais il me semble que je comble la mer car vous trouvez tous les pretextes pour justifier votre point de vue.
En tant qu'agronome vous aviez assurement été dans les campagnes pour aider les cultivateurs;pensez vous que ceux qui ont laissé leur champ le font parcequ'ils sont paresseux?Vont-ils a la dominicanie parce qu'ils aiment plus les dominicians?Risquent -ils leur vie dans de freles embarcations pour gagner les cotes des iles bahamas ou la floride pour leur bon plaisir.C'est bien parce que le pays ne leur offre aucune opportunité.Pour resumer notre debat je vais vous poser cette question ;et vous devez avoir l'honnèteté de repondre franchement:Si vous etiez en haiti consentiriez-vous de travailler pour un salaire qui ne vous permette pas de nourrir votre famille?I do not want any but; and if.Si vous repondez negativement ;alors toutes vos considerations ne sont que des paroles ,paroles ,paroles , rien que des mots;toujours des mots. (lol)ce fut un plaisir quand meme.Bonne soirée.
En tant qu'agronome vous aviez assurement été dans les campagnes pour aider les cultivateurs;pensez vous que ceux qui ont laissé leur champ le font parcequ'ils sont paresseux?Vont-ils a la dominicanie parce qu'ils aiment plus les dominicians?Risquent -ils leur vie dans de freles embarcations pour gagner les cotes des iles bahamas ou la floride pour leur bon plaisir.C'est bien parce que le pays ne leur offre aucune opportunité.Pour resumer notre debat je vais vous poser cette question ;et vous devez avoir l'honnèteté de repondre franchement:Si vous etiez en haiti consentiriez-vous de travailler pour un salaire qui ne vous permette pas de nourrir votre famille?I do not want any but; and if.Si vous repondez negativement ;alors toutes vos considerations ne sont que des paroles ,paroles ,paroles , rien que des mots;toujours des mots. (lol)ce fut un plaisir quand meme.Bonne soirée.
Rodlam Sans Malice- Super Star
-
Nombre de messages : 11114
Localisation : USA
Loisirs : Lecture et Internet
Date d'inscription : 21/08/2006
Feuille de personnage
Jeu de rôle: Stock market
Re: Salaire minimum: Ce que Steven Benoit ne pourra jamais comprendre
Invité Mer 11 Fév 2009 - 20:38
Rodlam Sans Malice a écrit: Pour resumer notre debat je vais vous poser cette question ;et vous devez avoir l'honnèteté de repondre franchement:Si vous etiez en haiti consentiriez-vous de travailler pour un salaire qui ne vous permette pas de nourrir votre famille?I do not want any but; and if.Si vous repondez negativement ;alors toutes vos considerations ne sont que des paroles ,paroles ,paroles , rien que des mots;toujours des mots. (lol)ce fut un plaisir quand meme.Bonne soirée.
Malice,
Retenez tout d'abord que ces genres de débat sont plus importants que toutes les radotes discutées sur la politique en Haiti. Donc, nous ne sommes pas en train de perdre notre temps, bien que nous n'arrivions pas à trouver un compromis; d'ailleurs ce n'était pas le but. Le but était plutot de soulever un ensemble de questions pour mieux éclairer nos parlementaires et autres acteurs économiques afin qu'ils puissent balancer le pour et le contre. Je pense que nous avons atteint cet objectif.
Pour finir, je dois vous dire que je ne comprends pas trop bien votre question mais je vais essayer d'y répondre. Malheureusement, vous m'obligez à parler de ma vie privée pour répondre à cette question mais j'y réponds quand meme.
Ma mère, aux Etats-Unis, avait déjà travaillé pour le salaire minimum. Si aujourd'hui, je devrais travailler pour le salaire minimum aussi, cela signifierait qu'elle aurait échoué, je gaspillerais son courage. Je connais la douleur des gens de cette classe et c'est pourquoi cela m'enerve lorsque des politiciens rorott veulent les ridiculiser.
Non, non, et au grand jamais, je ne travaillerai pas pour le salaire minimum d'un agronome, voire le salaire minimum d'un ouvrier.
JER peut travailler pour ce salaire minimum, pas moi! (lol)
Mon cher, kenbe di. Menm lè nou pa ekonomist, nou eseye jan nou kapab konprann pwoblem sa a.
Pote oubien e bonn nuit.
Invité- Invité
Contenu sponsorisé
Page 2 sur 2 • 1, 2
Sujets similaires» Le problème n'a jamais été le salaire minimum.
» Qui est Steven Benoit?
» Loi sur le salaire minimum
» Steven Benoit ap make pwen
» Le depute Steven Benoit en action...
» Qui est Steven Benoit?
» Loi sur le salaire minimum
» Steven Benoit ap make pwen
» Le depute Steven Benoit en action...
Page 2 sur 2
Permission de ce forum:
Vous ne pouvez pas répondre aux sujets dans ce forum