Friday, 29 January 2021
Thursday, 28 January 2021
Wednesday, 27 January 2021
Covid lies cost lives – we have a duty to clamp down on them
George Monbiot in The Guardian
Why do we value lies more than lives? We know that certain falsehoods kill people. Some of those who believe such claims as “coronavirus doesn’t exist”, “it’s not the virus that makes people ill but 5G”, or “vaccines are used to inject us with microchips” fail to take precautions or refuse to be vaccinated, then contract and spread the virus. Yet we allow these lies to proliferate.
We have a right to speak freely. We also have a right to life. When malicious disinformation – claims that are known to be both false and dangerous – can spread without restraint, these two values collide head-on. One of them must give way, and the one we have chosen to sacrifice is human life. We treat free speech as sacred, but life as negotiable. When governments fail to ban outright lies that endanger people’s lives, I believe they make the wrong choice.
Any control by governments of what we may say is dangerous, especially when the government, like ours, has authoritarian tendencies. But the absence of control is also dangerous. In theory, we recognise that there are necessary limits to free speech: almost everyone agrees that we should not be free to shout “fire!” in a crowded theatre, because people are likely to be trampled to death. Well, people are being trampled to death by these lies. Surely the line has been crossed?
Those who demand absolute freedom of speech often talk about “the marketplace of ideas”. But in a marketplace, you are forbidden to make false claims about your product. You cannot pass one thing off as another. You cannot sell shares on a false prospectus. You are legally prohibited from making money by lying to your customers. In other words, in the marketplace there are limits to free speech. So where, in the marketplace of ideas, are the trading standards? Who regulates the weights and measures? Who checks the prospectus? We protect money from lies more carefully than we protect human life.
I believe that spreading only the most dangerous falsehoods, like those mentioned in the first paragraph, should be prohibited. A possible template is the Cancer Act, which bans people from advertising cures or treatments for cancer. A ban on the worst Covid lies should be time-limited, running for perhaps six months. I would like to see an expert committee, similar to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), identifying claims that present a genuine danger to life and proposing their temporary prohibition to parliament.
While this measure would apply only to the most extreme cases, we should be far more alert to the dangers of misinformation in general. Even though it states that the pundits it names are not deliberately spreading false information, the new Anti-Virus site www.covidfaq.co might help to tip the balance against people such as Allison Pearson, Peter Hitchens and Sunetra Gupta, who have made such public headway with their misleading claims about the pandemic.
But how did these claims become so prominent? They achieved traction only because they were given a massive platform in the media, particularly in the Telegraph, the Mail and – above all – the house journal of unscientific gibberish, the Spectator. Their most influential outlet is the BBC. The BBC has an unerring instinct for misjudging where debate about a matter of science lies. It thrills to the sound of noisy, ill-informed contrarians. As the conservationist Stephen Barlow argues, science denial is destroying our societies and the survival of life on Earth. Yet it is treated by the media as a form of entertainment. The bigger the idiot, the greater the airtime.
Interestingly, all but one of the journalists mentioned on the Anti-Virus site also have a long track record of downplaying and, in some cases, denying, climate breakdown. Peter Hitchens, for example, has dismissed not only human-made global heating, but the greenhouse effect itself. Today, climate denial has mostly dissipated in this country, perhaps because the BBC has at last stopped treating climate change as a matter of controversy, and Channel 4 no longer makes films claiming that climate science is a scam. The broadcasters kept this disinformation alive, just as the BBC, still providing a platform for misleading claims this month, sustains falsehoods about the pandemic.
Ironies abound, however. One of the founders of the admirable Anti-Virus site is Sam Bowman, a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute (ASI). This is an opaquely funded lobby group with a long history of misleading claims about science that often seem to align with its ideology or the interests of its funders. For example, it has downplayed the dangers of tobacco smoke, and argued against smoking bans in pubs and plain packaging for cigarettes. In 2013, the Observer revealed that it had been taking money from tobacco companies. Bowman himself, echoing arguments made by the tobacco industry, has called for the “lifting [of] all EU-wide regulations on cigarette packaging” on the grounds of “civil liberties”. He has also railed against government funding for public health messages about the dangers of smoking.
Some of the ASI’s past claims about climate science – such as statements that the planet is “failing to warm” and that climate science is becoming “completely and utterly discredited” – are as idiotic as the claims about the pandemic that Bowman rightly exposes. The ASI’s Neoliberal Manifesto, published in 2019, maintains, among other howlers, that “fewer people are malnourished than ever before”. In reality, malnutrition has been rising since 2014. If Bowman is serious about being a defender of science, perhaps he could call out some of the falsehoods spread by his own organisation.
Lobby groups funded by plutocrats and corporations are responsible for much of the misinformation that saturates public life. The launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, for example, that champions herd immunity through mass infection with the help of discredited claims, was hosted – physically and online – by the American Institute for Economic Research. This institute has received money from the Charles Koch Foundation, and takes a wide range of anti-environmental positions.
It’s not surprising that we have an inveterate liar as prime minister: this government has emerged from a culture of rightwing misinformation, weaponised by thinktanks and lobby groups. False claims are big business: rich people and organisations will pay handsomely for others to spread them. Some of those whom the BBC used to “balance” climate scientists in its debates were professional liars paid by fossil-fuel companies.
Over the past 30 years, I have watched this business model spread like a virus through public life. Perhaps it is futile to call for a government of liars to regulate lies. But while conspiracy theorists make a killing from their false claims, we should at least name the standards that a good society would set, even if we can’t trust the current government to uphold them.
Why do we value lies more than lives? We know that certain falsehoods kill people. Some of those who believe such claims as “coronavirus doesn’t exist”, “it’s not the virus that makes people ill but 5G”, or “vaccines are used to inject us with microchips” fail to take precautions or refuse to be vaccinated, then contract and spread the virus. Yet we allow these lies to proliferate.
We have a right to speak freely. We also have a right to life. When malicious disinformation – claims that are known to be both false and dangerous – can spread without restraint, these two values collide head-on. One of them must give way, and the one we have chosen to sacrifice is human life. We treat free speech as sacred, but life as negotiable. When governments fail to ban outright lies that endanger people’s lives, I believe they make the wrong choice.
Any control by governments of what we may say is dangerous, especially when the government, like ours, has authoritarian tendencies. But the absence of control is also dangerous. In theory, we recognise that there are necessary limits to free speech: almost everyone agrees that we should not be free to shout “fire!” in a crowded theatre, because people are likely to be trampled to death. Well, people are being trampled to death by these lies. Surely the line has been crossed?
Those who demand absolute freedom of speech often talk about “the marketplace of ideas”. But in a marketplace, you are forbidden to make false claims about your product. You cannot pass one thing off as another. You cannot sell shares on a false prospectus. You are legally prohibited from making money by lying to your customers. In other words, in the marketplace there are limits to free speech. So where, in the marketplace of ideas, are the trading standards? Who regulates the weights and measures? Who checks the prospectus? We protect money from lies more carefully than we protect human life.
I believe that spreading only the most dangerous falsehoods, like those mentioned in the first paragraph, should be prohibited. A possible template is the Cancer Act, which bans people from advertising cures or treatments for cancer. A ban on the worst Covid lies should be time-limited, running for perhaps six months. I would like to see an expert committee, similar to the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), identifying claims that present a genuine danger to life and proposing their temporary prohibition to parliament.
While this measure would apply only to the most extreme cases, we should be far more alert to the dangers of misinformation in general. Even though it states that the pundits it names are not deliberately spreading false information, the new Anti-Virus site www.covidfaq.co might help to tip the balance against people such as Allison Pearson, Peter Hitchens and Sunetra Gupta, who have made such public headway with their misleading claims about the pandemic.
But how did these claims become so prominent? They achieved traction only because they were given a massive platform in the media, particularly in the Telegraph, the Mail and – above all – the house journal of unscientific gibberish, the Spectator. Their most influential outlet is the BBC. The BBC has an unerring instinct for misjudging where debate about a matter of science lies. It thrills to the sound of noisy, ill-informed contrarians. As the conservationist Stephen Barlow argues, science denial is destroying our societies and the survival of life on Earth. Yet it is treated by the media as a form of entertainment. The bigger the idiot, the greater the airtime.
Interestingly, all but one of the journalists mentioned on the Anti-Virus site also have a long track record of downplaying and, in some cases, denying, climate breakdown. Peter Hitchens, for example, has dismissed not only human-made global heating, but the greenhouse effect itself. Today, climate denial has mostly dissipated in this country, perhaps because the BBC has at last stopped treating climate change as a matter of controversy, and Channel 4 no longer makes films claiming that climate science is a scam. The broadcasters kept this disinformation alive, just as the BBC, still providing a platform for misleading claims this month, sustains falsehoods about the pandemic.
Ironies abound, however. One of the founders of the admirable Anti-Virus site is Sam Bowman, a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute (ASI). This is an opaquely funded lobby group with a long history of misleading claims about science that often seem to align with its ideology or the interests of its funders. For example, it has downplayed the dangers of tobacco smoke, and argued against smoking bans in pubs and plain packaging for cigarettes. In 2013, the Observer revealed that it had been taking money from tobacco companies. Bowman himself, echoing arguments made by the tobacco industry, has called for the “lifting [of] all EU-wide regulations on cigarette packaging” on the grounds of “civil liberties”. He has also railed against government funding for public health messages about the dangers of smoking.
Some of the ASI’s past claims about climate science – such as statements that the planet is “failing to warm” and that climate science is becoming “completely and utterly discredited” – are as idiotic as the claims about the pandemic that Bowman rightly exposes. The ASI’s Neoliberal Manifesto, published in 2019, maintains, among other howlers, that “fewer people are malnourished than ever before”. In reality, malnutrition has been rising since 2014. If Bowman is serious about being a defender of science, perhaps he could call out some of the falsehoods spread by his own organisation.
Lobby groups funded by plutocrats and corporations are responsible for much of the misinformation that saturates public life. The launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, for example, that champions herd immunity through mass infection with the help of discredited claims, was hosted – physically and online – by the American Institute for Economic Research. This institute has received money from the Charles Koch Foundation, and takes a wide range of anti-environmental positions.
It’s not surprising that we have an inveterate liar as prime minister: this government has emerged from a culture of rightwing misinformation, weaponised by thinktanks and lobby groups. False claims are big business: rich people and organisations will pay handsomely for others to spread them. Some of those whom the BBC used to “balance” climate scientists in its debates were professional liars paid by fossil-fuel companies.
Over the past 30 years, I have watched this business model spread like a virus through public life. Perhaps it is futile to call for a government of liars to regulate lies. But while conspiracy theorists make a killing from their false claims, we should at least name the standards that a good society would set, even if we can’t trust the current government to uphold them.
Tuesday, 26 January 2021
Indians have put their republic on a pedestal, forgotten to practise it each day
Nitin Pai in The Print
One fell swoop
This sounds gloomy and pessimistic, and no one today can honestly say that they expect public officials — at any tier of government — to uphold their constitutional duty regardless of popular prejudices, political partisanship or monetary inducements. If we are asked to name public officials and institutions that can be relied upon to do their duty, come what may, we will perhaps find only a handful. Reversing the direction where the finger is pointed, do we “expect” public officials to do what they constitutionally ought to, or do what we want them to? If we do not see the difference between the two, we are guiltier than charged.
It is not difficult to see why the Indian republic is under stress. It enshrines values and norms that were — and unfortunately still are — far ahead of the society it sought to govern. In one fell swoop, it overturned a social order that had been in place for centuries. It recognised the primacy of the individual in a land where endogamous communities governed social life, and where hard hierarchies were entrenched. It sought to shape a modern polity based on civic nationalism, while trying to rub out ancient divisions of caste, creed and religion. As perhaps the only constitution that sought to enshrine a progressive social revolution — it suffered a backlash from the day it came into force. It did not help that the leaders of the new republic lost interest in educating its citizens about its importance, leaving it to desultory civics classes in high schools that involved memorising a few sentences without understanding any of them.
It’s Republic Day. We will celebrate it as usual with a grand military parade in New Delhi, and flag-hoisting functions at government offices, educational institutions, apartment complexes and neighbourhoods. We will sing patriotic songs, honour our soldiers, listen to a speech by a chief guest and enjoy the rest of the holiday. In some of these functions, we will read out the Preamble to the Constitution aloud, a very good practice that started in recent years and one that ought to become more popular. These apart, there are some unusual developments this year with the invited foreign dignitary unable to turn up in New Delhi and uninvited farmers turning up in their thousands instead, for their very own Republic Day parade.
We have put the Indian republic on a high pedestal. In practice, though, the Indian republic is crumbling for the want of care. We publicly venerate the republic, even worship the Constitution, but we cannot care less about upholding it in practice. From the humblest citizen who wilfully violates traffic rules, to the middle-class businessman who cheats on taxes, to the public officials who line their pockets, to political leaders who use state power boundlessly, to judges and other constitutional authorities who bend in the direction of the prevailing winds, everyone pays respect to the Constitution. We all celebrate 26 January.
Yet the sum total of our actions leaves the republic weaker by the day. The crumbling started a couple of generations ago, slowly at first. Now, it is in a landslide. As I wrote in a column last month, “We are not even aware of the dangers of this deficiency…there is scarcely a whimper at the constant, popular undermining of the republic.”
We have put the Indian republic on a high pedestal. In practice, though, the Indian republic is crumbling for the want of care. We publicly venerate the republic, even worship the Constitution, but we cannot care less about upholding it in practice. From the humblest citizen who wilfully violates traffic rules, to the middle-class businessman who cheats on taxes, to the public officials who line their pockets, to political leaders who use state power boundlessly, to judges and other constitutional authorities who bend in the direction of the prevailing winds, everyone pays respect to the Constitution. We all celebrate 26 January.
Yet the sum total of our actions leaves the republic weaker by the day. The crumbling started a couple of generations ago, slowly at first. Now, it is in a landslide. As I wrote in a column last month, “We are not even aware of the dangers of this deficiency…there is scarcely a whimper at the constant, popular undermining of the republic.”
One fell swoop
This sounds gloomy and pessimistic, and no one today can honestly say that they expect public officials — at any tier of government — to uphold their constitutional duty regardless of popular prejudices, political partisanship or monetary inducements. If we are asked to name public officials and institutions that can be relied upon to do their duty, come what may, we will perhaps find only a handful. Reversing the direction where the finger is pointed, do we “expect” public officials to do what they constitutionally ought to, or do what we want them to? If we do not see the difference between the two, we are guiltier than charged.
It is not difficult to see why the Indian republic is under stress. It enshrines values and norms that were — and unfortunately still are — far ahead of the society it sought to govern. In one fell swoop, it overturned a social order that had been in place for centuries. It recognised the primacy of the individual in a land where endogamous communities governed social life, and where hard hierarchies were entrenched. It sought to shape a modern polity based on civic nationalism, while trying to rub out ancient divisions of caste, creed and religion. As perhaps the only constitution that sought to enshrine a progressive social revolution — it suffered a backlash from the day it came into force. It did not help that the leaders of the new republic lost interest in educating its citizens about its importance, leaving it to desultory civics classes in high schools that involved memorising a few sentences without understanding any of them.
Republic in practice
B.R. Ambedkar’s greatness lies as much in his prescience as in his powerful intellect. He was right on the mark when he said, “However good a Constitution may be, if those who are implementing it are not good, it will prove to be bad. However bad a Constitution may be, if those implementing it are good, it will prove to be good.” So it is important to heed his most important warning. He said that India risks losing its freedom again if we fail to do three things: first, “hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives”; second, not “to lay [our] liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with power which enable him to subvert [our] institutions”; and third, “we must make our political democracy a social democracy as well”.
Statues of Ambedkar often show him holding the Constitution in one hand, his other arm outstretched, finger pointed forward. The metaphor is brilliant. Yet we have put him on a pedestal too, making a public show of respecting him while doing the opposite of what he wanted us to do. It’s now more urgent than ever to follow the direction that he is seen pointing towards.
To preserve, protect and strengthen the Indian republic, we need to look no further than Ambedkar’s three guidances: insist on constitutional methods, avoid sycophancy, and recognise “liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life”.
A nation as large and diverse as India cannot painlessly execute a sudden change in direction. Individual citizens, public officials or leaders cannot change overnight. But we can make small changes at the margin. Everyone becoming just a little bit more law-abiding; just a little more sceptical about our leaders, parties and ideologies; and a little more conscious of our privileges and prejudices will get us back to ensuring that India is a living republic, a republic in practice than merely one on a pedestal.
B.R. Ambedkar’s greatness lies as much in his prescience as in his powerful intellect. He was right on the mark when he said, “However good a Constitution may be, if those who are implementing it are not good, it will prove to be bad. However bad a Constitution may be, if those implementing it are good, it will prove to be good.” So it is important to heed his most important warning. He said that India risks losing its freedom again if we fail to do three things: first, “hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives”; second, not “to lay [our] liberties at the feet of even a great man, or to trust him with power which enable him to subvert [our] institutions”; and third, “we must make our political democracy a social democracy as well”.
Statues of Ambedkar often show him holding the Constitution in one hand, his other arm outstretched, finger pointed forward. The metaphor is brilliant. Yet we have put him on a pedestal too, making a public show of respecting him while doing the opposite of what he wanted us to do. It’s now more urgent than ever to follow the direction that he is seen pointing towards.
To preserve, protect and strengthen the Indian republic, we need to look no further than Ambedkar’s three guidances: insist on constitutional methods, avoid sycophancy, and recognise “liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life”.
A nation as large and diverse as India cannot painlessly execute a sudden change in direction. Individual citizens, public officials or leaders cannot change overnight. But we can make small changes at the margin. Everyone becoming just a little bit more law-abiding; just a little more sceptical about our leaders, parties and ideologies; and a little more conscious of our privileges and prejudices will get us back to ensuring that India is a living republic, a republic in practice than merely one on a pedestal.
Monday, 25 January 2021
As Joe Biden moves to double the US minimum wage, Australia can't be complacent
Van Badham in The Guardian
When I was writing about minimum wages for the Guardian six years ago, the United States only guaranteed workers US$7.25 an hour as a minimum rate of pay, dropping to a shocking US$2.13 for workers in industries that expect customers to tip (some states have higher minimum wages).
It is now 2021, and yet those federal rates remain exactly the same.
They’ve not moved since 2009. Meaningfully, America’s minimum wages have been in decline since their relative purchasing power peaked in 1968. Meanwhile, America’s cost of living has kept going up; the minimum wage is worth less now than it was half a century ago.
Now, new president Joe Biden’s $1.9tn pandemic relief plan proposes a doubling of the US federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
It’s a position advocated both by economists who have studied comprehensive, positive effects of minimum wage increases across the world, as well as American unions of the “Fight for 15” campaign who’ve been organising minimum-wage workplaces demanding better for their members.
The logic of these arguments have been accepted across the ideological spectrum of leadership in Biden’s Democratic party. The majority of Biden’s rivals for the Democratic nomination – Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and even billionaire capitalist Mike Bloomberg – are all on record supporting it and in very influential positions to advance it now.
In a 14 January speech, Biden made a simple and powerful case. “No one working 40 hours a week should live below the poverty line,” he said. “If you work for less than $15 an hour and work 40 hours a week, you’re living in poverty.”
And yet the forces opposed to minimum wage increases retain the intensity that first fought attempts at its introduction, as far back as the 1890s. America did not adopt the policy until 1938 – 31 years after Australia’s Harvester Decision legislated an explicit right for a family of four “to live in frugal comfort” within our wage standards.
When I was writing about minimum wages for the Guardian six years ago, the United States only guaranteed workers US$7.25 an hour as a minimum rate of pay, dropping to a shocking US$2.13 for workers in industries that expect customers to tip (some states have higher minimum wages).
It is now 2021, and yet those federal rates remain exactly the same.
They’ve not moved since 2009. Meaningfully, America’s minimum wages have been in decline since their relative purchasing power peaked in 1968. Meanwhile, America’s cost of living has kept going up; the minimum wage is worth less now than it was half a century ago.
Now, new president Joe Biden’s $1.9tn pandemic relief plan proposes a doubling of the US federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.
It’s a position advocated both by economists who have studied comprehensive, positive effects of minimum wage increases across the world, as well as American unions of the “Fight for 15” campaign who’ve been organising minimum-wage workplaces demanding better for their members.
The logic of these arguments have been accepted across the ideological spectrum of leadership in Biden’s Democratic party. The majority of Biden’s rivals for the Democratic nomination – Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker and even billionaire capitalist Mike Bloomberg – are all on record supporting it and in very influential positions to advance it now.
In a 14 January speech, Biden made a simple and powerful case. “No one working 40 hours a week should live below the poverty line,” he said. “If you work for less than $15 an hour and work 40 hours a week, you’re living in poverty.”
And yet the forces opposed to minimum wage increases retain the intensity that first fought attempts at its introduction, as far back as the 1890s. America did not adopt the policy until 1938 – 31 years after Australia’s Harvester Decision legislated an explicit right for a family of four “to live in frugal comfort” within our wage standards.
As an Australian, it’s easy to feel smug about our framework. The concept is so ingrained within our basic industrial contract we consume it almost mindlessly, in the manner our cousins might gobble a hotdog in the stands of a Sox game.
But in both cases, the appreciation of the taste depends on your level of distraction from the meat. While wage-earning Australians may tut-tut an American framework that presently allows 7 million people to both hold jobs and live in poverty, local agitation persists for the Americanisation of our own established standards.
When I wrote about minimum wages six years ago, it was in the context of Australia’s Liberal government attempting to erode and compromise them. That government is still in power and that activism from the Liberals and their spruikers is still present. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry campaigned against minimum wage increases last year. So did the federal government – using the economic downtown of coronavirus as a foil to repeat American mythologies about higher wages causing unemployment increases.
They don’t. The “supply side” insistence is that labour is a transactable commodity, and therefore subject to a law of demand in which better-paid jobs equate to fewer employment opportunities … but a neoclassical economic model is not real life.
We know this because some American districts have independently increased their minimum wages over the past few years, and data from places like New York and Seattle has reaffirmed what’s been observed in the UK and internationally. There is no discernible impact on employment when minimum wage is increased. An impact on prices is also fleeting.
As Biden presses his case, economists, sociologists and even health researchers have years of additional data to back him in. Repeated studies have found that increasing the minimum wage results in communities having less crime, less poverty, less inequality and more economic growth. One study suggested it helped bring down the suicide rate. Conversely, with greater wage suppression comes more smoking, drinking, eating of fatty foods and poorer health outcomes overall.
Only the threadbare counter-argument remains that improving the income of “burger-flippers” somehow devalues the labour of qualified paramedics, teachers and ironworkers. This is both classist and weak. Removing impediments to collective bargaining and unionisation is actually what enables workers – across all industries – to negotiate an appropriate pay level.
Australians have been living with the comparative benefits of these assumptions for decades, and have been spared the vicissitudes of America’s boom-bust economic cycles in that time.
But after seven years of Liberal government policy actively corroding standards into a historical wage stagnation, if Biden’s proposals pass, the American minimum wage will suddenly leapfrog Australia’s, in both real dollar terms and purchasing power.
It’ll be a sad day of realisation for Australia to see the Americans overtake us, while we try to comprehend just why we decided to get left behind.
But in both cases, the appreciation of the taste depends on your level of distraction from the meat. While wage-earning Australians may tut-tut an American framework that presently allows 7 million people to both hold jobs and live in poverty, local agitation persists for the Americanisation of our own established standards.
When I wrote about minimum wages six years ago, it was in the context of Australia’s Liberal government attempting to erode and compromise them. That government is still in power and that activism from the Liberals and their spruikers is still present. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry campaigned against minimum wage increases last year. So did the federal government – using the economic downtown of coronavirus as a foil to repeat American mythologies about higher wages causing unemployment increases.
They don’t. The “supply side” insistence is that labour is a transactable commodity, and therefore subject to a law of demand in which better-paid jobs equate to fewer employment opportunities … but a neoclassical economic model is not real life.
We know this because some American districts have independently increased their minimum wages over the past few years, and data from places like New York and Seattle has reaffirmed what’s been observed in the UK and internationally. There is no discernible impact on employment when minimum wage is increased. An impact on prices is also fleeting.
As Biden presses his case, economists, sociologists and even health researchers have years of additional data to back him in. Repeated studies have found that increasing the minimum wage results in communities having less crime, less poverty, less inequality and more economic growth. One study suggested it helped bring down the suicide rate. Conversely, with greater wage suppression comes more smoking, drinking, eating of fatty foods and poorer health outcomes overall.
Only the threadbare counter-argument remains that improving the income of “burger-flippers” somehow devalues the labour of qualified paramedics, teachers and ironworkers. This is both classist and weak. Removing impediments to collective bargaining and unionisation is actually what enables workers – across all industries – to negotiate an appropriate pay level.
Australians have been living with the comparative benefits of these assumptions for decades, and have been spared the vicissitudes of America’s boom-bust economic cycles in that time.
But after seven years of Liberal government policy actively corroding standards into a historical wage stagnation, if Biden’s proposals pass, the American minimum wage will suddenly leapfrog Australia’s, in both real dollar terms and purchasing power.
It’ll be a sad day of realisation for Australia to see the Americans overtake us, while we try to comprehend just why we decided to get left behind.
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