Wal-mart asks its underpaid workers to donate food to other underpaid workers

[peter grimes]

The problem with minimum wage in the US is that far too many people wind up relying on it for most of their pay. It's not just the people who are payed the $7.50/hr - but the people who are payed 8, 8.50, even $10. Those people's wages are commonly established in relation to the minimum wage.

Depending on where you live, 2 incomes at 10/hr might be enough to not be in poverty. Certainly not where I live, though.

But raising the minimum wage would also inadvertently raise millions of other worker's wages as well.

 

[El_Machinae]

"Poverty" is tough to define. I have an infinitely better color TV than my great grandparents ever had. I'm at drastically less risk of contracting either smallpox or polio.

Usually, we set the poverty line at some percentage of your income of how much you spend on essentials. Food, shelter, travel, clothing. Now, obviously, you can overspend on these things, but you have to assume a fairly spartan lifestyle. BUT, if my rent takes up a larger portion of my paycheque AND my my apartment is worse AND my commute is longer than (say) my great-grandfather's, one could say that (in some ways) I'm poorer than he was. OTOH, if a lower portion of my paycheque or my time goes towards accumulating essential nutrition, I'd be wealthier on that front.
So, you can set poverty based on the cost of transport, a reasonable basket of food, a reasonable apartment, and reasonable travel expenses. If the amount of my income spent on these things rises, I'm probably getting poorer. And if the number of people rises who have to spend a specific percentage of their income (say 60%) on these things, people are getting poorer. All the freedom from polio in the world doesn't change the fact that I need to eat.

 

[Hygro]

And the physically harmful effects of being socially excluded by ever moving goalposts of purchasable items of decorum. A suit. A suit and a car. A suit and a car and a cell phone. A suit and a car and a cell phone and overseas experiences and a college degree and a gym body. Oh, you don't eat organic food?

As long as we live in a society in which we feel empathy for one another, and people are richer than others, and those richer people value emotionally their wealth, those less wealthy who trust and respect those richer will by nature of being empathetic feel degrees of shame for having less wealth.

 

[peter grimes]

Good points, El Machinae. And Hygro - I never thought about the empathy aspect.

I recall reading a very interesting ledger book we had a work. It was from ~1890 and listed weekly and monthly payments to employees. I didn't note their job, just their names.

From this we were able to figure out what portion of their wages went to certain things. Advances were given on the monthly wage and they might be for clothes- 2 shirts, pants, jacket. Or for food.

These people spent half their wages on food and clothing. Clothes, in particular, were far more of an expense for them than they are for me. But then again I don't have to wear a suit. Jeans / shorts and a casual shirt with or without a collar are fine.

 

[Hygro]

The flipside gets worse--when people with empathy capacity feel their superior wealth, or their potential, is causing distress to those less well off, they can feel the same shame. But to justify it, they externalize that shame in the form of judging the other. Shaming the other. And so then the poorer person feels double shame and the richer person feels this weird shame based superiority.

(I invite thread skimmers to read the top and skip the rest.)


(And then you get third party folks, as broke or average as anyone, chiming in, usually taking the side of the winners, driving a larger wedge between haves and have nots. And so forth. Society, yo).


Shame is one of the most powerful physiological motivators and feelings, and is a direct cause of health states. Particularly fatigue.

Now I dislike appealing to evolutionary psychology but it's my best so far: fatigue as a symptom of shame is socially good, because it means the tribe sees someone acting harmful and out of line. So they behave in a way that makes the guilty person feel ashamed (appealing to their empathy). A personality disordered narcissist will of course lash out and try to squelch the shamers and a sociopath won't care (no empathy capacity), but those with healthier empathy will get tired.

Aka: Person does bad, tribe reacts, person gets ashamed, body creates fatigue to stop person from acting beyond survival needs until the person can align his or herself with doing good, shame over, energy back, tribe protected.

But what if the reason for the shame is that we shame people, even if by mistake, for being poor? Poor folks will get even more tired! Try getting an education or working a little harder when you're tired. It's a super self-sustaining, terrible cycle.

So inequality goes a lot further than mere stuff. We have to be careful with inequality. I'm still trying to figure it out, but from my current vantage point, if we have neither
a) Social equality of results
b) Social equality of contribution

then we have a toxic system. FWIW a kind of Mr. Rogers libertarianism can go a long way to having a sustainable social-equality in the face of economic disparity. That requires really genuinely respecting poor people as equals, and recognizing value beyond wealth and even work. It also requires we respect rich people as equals and not more. And that might be even harder for many.

Spoiler For tangent about different social shame regimes :

Note: Southern poor white folk were happy to fight in defense of slavery, a system that gave them no economic benefit because it meant they were social equals to slave-owner whites. The Southern society used deliberate race-shame to stratify. The northern society meanwhile used economic-inequality to in-of-itself to class its members--though not by de jure. And once "go west" was no longer an option, and the New Deal/WW2 stimulus money ran out by the 1960s, we've had a big problem in this country.

 

[Borachio]

The take-home message of that, which is an interesting read Mr Hygro, is that it's better not to compare oneself to others? (Or is that the sociopath, not comparing?)

But if we don't compare, how will we know how we're doing?

Do we really need to know at all?

 

[Hygro]

The take-home message of that, which is an interesting read Mr Hygro, is that it's better not to compare oneself to others? (Or is that the sociopath, not comparing?)

But if we don't compare, how will we know how we're doing?

Do we really need to know at all?

Thanks! You ask interesting questions there, and hopefully we'll come up with some answers.

I find it telling that the hippie/youth movement, about respecting and valuing more than our economic circumstances, came about right when the economy stopped trending towards equality and shared growth. It would be many decades before we had clear proof and better theories to show that that's when it started happening.

What broke the movement is when the money started flowing again, but this time only to the top (beginning in early 70s, but really in 1981). Culture's gotten real weird since then. Psychiatric diagnoses exploding at the same time we the regular folk gain the potential for living the most awesome lives in history. Particularly high shame-correlation diagnoses. I don't think those things have to go in tandem at all.

 

[peter grimes]

I dislike appealing to evolutionary psychology as well, and in this case I think your post would have been stronger without that part

That said, I am in complete agreement with you that shame is a scary powerful event.

 

[Borachio]

Shame is, for sure, the principal mechanism for social control (for want of a better term).

But I don't see why it should necessarily be tied to wealth.

Personal wealth is only a comparatively recent invention isn't it?

 

[Hygro]

I dislike appealing to evolutionary psychology as well, and in this case I think your post would have been stronger without that part

That said, I am in complete agreement with you that shame is a scary powerful event.

It's like game theory except for anthropologic history Organizes a narrative, but yeah perhaps the argument is stronger without postulating a reason for why shame causes fatigue. How would you have argued it?

Shame is, for sure, the principal mechanism for social control (for want of a better term).

But I don't see why it should necessarily be tied to wealth.

Personal wealth is only a comparatively recent invention isn't it?

Yeah, it's unfortunate. Wealth is social, and so is shame by definition, so without some method of divorcing shame from wealth differences, it's gonna happen.

 

[Borachio]

I'm quite proud to be poor. I think it indicates that I've given all my wealth to other poor people.

(I haven't really. But rich people don't know that.)

 

[Traitorfish]

You also get crusties and New Age types and such, who seem quite impressed with themselves for being skint. But I'd guess they're too marginal to really effect the argument at a societal level.

 

[peter grimes]

It's like game theory except for anthropologic history Organizes a narrative, but yeah perhaps the argument is stronger without postulating a reason for why shame causes fatigue. How would you have argued it?

Good question! I don't know - I'm just an armchair critic. I think I'd have to move up to dining table critic before offering better ideas

The problem I have with the group selection angle that you wrote is that selection works on the level of genes carried in individuals. When those individuals are existing in groups of other individuals with a shared gene pool, group selection is only possible if there's rarely if ever any exogamy. We know this is not the normal course of affairs. Literally. Study after study shows that even in "monogamous" cultures there's tons of sex between people who shouldn't be enjoying eachother's company like that.

Only in very isolated populations could group selection have an effect - and even then, it doesn't take much outside "influence" to dilute the effect. Andaman islanders come to mind.

I suspect my understanding is not deep on this, and likely out of date. So I'd love it if someone else could comment more fully even if it's just to show how wrong I am.

But with humans (not hymenoptera, for which the genetic math actually works) group selection just isn't a factor.

 

[Borachio]

You also get crusties and New Age types and such, who seem quite impressed with themselves for being skint. But I'd guess they're too marginal to really effect the argument at a societal level.

I don't see why they couldn't affect the argument as much as anyone else.

 

[Archbob]

I'm quite proud to be poor. I think it indicates that I've given all my wealth to other poor people.

(I haven't really. But rich people don't know that.)

Sorry, but if your poor, rich people just think you are a worthless lazy bum.

 

[Traitorfish]

Nonsense. That would imply that they acknowledge the poor have any sort of internal life whatsoever.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

There in deed is some research saying that the greater the inequality the more everyone is unhappy and vice versa. It goes to show that beneath all the layers of egomania and ambition - what we all apparantly really want is be part of a disgustingly jolly-happy harmonious group. And those are ironically things extremely "unsexy" in this day and age. It is almost like the system teaches us to want the opposite of what we really want.
The realization of equality remains to appear extremely complex.
It reminds me of the the minimum wage which is soon to arrive in Germany as well (so far there is none). In polls there always was a strong majority in favor of it. Even though most people will not benefit from it and if anything will have to pay more to finance it. The actual amount may be negligible in production, but I think it will be noticeable in the service industry. So people are fine with that. But when someone wants to directly redistribute income, opinions look very different. It is like people are torn between wanting to be among equals and wanting to be justly compensated for their personal accomplishments. This yearning of justice is after all another human instinct which is very well established as a matter of fact.

 

[Traitorfish]

Except crusties, who know full well that they want to live in harmonious little groups. Also to live off food out of bins and wear clothes made mostly of repairs. Because apparently humans can only get like one thing right at a time.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

That may demonstrate the tension between equality and justice I edited in in my above post.
If you get your food out of bins and try to avoid buying cloths altogether it sounds like it goes hand in hand with not "accomplishing" a lot. With not "deserving" much other than the joy of socializing. So the question of justice in terms of what ones deserves compared to others doesn't offer much grounds for quarrels.
If on the other hand you want nice cloths and food and housing etcetera - you will only get it by "earning" it. You may not want to look down on those that don't. But your sense of justice may on some level tell you to nevertheless. Because why else would you deserve what you get in contrast tp them? And isn't it something they would like to but just didn't bother to earn it?

 

[Zelig]

Sorry, but if your poor, rich people just think you are a worthless lazy bum.

Yeah, but I don't discriminate, I think rich people are worthless lazy bums too.