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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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First, full time wages isn't how median income is calculated. It's simply taxable income, could be from capital gains, inheritance, working part time etc.
If we switch to full time employee, are we ignoring shiftwork? Counting it as full time if they have enough hours? (Which really starts to skew when you think about the service industry where a bartender or server walks out with a few hundred for a few hours hard work.)
But let's just ignore all that, pretend everyone is on a 40 hour a week job. Even so, again at the low end you still run into oddities that really warp the statistics. When I was 16 - 21 I had a full time job as a camp counsellor but a large part of my wages were what's called "in kind" wherein they covered my food and board. When I was in school, I worked security and made minimum wage but with the understanding I could do my schoolwork (in essence, another type of in-kind pay) so I took that over a better paying job. Similarly, you might have apprentice or entry wages. Or as above, a program that gets special needs folks a job eith a willing employer where some of the wage is shared by the government or goes to paying the costs associated with employing that person. (Consider these programs from the employer's perspective, if the employer was paying the same wage regardless, why would they hire someone with challenges etc when they could hire someone who wouldn't require accomodations.) Again, all of this stuff happens at the very bottom and really isn't a good indicator of the economy.
If you did large bottom swathes, bottom 10/20 % you'd still have some of these issues but they'd get smoothed out a little bit.
Yes, we are 100% looking at people working 40 hours a week for this particular insight. The basis is, our economy is only baseline good if the least paid full time worker makes a living wage. Any other answer is a fail. Incentives for employers to hire staff from traditionally underserved persons can absolutely be affected through better means than giving them less of a share of their work.
As well, the question above that spawned this little thread was: Why would the lowest full time annual wage be the best measure of anything to do with an economy?
How the lowest paid full time worker is compensated is a keystone data point. The current full time yearly pay for a standard worker (should be ANY full time worker if the economy was good) is $15,080 a year. Before taxes and workers comp and health insurance. Not nearly enough for someone to survive, nonetheless better their situation. The underserved populations are getting even less currently, which should really grind your gears.
It is not the only data point that’s important, but to suggest it’s useless as a data point is ridiculous
Amd to answer OP's question, I've given a bunch of examples of people where measuring their full time wage would be a poor measure of their situation and equally, a poor measure of the economy.
Can you explain why you think the lowest, which is going to be full of outliers and silliness would be more meaningful than say, the median for the bottom 15 or 20%?
To me, any measure that could count Larry Ellison, Elon Musk or Meg Whitman, all of whom have at one point received $1 annual salary, as grievously poor seems silly and pretty poor indicator of the economy but maybe you understand something I don't?
Because it’s not okay to write off underserved and disadvantaged as “silliness.” How we treat the least of our people says a great deal about how “good” the economy is.
The least paid full time worker should be able to live on the federal minimum wage. They can’t. That should be a huge red flag to anyone who A) cares about people in general and B) understands that corporate profit doesn’t equal a good economy.
And yes, people should be able to waive the salary they are entitled to and take $1 instead, of their own volition. But that has nothing to do with the question: how could the lowest paid full time wage be the best measure of anything in our economy? It absolutely the best indicator of our humanity and empathy (or lack thereof). You could look at the median of the bottom 2% but it wouldn’t point to our failures we need to fix as clearly as looking at the lowest paid full time salary.
*bottom 20%
Again, there are people whose salary is $1 but they are multi millionaires/billionaires.
So, your measure would "show" people trying to live on $1 a year as that is their full time wage. But surely we both understand this would be a poor measure of what you're hoping to achieve?