Minimum Wages Are Required

I really love the classic film of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, so made a point a couple years ago to read the book, which I also greatly enjoyed.  One of the things that really struck me was how the prevailing wages for rough physical work that the family encounters actually falls basically below the point of being able to even afford adequate caloric intake to maintain that level of effort over time.  In one sequence the whole family works the whole day picking fruit at some farm, and the wages they're paid don't even buy a big enough meal to feed them all to satisfaction.  The next day they find the wages are even being cut further.  People were working for less money than it costs just to survive.

Now, you can say it's just a book, but I see no reason to doubt that this happens in extreme economic conditions, and Steinbeck was basing his work on actual visits he made to the Hoovervilles and camps these migrant workers created (which were actually worse than he portrays in the book; people really were starving to death).

There's plenty of room for debate about where the minimum wage should be set, but even if it was true that the minimum wage "costs jobs" I wouldn't be persuaded against its necessity in the face of the above.  Desperate people will work for near anything, and if a job's "marginal utility" is such that it pays less than survival wages, the worker is better off if that job doesn't exist.  Fortunately the empirical evidence is that the Econ 101 theory which says minimum wages kill low wage jobs is just flat false.

All economic discussions need to drop absolute dollar figures

The use of absolute dollar figures in economic discussions drives me crazy.  Given the realites of inflation and population growth, the absolute dollar figures for everything will nearly always be the highest in history.  In non-political terms, the one that bugs me most is the list of top grossing movies.  Compare that list (which doesn't have a movie made before 1993 in the top 20) to this list adjusted for inflation.  One can still quibble about these things, after all in the era of Gone With the Wind there wasn't things like television, TiVo and movie piracy, and clearly these things drove increased ticket sales.  Still, the point should be obvious that you cannot measure the "top grossing" movies in unadjusted dollars and expect to get any kind of fair comparison. 

In politics, this sort of thing is far worse.  Today's example from the Politico:

The White House anticipates unemployment at 8.25 percent, and Goldman Sachs and others warn the number could be higher — close to 9 percent, which would mean no net job growth after the biggest stimulus package in the history of the world. No president has won reelection when unemployment was higher than 7.2 percent in 50 years.

I don't doubt this is true in absolute dollar figures.  But "the history of the world" is a big claim.  Was the ARRA really bigger than the construction of the Great Wall of China?  Bigger than World War II?  Bigger than the Great Pyramids?   Only a comparison using relative economic indicators (such as ratio to GDP, or some kind of inflation adjusted metric) could possibly tell you this.  Anyone who has more than glanced Krugman's direction over the past several years will know the serious economic objections to this claim anyway:  1) ARRA was far too laden with poorly stimulative tax cuts and 2) It really only counteracted the precipitous decline in State government spending so that there was no net government stimulus. In fact, once you adopt a metric that compares to the size of the economy, it's clear the US stimulus program wasn't even the biggest one in the world in 2009 - Saudi Arabia's program was bigger as a percentage of GDP. 

Leaving aside the ancient examples, it's pretty clear to me that WWII remains the biggest stimulus program ever in any meaningful sense worth discussing.  That WWII wasn't explicitly designed as a stimulus program doesn't matter, as the theory driving stimulus only requires that a) the economy be under utilized and b) that government spend a lot of money, which clearly fits the bill c1939-1942. 

I think this can be fixed.  The general public understands a surprising number of abstract and relative metrics.  We typically measure unemployment as a percentage, and not in absolute terms.  People have some sense of what "GDP" is (though I doubt many could tell you how it is calculated).  It's sloppy journalism (unsurprising from the Politico) and it opens the door to various dishonest demagogues with agendas to push.