Re: inflation
One of the things I believe that minimum wages may lead to is wage compression. Though I've not been reading about economics for a while, so this theory may no longer be popular. But the idea is you push wages up at the bottom, but the wages a bit above that don't go up to compensate. So you end up with more people on the minimum wage. Not that anyone's have gone down.
It's non-controversial that minimum wages cost jobs. There are some things that may be economic at £5 an hour, but not at £7 say. And also there are some robots that may not be economic when you can pay someone £5 an hour, but become cost effective at £7.
But wages are also a price. They're what companies have to pay to get stuff done. So what drives wages up is when they can't get the staff to do something for the current wage.
There are still labour shortages in the economy - so we don't need to be worried about robots putting us all out of work just yet.
I also don't have the faith in AI suddenly becoming magic that many people seem to do.
One of the problems is that modern economies do pretty much work as advertised, they are self-correcting but they don't do it fast enough. Plus we're not very good at moving between different skillsets. On the other hand, planned economies work even less well, and make even more people miserable and poor than market ones. So I guess we need government to do a better job at tidying up the messes. So better adult education services for a start.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
