A policy that requires job hopping to get good wages discriminates against people who are less mobile: workers with families, elderly parents, older workers with more ties to their neighborhood, people who don’t have enough savings to move, people who can't afford transportation...

I’m not sure that raising the median wage is even more desirable than raising the minimum wage. If the median wage enables a good life but, say, the lowest quartile is precarious exploitative jobs close to the poverty line then raising the minimum should increase overall happiness more than just raising the median.

This is essentially how the job market is structured in Denmark, and it works very well. We provide strong safety nets, free healthcare, etc, but in return, employers are given wide latitude to fire employees. This allows them to remain unusually flexible in a European context - responding to market changes much faster than almost any other European nation. We don't even have a minimum wage. Despite this, people can and do leave when an employer treats them badly or pays them poorly. This forces employers to offer reasonable wages and working conditions, or they lose their employees. For example, in 2021, Dansk Arbejdsgiverforening measured that 38.4% of employees in their member companies changed jobs. This was during a period when inflation jumped but employers were too slow to increase wages. While this should not be extrapolated to the entire economy, it provides an anchor to understand just how dynamic our job market is.

This is the standard in the Scandinavian social democracies. They have no minimum wage laws (though unions supplement that greatly) and a competitive labor market pushes wages up.

Much like housing, the best solution usually isn't government price controls. Better (if feasible) is abundance in the market.

> enables and incentivizes job hopping

I've often felt that I'm not very good at a particular company until I've been there 4 years... then I can really do good work. I wonder if there is any downside for society to incentivize switching often.

The more turnover the more leadership wants to keep talent. The more turnover the more hiring leadership needs to keep headcount.

Greater turnover is good for all employees and worse for employers

I was thinking the time it takes to find a job is good indicator of how hard it is to switch jobs, if that was tracked and reduced that would be good for workers.

Reforming tax incentives to prevent health insurance from being coupled with employment would be a major improvement on this front.

> any policy that makes job hopping harder than staying would suppress the wage level

Like healthcare being tied to employment?

Your job hopping comment is interesting and is generalisable: reduce monopsony in the labour market, and you get more competition for labour that actually bites.

The minimum wage is a strawman by comparison: it doesn't actually help workers.

Gig-work like Uber is a great safety valve to enable instant job hopping for unskilled labour. And not just the job hopping itself, but also the threat of job hopping.

And yet that has terrible implications. Job hopping is both extremely unsatisfying on an individual level (no place to belong; you're just an interchangeable cog in the machine being swapped around, giving you no sense of purpose in your work) and on the greater national economic level (it's insanely inefficient and completely irrational to churn employees because you're willing to pay new hires more than your veteran staff).

Yeah no thanks, I rather have the government regulate some actual floors rather than hoping that the better angels of American corporations eventually do the right thing.

Also who wrote this theory? Sounds like the wet dream of some neoliberal econ grad.