* https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/07/22/amazon-gi...
At best all you can say is that if you decide to hire, it cannot be lower than some minimum, but often this results in no job at all.
That's pretty reasonable. Nobody should be working 40 hours a week at a job and not make enough to support themselves. Any company who can't afford to pay their employees at least that much is a failure who deserves to be out of business.
Their analysis will yield false conclusions because they’re completely ignoring a number of variables.
For instance, the USSR had capital controls for financial and political reasons. The article assumes that politics plays no role, only finance.
Wall Street influences US financial policy, but so does politics.
The laziness of this research is shocking, so I looked up the author. He’s an author for the Communist blog “Jacobin.”
Why is this on Hacker News?
This paper is flimsy propaganda.
US average disposable income is $67,000, while it's $32,000 in the UK (with higher rents in the UK than the US).
We might make half as much (rather less for me actually) because of our specific industry, but that's not generally true.
Doesn’t feel objective.
alephnerd•1h ago
If this was true, then the Eurozone crisis would not have been as severe as it was in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, and France - all countries with broad and large social assistance programs.
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Also, the HN title is editorialized, the correct title is "Who the welfare state protects shapes a country’s financial openness"
mono442•29m ago
The ECB could have brought government bond yields down from the beginning and most of the problems could have been avoided.
3748949494•22m ago
mono442•17m ago
SubmarineClub•6m ago
The other option is endlessly printing money, which causes hyperinflation and you get an Argentina/Turkey/Weimar Republic situation.
gruez•17m ago
Is that sustainable? Argentina's predicament is basically caused by a variant of this. The Peronists gave handouts to buy votes, funded by money printing (ie. "The ECB could have brought government bond yields down"), but that has consequences and turned Argentina into an economic basket case. Of course, you might argue the EU doesn't have this problem because it's stronger economically and other states can prop them up, but that begs the question, why should member countries like Germany fund Southern Europeans's fiscal profligacy?
kingleopold•13m ago
alistairSH•25m ago
nickff•18m ago