This is symptomatic of neoliberal reductionism. We shouldn't treat labor as any other commodity. Apples do not care what their market price is, but workers (humans) do, in fact, high wages are an important component of human well-being. The economy should ultimately serve needs of humans, not the other way around.
All commodity prices are ultimately labor cost. No one else than people get paid!
The cost of apples depend on the labor cost of apple pickers and farmers, etc.
As a consumer it's easy to think of apples as something that "just appears" in the store. If you feel argumentative, that view is a way of dehumanizing the people working in the apple supply chain.
>All commodity prices are ultimately labor cost. No one else than people get paid!
>The cost of apples depend on the labor cost of apple pickers and farmers, etc.
This isn't true. You had to pay somebody for the land those apple trees are grown on and when you do you're not paying them for their labor, you're paying for their status as a land owner.
>All commodity prices are ultimately labor cost. No one else than people get paid!
And this is why allocating resources to improving the efficiency of human labor is so important. If a person can be get twice the amount of work done then the fruit of that labor is going to eventually be cheaper for everyone else.
Ok? It’s fine to think wage share of GDP should be high and I agree. But the fact is that there is a relationship between labor supply/labor demand/and wage and I’m just pointing out that by the logic of “there is no labor shortage because wages could go higher” there is almost never a shortage of anything.
If you want high wages and human well-being, your decisions about how to allocate society's limited resources need to be made in a way that respects the consequences of those decisions. When you don't, the results are ugly.
Because of its centrality and importance, we should be more rigorous about how we approach the economics of the labor market, not less. That's not "neoliberal reductionism". It's the universal laws of economics: the readily-foreseeable consequences of our political decisions and regulations that define the allocation of society's limited resources. When instead we are too-precious about how we treat labor (disrespecting fundamental economics in the name of justice and equity, living in ignorance of the consequences), then we will find stagnation instead of growth, higher rates of unemployment, more inequality, and more poverty.
If everyone gets higher wages then prices all go up due to inflation and then workers are back where they started. What you really want isn't higher wages per se, but rather reduced income inequality (Gini coefficient).
This is symptomatic of neoliberal reductionism. We shouldn't treat labor as any other commodity. Apples do not care what their market price is, but workers (humans) do, in fact, high wages are an important component of human well-being. The economy should ultimately serve needs of humans, not the other way around.