> no one is going to commute 90 minutes for a minimum wage job when there are plenty of jobs available elsewhere.
They absolutely will, this concern has never really made sense to me. Poverty is like a badge of honor for many folks, and the harder one works for the lower the pay ends up being a little game some folks like to engage in, almost as a self flagellation; "I suffer therefore I'm noble."
Just look at some of the most oppressive places in the world, and how people continue to opt into that abject horror because it's a path to marginally help themselves or others they care about. NYC is nowhere near approaching the levels of, say, Qatar, in how it treats its workers, and a 90 minute commute each way wouldn't do much to push NYC closer to Qatar on that particular front.
You think we're at the bottom? No, we can go so much lower. So very much lower...
Another is these people are stuck. It takes money to pack up and leave. If the everything is costing more and more and more, their ability to save and leave goes down and down and down. Eventually they'll be forced to leave (somehow); the haves will see to it.
It's as cruel as life. Pretending like there aren't any negative learned behaviors that cause vicious cycles from poverty is naive. When all you know is suffering, the human mind has to come up with some justification for it, some reason it's "worth" continuing on. Nobility is often that conjured reason.
Have you really never met anyone who's oddly proud of how hard they work, despite how little they earn? I grew up around these people, this view was more common than drug use, more common than gambling, almost consensus that the poor folks were the real heroes of the story.
"Stuck" is indeed the right word, but no they won't get "unstuck"; their lives will just get worse and worse. Like I said, there's just so much lower we can go here, people don't even realize where the bottom is.
They absolutely will, this concern has never really made sense to me. Poverty is like a badge of honor for many folks, and the harder one works for the lower the pay ends up being a little game some folks like to engage in, almost as a self flagellation; "I suffer therefore I'm noble."
Just look at some of the most oppressive places in the world, and how people continue to opt into that abject horror because it's a path to marginally help themselves or others they care about. NYC is nowhere near approaching the levels of, say, Qatar, in how it treats its workers, and a 90 minute commute each way wouldn't do much to push NYC closer to Qatar on that particular front.
You think we're at the bottom? No, we can go so much lower. So very much lower...