CUBA

Josh posted a nice little thing on my Facebook wall about how Cubans make only $20 a day and have less than 2% unemployment. He related it back to the minimum wage, though I'm pretty sure a minimum wage has very little to do with it. Unfortunately, I was unable to find a satisfactory answer in the 15 or so minutes I searched for one. But since I did invest so much time and effort into it, I figured I might as well reproduce here what I wrote to Josh:

Well, Cuba "was" a centrally planned economy. One nice characteristic of those is that there normally is little or no unemployment because the state employs everyone. Wikipedia says that around 3/4 of Cubans are employed by their government. Cuba is also a developing economy. As such, they are poor as fuck (though doing better than a lot of other places, it seems). Then there is this from nationsencyclopedia.com: "The minimum wage varies (in Cuba), depending on the type of employment. As of 2002, the monthly wage was $8.25 for a maid, $9.50 for a bilingual office clerk, and $10.75 for a gardener."

I found a short, but pretty good paper about the minimum wage in Poland that is pretty damning. It is here:http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/asce/cuba6/14melnyk.fm.pdf

The best part about Poland is that the minimum wage is high and applies to everyone's monthly wage (as opposed to the US where it's hourly and state by state and thus excludes a lot of workers), and the labor force is rather immobile and divided up into regions with very different average wages. So Poland is a pretty nice place to look at the effects from a minimum wage.

Also, it's important to note that the minimum wage usually hurts younger, unskilled workers the most. So instead of being a "poverty reducing" tool, it actually might help make the poor poorer.

******************

In other news, I'm sick of snow. But I think we all are, now. And I'll be in Bloomington this weekend for... only God knows why. I told Declan I'd drive him. Actually, it seems kind of fun. I'll get to see IU, and Bloomington is in a very pretty area. As long as the roads are snow free, there'll be smooth sailing ahead.