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The Missouri Supreme Court gave low-wage workers in St. Louis a raise on Tuesday.

The five-judge panel issued a ruling upholding St. Louis’ minimum wage ordinance, saying it did not conflict with Missouri state law as business groups had argued. The decision means the city’s wage floor will soon rise to $10 per hour and then $11 in 2018.

St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, a Democrat, tweeted that the ruling meant “higher wages for low wage workers,” adding that the city would give employers a “short but reasonable” grace period to get in line with the law.

The ruling is expected to make a significant difference to the lowest-paid workers in St. Louis. The Missouri state minimum wage is just $7.70, over $2 less than the city’s.

The city passed the ordinance in 2015, but it’s been tied up in court ever since. Businesses argued that the measure should be preempted by a 1998 law that barred localities from instituting minimum wages higher than the state level. The state Supreme Court agreed with a lower court’s ruling that that law was unconstitutional because of how it was passed.

The court also found that a separate state law passed in 2015 had no bearing on St. Louis’ minimum wage ordinance. That law forbids local minimum wages that weren’t in effect by Aug. 28, 2015. St. Louis’ measure was implemented that very day, making it legally sound, according to the judges.

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour and hasn’t been raised since 2009. But as Congress leaves that wage floor untouched, cities and states around the country have gone ahead and raised their own rates in recent years, responding to public pressure from workers and labor groups.

The fight in St. Louis has been one of many “preemption” battles between states and cities. As labor activists have succeeded in passing local minimum wage hikes, Republican legislatures have responded by passing state laws that seek to nullify them. According to a recent report, 17 states now have preemption laws on the books that could block local wage raises.

Democrats and local activists argue that the state laws are meddling in local self-governance and keeping wages down. One of the most controversial preemption laws was passed in Alabama, where a mostly white state legislature blocked a minimum wage increase in predominantly black Birmingham.

The Fight for $15, a union-backed minimum wage campaign, issued a statement from St. Louis McDonald’s worker Bettie Douglas on Tuesday praising the Missouri Supreme Court ruling as a “major victory.”

“When we started our Fight for $15 an hour and union rights, nobody in Missouri gave us a chance to win,” Douglas said. “But by standing together and going on strike, we’ve secured life-changing raises for fast-food cooks and cashiers, janitors, and home care aides across the city.”

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Last week Bill Gates called for taxing robots. He argued that we should impose a tax on companies replacing workers with robots and that the money should be used to retrain the displaced workers. As much as I appreciate the world’s richest person proposing a measure that would redistribute money from people like him to the rest of us, this idea doesn’t make any sense.

Let’s skip over the fact of who would define what a robot is and how, and think about the logic of what Gates is proposing. In effect, Gates wants to put a tax on productivity growth. This is what robots are all about. They allow us to produce more goods and services with the same amount of human labor. Gates is worried that productivity growth is moving along too rapidly and that it will lead to large scale unemployment.

There are two problems with this story: First productivity growth has actually been very slow in recent years. The second problem is that if it were faster, there is no reason it should lead to mass unemployment. Rather, it should lead to rapid growth and increases in living standards.

Starting with the recent history, productivity growth has averaged less than 0.6 percent annually over the last six years. This compares to a rate of 3.0 percent from 1995 to 2005 and also in the quarter century from 1947 to 1973. Gates’ tax would slow productivity growth even further.

It is difficult to see why we would want to do this. Most of the economic problems we face are implicitly a problem of productivity growth being too slow. The argument that budget deficits are a problem is an argument that we can’t produce enough goods and services to accommodate the demand generated by large budget deficits. 

Gates’ notion that rapid productivity growth will lead to large-scale unemployment is contradicted by both history and theory.

The often told tale of a demographic nightmare with too few workers to support a growing population of retirees is also a story of inadequate productivity growth. If we had rapid productivity growth then we would have all the workers we need.

In these and other areas, the conventional view of economists is that productivity growth is too slow. From this perspective, if Bill Gates gets his way then he will be making our main economic problems worse, not better.

Gates’ notion that rapid productivity growth will lead to large-scale unemployment is contradicted by both history and theory. The quarter century from 1947 to 1973 was a period of mostly low unemployment and rapid wage growth. The same was true in the period of rapid productivity growth in the late 1990s.

The theoretical story that would support a high employment economy even with rapid productivity growth is that the Federal Reserve Board should be pushing down interest rates to try to boost demand, as growing productivity increases the ability of the economy to produce more goods and services. In this respect, it is worth noting that the Fed has recently moved to raise interest rates to slow the rate of job growth.

We can also look to boost demand by running large budget deficits. We can spend money on long neglected needs, like providing quality child care, education, or modernizing our infrastructure. Remember, if we have more output potential because of productivity growth, the deficits are not problem.

We can also look to take advantage of increases in productivity growth by allowing workers more leisure time. Workers in the United States put in 20 percent more hours each year on average than workers in other wealthy countries like Germany and the Netherlands. In these countries, it is standard for workers to have five or six weeks a year of paid vacation, as well as paid family leave and paid vacation. We should look to follow this example in the United States as well.

If we pursue these policies to maintain high levels of employment then workers will be well-positioned to secure the benefits of higher productivity in higher wages. This was certainly the story in the quarter century after World War II when real wages rose at a rate of close to two percent annually.

Of course these policies will not ensure that no workers ever suffer from automation. While we can never guarantee that no worker is harmed by improvements in technology in a dynamic economy, we can look to soften the impact.

One obvious policy would be to require severance pay, for example two weeks of pay for each year worked. This would both give displaced workers somewhat of a cushion and changes the incentives for employers. If a company knows that it faces large payout if it lays off a number of long-term employees, then it has more incentive to think about modernizing its facilities and retraining workers. This would be a win-win where the company has an interest in ensuring that its workers are as productive as possible while the workers get to keep their jobs.

In short, there is no reason that productivity growth should ever be viewed as the enemy of workers. We just need the right set of policies to ensure that they share in the gains.

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WASHINGTON — “Action now is seen as the only safe insurance.” 

That was among the many clear warnings that oil giant Shell issued in a film it produced about climate change more that 25 years ago. Many environmentalists, however, argue that the company has largely ignored its own alarm bells.

The 1991 film, “Climate of Concern,” resurfaced Tuesday on the Dutch online news outlet The Correspondent. It’s the latest in an ever-growing body of evidence that suggests the oil industry has long known about the climate risks associated with carbon dioxide emissions — and has actively worked to cover them up.

“The need to understand the interplay of atmosphere and oceans has been given a new sense of urgency by the realization that our energy-consuming way of life may be causing climatic changes with adverse consequences to us all,” the nearly 30-minute video notes. 

The film is eerily prophetic, warning of spiraling global temperatures, a sea level rise that could prove “disastrous,” wetland habitats inundated by salt water and ferocious storm surges brought on by warming ocean temperatures. 

“What is now considered abnormal weather could become a new norm,” the film’s narrator says.  

“In a crowded world subject to such adverse shifts of climate, who would take care of such greenhouse refugees?”

According to The Correspondent, which shared the video with The Guardian, the film was produced for the public eye, particularly for viewing in schools and universities, but has gone largely unseen for many years. In a separate 1986 document reviewed by both publications, Shell reportedly wrote of the uncertainties regarding climate science but noted that “changes may be the greatest in recorded history.”

In an interview with The Correspondent, professor Tom Wigley, the former head of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which assisted Shell in creating the film, spoke about the accuracy of its predictions. 

“It’s amazing it’s 25 years ago,” Wigley said. “It was quite comprehensive on what might happen, what the consequences are, and what we can do about it. I mean, there’s not much more.”

Along with linking fossil fuel consumption and rising carbon dioxide emissions to warming global temperatures, the film celebrates renewable energy technologies, including solar and wind. Although Shell does recognize climate change and made investments in wind energy, it is also a key player in the destructive and dirty Canadian tar sands.

In an email Tuesday to The Huffington Post, a Shell spokesman said, “Our position on climate change is well known; recognizing the climate challenge and the role energy has in enabling a decent quality of life. Shell continues to call for effective policy to support lower carbon business and consumer choices and opportunities such as government lead carbon pricing/trading schemes.”

But environmental groups aren’t convinced that the company has walked the walk when it comes to acting to combat climate change.

“The fact that Shell understood all this in 1991, and that a quarter-century later it was trying to open up the Arctic to oil-drilling, tells you all you’ll ever need to know about the corporate ethic of the fossil fuel industry,” Bill McKibben, the co-founder of 350.org, said in a statement. “Shell made a big difference in the world ― a difference for the worse.”

In the film (which can be seen in full here), Shell warned that while global warming was not fully understood, “many think that to wait for final proof would be irresponsible.” 

“Whether or not the threat of global warming proves as grave as the scientists predict, is it too much to hope that it might act as the stimulus, the catalyst, to a new era of technical and economic cooperation?” the narrator asks. “Our numbers are many and infinitely diverse, but the problems and dilemmas of climatic change concern us all.”

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It has almost been a year since NVIDIA launched the GTX 1080, the crowning glory of its latest Pascal-powered GeForce 10 series. In the fast-paced world of computing, that means it’s overdue a successor. At GDC 2017, the world’s biggest game developers’ event, NVIDIA did just that by unveiling the GTX 1080 Ti. The numbering is a bit deceptive, implying … Continue reading

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