People will ultimately work for their minimum survivable wage and economies will adjust to support ever decreasing wages among a subset of the population.

People live in favelas in Rio. They live in tiny, one room flats in Hong Kong without plumbing in deplorable conditions. They live in 'work camps' in Dubai without any rights at all.

And they work hard.

Of course 'people in SF' would do the same.

Don't think you're exempt - you would do the same if your skills were commoditized and you had no recourse.

Your salary has nothing to do with how skilled you are, how hard you work, or how much value you can provide. It's entirely a function of 'power' relative to your employer. So even if you are a full-on genius, and can speak 10 languages, code in 10 languages and have a PhD in AI - you will earn next to nothing if those things are common and your skills are a commodity.

In any given economy, a good chunk of people have commodity skills, i.e. manual labour or not much more. This bar is getting higher. Way back before minimum wage we (and without knowing you, there's a very high chance this applies to your ancestors as well) survived on next to nothing - and probably worked hard. Land owners, mine owners, factory owners would leverage and leverage and leverage to make sure the workers had 'only enough barely survive' - after all - every additional penny to workers would have been simply charity, in the raw economic sense.

So - all modern and civilized economies have 'minimum wage' and/or collective bargaining for some groups. Minimum wage and unions were essential to bringing civilizations out of the dark ages. Some caveats to that would be a very high social security system with gracious benefits - i.e. the government gives you a 'job' which is 'not doing anything' which would set a floor for wages obviously. Or an economy in which there were very few people with commodity skills and 'everyone' was somehow empowered a little bit against everyone else (like 'equality and diversity in skill set' kind of thing), which is not very common.

Because of the imbalance of power - we have no choice but to have minimum wage, or something like it - and it's also generally why we don't need such things in areas wherein people are not commoditized.

The really interesting paradox is that the 'minimum survivable wage' for any individual is not the profit maximizing wage for employers in the long run!

In the 'short run' employers save money / increase profits by cutting wages. But - those people can then 'spend less' and it hurts the economy, which hurts business!

Henry Ford realized this pragmatically. He realized that if he wanted to sell a 'model T' to 'everyone' and his own factory workers could literally not afford one, then few people would be able to buy his cars, ergo, his business model was not going to work! So he paid his employees more than the short-run minimum requirement.

This requires a fairly enlightened strategy on the part of employers - moreover - it requires kind of a common buy-in by most employers, which is like a strategy game:

> If all employers pay subsistence wages - then they all kind of lose because nobody can afford to buy the crap they make in their factories.

> If all employers pay some difficult-to-calculate wage higher than subsistence, like a minimum wage ... well, everyone is better off.

> But - if most employers pay this 'decent wage' but some employers 'cheat' and pay much less, well, those 'cheating' employers can benefit quite a lot, and get rich of a system by sneaking off surpluses from a system they are not paying into. Kind of like 'not paying taxes'. But of course - every employer is under constant pressure to keep wages down - and they have no formal pressure, like a taxation agency or regulatory body, to keep them from doing otherwise. So of course we're going to have low wages without regulation.

The minimum wage is actually economically rational from a practical, surplus sharing perspective (you could say 'socialist' or 'communitarian'), but even if you want to look at it more from a 'free market' perspective, minimum wage could be argued to be the wage at which the economy (including employers and shareholders) maximally benefit in the long run ... but it's just simply impossible to get 'all business' to intelligently collude and set this wage because they are all competing more or less on short-run business cycles, and have great incentive to cheat. Hence regulation.

As for SF, especially the increasing ratio of undocumented workers who have no access to social services, yes, they will work for next to nothing - the minimum that will allow them to survive.

SF would form favelas just like in Brazil, and there's absolutely no economic reason why it wouldn't - only regulatory policies etc. keep it from that i.e. wages, rights, services, etc. etc...

FYI - this partly why having a lot of undocumented folks in the economy is a really bad idea. For a host of other reasons well. If you're going to have people participating in the economy - give them full rights. But that kind of means 'open borders' - which you can't have ... (ie can't have open borders and social welfare at the same time). A much better solution would be to have 'reasonably effective border control', close unprofitable factories/businesses in the US and move them to Mexico so that entire communities of regular people can aspire to a higher standard of living, safety, civility etc.. That's a much better win for everyone.