> What worries me at the moment is the trend of 40-50 years of productivity increases leaving wages far behind.

First, people usually make that claim for the US. Living standards in the developed world have improved too visibly. So let's concentrate on the US.

Second, that claim usually comes about by people comparing productivity statistics to wage statistics. Usually, both of those data sets are inflation adjusted, but via different measures of inflation.

To avoid that complication, we can just look at the ratio of nominal wages to nominal GDP over time.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2017/article/estimating-the-us-... has a graph that shows that labour share falling from about 66% in 1947 to ~58% in 2016.

That's a fall to be sure, but calling the change something like 'leaving wages far behind' seems a bit dramatic.

If I remember right, most of that lost 8% went to higher land rents. The share of capital is generally stable.

I find land rents as problematic as the next Georgist.

> I want to know where it will end, because all I can see in the future is rising inequality and stratification.

Globally, inequality has gone down massively over the last few decades. Billions of people used to starve. Now people in China and (many in) India obsess over which smart phone to buy.

> I'm not familiar with occupational licensing in Germany. But I don't have a problem with it if it's done to ensure safety/quality and there are minimal barriers to entry, employers seem all too happy to introduce inexperienced workers to situations which may not be obviously dangerous to the worker without proper training.

In Germany, the government requires a two to three year apprenticeship for you to be allowed to eg cut hair or fix a computer or lay bricks or cook etc.

In Singapore, you mostly just have to do a short health and safety training, and then it's up to the customers to reject your bad haircuts.

> Minimum wage is a fairly contentious issue, what is it you dislike about it in particular?

They are an instance of the 'Copenhagen interpretation of ethics': https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-eth...

If we want poor people to have more money, we should levy a general tax of some kind, and then use the proceeds to give them more money.

Minimum wages put a burden on people who interact with poor people instead. So they encourage you to find ways around having to interact with poor people. Eg you can avoid the burden by eg replacing workers with robots, or by shopping at a more upmarket place than Walmart. Or eating at fancy restaurants instead of Burger King.

(You might notice that the people shopping at places that hire a lot of minimum waged workers tend to be also on the poorer side.

And I don't think business owners are absorbing the costs of minimum wages, because capital is internationally mobile.)

> It was interesting to see how far back the disagreement on Singapore's economy goes.

I asked Google Scholar to tell me who cited the paper you quoted to get some further context. The paper and author seem to be embedded in some particular corner of economics.

Wikipedia and most of the rest of the world describe Singapore as free market. (Including also the economists blogging at econlog.)

> I'd be interested in knowing why cleaning and security were singled out specifically rather than a more general rule.

I might look up the history behind that. In general, I assume it was some pragmatic bending to political pressure. In some instances the population is not quite as free market as the government here.

I really like the system Singapore has for cars. Basically, the government sets an overall limit for the number of cars on the island. It's about a million at the moment. Those one million permits are auctioned off to the highest bidders for ten years at a time. Each month, roughly 1% of permits expire and are auctioned off again.

The auction is a simple affair:

The government takes all the bids from the current month, and determines the lowest price that clears the market. Ie every one who bid more than the clearing price gets a permit at the clearing price. Everyone who doesn't get a permit bid less than the clearing price.

To come to the point: often people suggest that instead of every winner paying the same price, winners should be made to pay what they bid.

For some reason, that's supposed to make big companies pay more in the end, and individuals pay less.

Of course, big companies are exactly the kind of institutions who can afford the modelling and research to forecast the clearing price, and they can also afford to miss out or get a few extra cars in their fleet.

(Thus the government understands economics a bit better than much of the population.)

It's also a good illustration of how the government intervenes here, instead of letting everyone drive a car, but does so in a way that econ 101 would approve of.