>So what would be enough to live on? That would of course depend on where someone lived, and how much that place costs. And so Glasmeier rounded up some of her best graduate students to create, basically, a giant spreadsheet. They loaded it up with the best regional data available, from government and industry surveys, on costs for housing, food, child care, medical expenses, and transportation.
I don't get it: she "avoids tourist traps" (a few paragraphs up) to find the places people really shop. But when estimating cost of living, she uses detached government aggregates rather than finding how people actually make their wages work, meaning she would necessarily miss eg how grandma provides most of the daycare services.
I would think that the primary question in building out a living wage figure would be to ask how people are currently pulling it off on low wages, rather than extrapolate one's own life through some categorized figures.
Most likely the professor is pulling together whatever information she can with the resources she has. Can you imagine how big of a ground effort it would take to collect the information you described?
Absolutely! That's why I wasn't criticizing the missing country-wide tabulation of such data, but trying to reconcile its absence with the praise of the researcher at the beginning, and how she collects another kind of data on the ground.
Of course, that could just be stuff getting scrambled by the PR machine.
My main criticism was this: if you're going to calculate a living wage, wouldn't the number one question be "How are people currently living on their wages?" Even knowing how one family pulls it off would be tremendously informative, and from that point you could figure the cost of the missing amenities. In contrast, the researcher's approach is to assume they buy everything from some model budget (probably based indirectly on her team's own lives), but less of it.
I don't get it: she "avoids tourist traps" (a few paragraphs up) to find the places people really shop. But when estimating cost of living, she uses detached government aggregates rather than finding how people actually make their wages work, meaning she would necessarily miss eg how grandma provides most of the daycare services.
I would think that the primary question in building out a living wage figure would be to ask how people are currently pulling it off on low wages, rather than extrapolate one's own life through some categorized figures.