A $15 national minimum wage doesn't look economically sound to me

[jeff47]

86. No. If you bother reading what I wrote, I never said wages would go up.

I said the equilibrium would be restored. That does not require wages to go up.

In the abstract, the value of living in a particular place is based on how much money you get paid, the costs of living in that place, and the "value" of living there (ie. there are some non-monetary perks from living in CA, like the weather).

If people aren't getting paid enough, they leave. The costs are too high for those non-monetary benefits.

Fixing that equilibrium does not mean everyone has to get paid more. Non-monetary perks can be added, or costs can go down (or more realistically, rise more slowly).

Build a new freeway in LA, and suddenly the areas on the other side of the mountains become easier to commute from. So people move there for lower costs. Then the freeway gets too crowded, making the commute too painful again. Which causes people to move back to the LA-side of the mountains. The equilibrium will overshoot a few times, and then settle into something stable. (Then the 2008 recession nuked home prices, breaking the equilibrium again.)

The same thing happens on a national scale, but keeping the example to areas of LA makes it simpler to describe. There's fewer complicating factors (how bad do I rate snow in winter versus oppressive heat and humidity in summer? How do you value earthquakes versus hurricanes?)