This isn't true because of the minimum wage: if people would be willing to pay you less than the minimum wage for something useful, but not more, that's not a job.
There is no credible evidence that reasonable minimum wages have lowered employment in practice[0], and there are theoretical reason to believe it can increase it[1].
That said, the Australian and Danish systems are the best because they're more flexible.
[0] This holds up to about 60% of median wages. You can imagine it'd lower the hours some people get before it entirely makes them unemployed.
[1] One is that it provides price signals to monopsony employers. Another is that it reduces search costs in the labor market by basically acting as a spam filter that gets rid of time-wasting job offers.
Curious what you think about the UK, then. A software engineer in the UK makes 45k GBP on average. A minimum wage salary there (at 12.21 GBP per hour) is ~22k a year. The wage squeeze between skilled professional and minimum wage surely lowers the amount of people entering skilled professions
Well it doesn't matter what I think, just what empirical evidence says.
That's because of agglomeration effects I think. "In the UK" is the keyword, if they wanted to earn ten times that they could move to Silicon Valley and do that. So you're left with people who don't want to uproot their lives like that.
