A useful, and irritating, thing about computer systems is that you have to tell them precisely what to do or they won’t do it. No amount of cajoling, persuasion techniques, nudge theory or other New Wave beliefs will fix a Segmentation Fault. You have to be more precise in your instructions to the machine.
While being excessively precise about limits in the New Wayland baseline model, I came across something interesting I hadn’t really appreciated before.
Everything on the production side has a minimum unit quantity. Half a car isn’t much use. Transactions clear in whole values of the smallest unit of currency. And it takes an amount of time to create something. All of these are necessarily above zero and even if you subdivide ad absurdum you hit a physical limit (one electron for one atom manipulated in one plank time).
Wages on the other hand readily hit zero - as we see regularly with intern positions, zero hour contracts, and even ultimately slavery. That again follows logically. You can either have nothing, or you can do something in the expectation that you might get more than nothing in the future. The latter is a better bet - even if it turns out to be a fallacy of composition in the aggregate.
And all this means is that even with all the “friction” restrictions removed in a model, it will easily drive the wage below the indivisible limits of the production system, and from which it cannot recover by “natural” methods.
This fits with the view put forward by MMT stalwart Warren Mosler
People have to work to eat, but businesses only hire when they want to, or when they think they can make a profit. It is not a fair confrontation. And if there isn’t some kind of support for labor, then real wages will be forced down continuously
What the Indivisibility Issue suggests is that they can be driven below subsistence levels.