“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”
― Sir Thomas More, Utopia
Bornin London, England December 24, 1477
Died May 17, 1535
This dude even understood the problem.
The Fair Labor Standards Act established the first minimum wage with 20 hours a week of work pay enough to not live, but thrive. Meaning you can be housed, fed, get health care, buy what you need, get an education or fund a hobby or start a business.
40 hours a week was deemed the maximum a person can reasonably work. Basically, we have 40 hours a week of work in us before we are basically too exhausted to thrive and function but would be enough to raise a family off of.
Australia has a dynamic minim wage. Every year they review a number of economic variables and then peg the minimum wage, because of that and well funded safety nets, Australia is basically recession proof. The only people that basically don't get richer during a recession are the wealthy.
We know how to run and build a thriving economy for humans, we just refuse to do it. We have an entire political party dedicated to keeping workers poor while giving the workers gains to owners. We really do get what we vote for.