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OTOH if they draw conclusions from data that only very poorly reflects the Seattle labour market the study's got a problem
by Joe-Z 9y ago
OTOH if they draw conclusions from data that only very poorly reflects the Seattle labour market the study's got a problem
- surfmike 9y agoYour commment implies they were cherry-picking the data, which isn't true. They only included data that could definitively be marked as within Seattle vs outside Seattle.
- Joe-Z 9y agoThanks for clearing that up! I wasn't trying to insinuate that they were cherry-picking data. But doing a study on the Seattle labour market and excluding these major companies completely seems to be overdoing it.
- surfmike 9y agoHopefully they do a follow up study if they can get better data sets from the big companies. But they estimate based on Washington-wide stats that they cover ~63% of workers with their data.
- lowbloodsugar 9y agoBut the question is, did they have 20 different datasets and picked the one that gave them the result that they wanted. Did they pick "Seattle vs outside Seattle (except for Starbucks, Walmart, etc)" and get "Oh dear bad result for minimum wage". Or did they pick "Oh dear bad result for minimum wage", and then find "Here's one: Seattle vs Outside Seattle (except for Starbucks, Walmart, etc)"?
- taeric 9y agoSometimes you cherry-pick data not to get the results you are looking for, but because it is easier to do so. No matter the reason for the cherry-picking, it does add uncertainty to the results. In the malicious case, the uncertainty is easy to predict in the direction it will go. In the "ease of picking" case, it is not. Which is to say, it does not throw out the results. This is a useful paper and more folks should look at it. Hopefully someone has the necessary energy/effort to get all of the data and we can clear up the uncertainty that it introduced.