2 ms·

>The headline is right - one alarming study isn't the final word, nor should it be. But we seem to be rather quick to let one study confirming our biases to be

>The headline is right - one alarming study isn't the final word, nor should it be. But we seem to be rather quick to let one study confirming our biases to be "the final word" when it confirms our priors, and rather quick to dismiss it as "just one study" when it contradicts them. Neither position is intellectually honest, and if we truly want to help the most vulnerable, we have to do it in ways that are backed by the evidence. I disagree with this conception of the problem. As the other downvoted comment links the general consensus is that minimum wage hikes of small/medium magnitude are going to have zero/small effect on employment numbers. People like Card/Krueger because there's a lot of good reasoning in it and it's one of the earliest really good studies that showed the effect it did. But they quote it because the effect that it shows agrees with our scientific consensus. This UW study not only goes against consensus but also to an extreme degree: The UW report nonetheless finds an unprecedented impact of wage increases on jobs, ten times higher than the average in 942 published minimum wage and non-minimum wage estimates, and triple that of minimum wage critic David Neumark. [0] The UW study also tries to sell it itself (or has been accepted by laymen) as a more definitive study because it doesn't limit itself to one industry. And while it's true that it's pursuing a larger scope the sampling problems in their methodology have made it almost useless. If you refer back to the pdf in the previous citation and you can read about them. So I think people's skepticism about this study is actually pretty well placed. [0] http://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2017/Reich-letter-to-Robert-Feldstein.pdf http://irle.berkeley.edu/files/2017/Reich-letter-to-Robert-F...

cheald 9y ago
That's just the problem, there isn't a "general consensus" on minimum wage among economists. There is a broad and varied body of research with a variety of contradictory conclusions. A brief overview of the state of the literature is handily summed up here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_minwage#wiki_empirical_studies https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_minwage#wiki_emp... The tl;dr from that section is nicely concise: > The most comprehensive summary that can be made about the minimum wage literature is that while the evidence is sometimes contradictory, small minimum wage increases seem to either have no employment effects or at least quite small employment effects in the short run. Estimates of long-run impacts, or the impact of large minimum wage increases are presently unknown. Seattle is notable because it was (I believe) the largest MW increase in US history. The research has broadly agreed that with large changes, we don't have evidence predicting what'll happen, which is why this study is of such critical political importance to both sides - if it shows that the MW is a net gain, then the MW proponents get to say "see? no large changes, $15 MW nationwide now!". If it shows a net loss, the MW opponents get to say "see? You can't go past the inflection point without moving backwards, put the brakes on this push". Card/Kreuger was notable because it was the first robust result that contradicted the consensus at the time. The paper contributed substantially to our understanding of labor economics, and it would have been a major mistake to discount it because it conflicted with the widely-held beliefs at the time. To dismiss the UW study because it contradicts some contemporary research would be just as much a mistake.

cheald 9y ago

That's just the problem, there isn't a "general consensus" on minimum wage among economists. There is a broad and varied body of research with a variety of contradictory conclusions. A brief overview of the state of the literature is handily summed up here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_minwage#wiki_empirical_studies https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_minwage#wiki_emp... The tl;dr from that section is nicely concise: > The most comprehensive summary that can be made about the minimum wage literature is that while the evidence is sometimes contradictory, small minimum wage increases seem to either have no employment effects or at least quite small employment effects in the short run. Estimates of long-run impacts, or the impact of large minimum wage increases are presently unknown. Seattle is notable because it was (I believe) the largest MW increase in US history. The research has broadly agreed that with large changes, we don't have evidence predicting what'll happen, which is why this study is of such critical political importance to both sides - if it shows that the MW is a net gain, then the MW proponents get to say "see? no large changes, $15 MW nationwide now!". If it shows a net loss, the MW opponents get to say "see? You can't go past the inflection point without moving backwards, put the brakes on this push". Card/Kreuger was notable because it was the first robust result that contradicted the consensus at the time. The paper contributed substantially to our understanding of labor economics, and it would have been a major mistake to discount it because it conflicted with the widely-held beliefs at the time. To dismiss the UW study because it contradicts some contemporary research would be just as much a mistake.