Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 235 posts

Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news

#121

Post by lowbloodsugar »

surfmike wrote: post #61
Joe-Z wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH if they draw conclusions from data that only very poorly reflects the Seattle labour market the study's got a problem

Your 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.

But 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)"?

Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news

#123

Post by tptacek »

ancap wrote: post #113
tptacek wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be clear here that Hazlitt is not himself an economist.

To address this point I will quote from Walter Block[1]: >Just because Hazlitt has no formal credentials in economics does not render his views fallacious or superficial. There are other highly respected economists, in the modern era, who do not have a PhD in economics: David Friedman (physics PhD), Henry Manne (law degree), Gordon Tullock (law degree). Gary Becker wrote a lot about sociology, but his PhD was in econ…

Hazlitt wasn't a scholar of any sort. He was a writer. He's got about as much authority on this subject as John Stossel.

The irony of this citation is that we're commenting on a paper that opens by observing that the theory of minimum wages, derived in effect from economic first principles, hugely oversimplifies the empirical reality. And as support for that study.. Hazlitt.

Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news

#125

Post by rsync »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #88
lend000 wrote: post #42

The problem I have with the minimum wage is that it transfers wealth from the very poorest to the mid-working class/lower middle class. Who am I to tell a homeless person that she is legally forbidden to engage in a voluntary, hourly employment contract for less than $15/hr? I would effectively be guaranteeing that she stays unemployed/homeless. Regardless of practical effects (which are ambiguous at best), it's wron…

The crux of the issue is at the end of the day, the true "market value" of most 0 or near 0 skill jobs is close to 0$. This is especially true in the case of your hypothetical homeless person for whom any employment represents a significant percentage marginal increase in income (hard not to beat 0). Given the power asymmetry between "people offering low skill jobs" and "people forced into taking low skill jobs" mini…

"The crux of the issue is at the end of the day, the true "market value" of most 0 or near 0 skill jobs is close to 0$. This is especially true in the case of your hypothetical homeless person for whom any employment represents a significant percentage marginal increase in income (hard not to beat 0)."

I don't think that's true at all ... as a Californian, I am surrounded by zero skill tasks related to agriculture that pay well more than zero.

I pay workers in my vineyards and orchards for zero-skill tasks like weeding, mowing, digging, etc. over minimum wage. Granted, this is in a coastal area (Marin County) but even in the central valley the value of zero-skill labor is much more than zero.

In fact, I will bet that anywhere in California a worker that can show up on time and work hard for a full shift will consistently be paid over minimum wage for this zero-skill labor (absent employer trickery).

The real problem, in my opinion, is that there is a great social migration taking place towards high-priced cities with low housing stock and lots of wealth driving up prices of all goods and services in these areas.

So it's not that zero-skill work has zero value, but rather: zero skill work cannot meet basic living standards in an expensive city - and these days, all of the cities are (relatively) expensive.

We are talking about Seattle, after all ...

Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news

#126

Post by Joe-Z »

tim333 wrote: post #86
Joe-Z wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Who am I to tell a homeless person that she is legally forbidden to engage in a voluntary, hourly employment contract for less than $15/hr? Someone who hasn't unterstood minimun wage fully? Minimum wage covers exactly this situation: You will have to pay at least that amount, even if the person you're employing happens to be homeless at the moment. If an employer is not willing to pay that, than that's not an issue…

The trouble is for $15 per hour the business can probably hire someone more productive or less hassle than the homeless guy. Thus the homeless guy stays unemployed. I was always a put off minimum wage laws by reading Thomas Sowell on how blacks had lower unemployment than whites in 1948 before minimum wage laws had much effect. After people hired non blacks and the unemployment rate shot up giving problems that conti…

Thank you for your example, that's interesting! I guess the story can also be interpreted the other way around:

Employers were only willing to hire black people because they were worked for lower wages, because they exactly knew that their labour was being considered less worth that that of white people? So introducing the minimum wage just made the racism obivous and I'm sure problems would also have arisen if the minimum wage had never been introduced and the black minority would have been forced to slave away on minimal incomes their whole life.

Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news

#127

Post by tdb7893 »

lend000 wrote: post #42

The problem I have with the minimum wage is that it transfers wealth from the very poorest to the mid-working class/lower middle class. Who am I to tell a homeless person that she is legally forbidden to engage in a voluntary, hourly employment contract for less than $15/hr? I would effectively be guaranteeing that she stays unemployed/homeless. Regardless of practical effects (which are ambiguous at best), it's wron…

A lot of my girlfriend's friends work at or near minimum wage because they just need any job and the fact that there is a minimum wage seems to save them from complete poverty (and it's not like they are trying to start a family or anything yet). I think that there is a optimal minumum wage (15$ seems too high for me) but it's hard for me to argue against it completely having seen the good it has done for people and how impossible it would be to live below it. I guess I would feel differently if I had met a lot of people who had not been able to get jobs because of the minimum wage but at least for me I've yet to meet someone in that situation.

Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news

#128

Post by thehardsphere »

surfmike wrote: post #94
harimau777 wrote: post #76

This seems like an interesting study, but I'm not sure its conclusion makes sense to me. Am I understanding the facts correctly: 1. Employment stayed about the same. 2. Employees overall were payed a lot more. 3. The number of low wage employees (which I assume means those making the new minimum wage) dropped. However employees overall were payed more. My understanding is that this means that employers switched to pa…

I think your assumption (1) is incorrect. Quote from article: "They've cut their payrolls, putting off new hiring, reducing hours or letting their workers go, the study found."

Also, the unemployment rate does not count individuals who have dropped out of the labor force completely, which displaced low skill workers are especially likely to do.

If there are labor participation rate statistics available (probably not yet), you'd see the drop there.

Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news

#129

Post by rhino369 »

coldpie wrote: post #83
lend000 wrote: post #42

The problem I have with the minimum wage is that it transfers wealth from the very poorest to the mid-working class/lower middle class. Who am I to tell a homeless person that she is legally forbidden to engage in a voluntary, hourly employment contract for less than $15/hr? I would effectively be guaranteeing that she stays unemployed/homeless. Regardless of practical effects (which are ambiguous at best), it's wron…

> On the other hand, the minimum wage definitely benefits middle class teenagers on their first jobs (if they can get a job), and has questionable benefit for millennial humanities college grads who have yet to start a career. This is the problem. Everyone working 40 hours per week deserves a living wage, whether they're fresh out of high school or 8 years into a humanities degree. There's this weird sense out there…

Whether they deserve or it or not doesn't change whether the market will support it. Some people making 10 dollars an hour might get a raise to 13, but some might just get fired. So law decides that someone whose labor is only worth 10 dollars to the market is better off banned from working.

Re: A ‘very credible’ new study on Seattle’s $15 minimum wage has bad news

#130

Post by CompanionCuuube »

Apreche wrote: post #16

Uh, businesses. You are supposed to raise prices, effectively taxing those rich customers. Did you forget that part?

Uh, if they raise prices, you're effectively taxing ALL customers. That's why consumption based taxes are worse for the mid to low wealth consumer, a greater share of their income is spent on consumption. You'd have to find out which products the rich customers are buying exclusively and increase the prices on those.
Post reply on HN