Did it really take awarding the Nobel Prize for folks to realize the Rick Berman, GOP governors, and a slew of other naysayers are full of crap? With their claims that changes in the minimum wage causes job losses. Or, the extended unemployment benefits the US offered during the pandemic meant folks wouldn’t work. (What THAT data demonstrated is that they wouldn’t work crummy jobs for dastardly low pay.)
Well, Drs. Joshua Angrist (MIT), Guido Imbens (Stanford) and David Card (UC Berkeley) just shared the Nobel Prize for economics. (Unfortunately, Dr. Alan Krueger passed away before his research [with Card] was seminal.) While the ‘high-falutin’ terminology of their research is “empicial contributions to labor economics”, one of the key findings of this sort of research was that minimum wage increases barely affects employment (plus, an additional year of education radically augments one’s lifetime income.)
Another concept that describes their research is called “natural experiments” (aka, the credibility revolution). These examinations help us learn whether a relationship is correlative (coincidental) or causal. (As opposed to laboratory research, natural experiments test their theories in real life but not in rigidly controlled environments, even though the circumstances that can come close.)
It was Drs. Card and Krueger whose research served to squash the BS spewed by Rick Berman with his plethora of fake associations all purporting to claim that wage increases kill the food and restaurant industry. As I reported some years ago (see above ‘picture’), these two studied fast-food restaurant employment in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. (New Jersey had just raised its minimum wage from $ 3.25 to $ 5.05; Pennsylvania did not.) And with the raise in minimum wage- employment at neither the NJ fast food and Pennsylvania were not affected. (They initially reported that the NJ employment rose- but that data was less than pristine.)
Congratulations to these three economists- who are helping bring data, not alternative news, to explain economic issues.
Too bad the people you mention don’t buy into facts; they go by emotions and buy into whatever sounds good.
Alana recently posted..The Garden Bountiful
You’ve rendered the situation concise and direct, Alana. Thanks.