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Seattle Minimum Wage Study Has Serious Flaws (washingtonpost.com)
"Remember the story from last week about how the new Seattle minimum wage law was hurting workers?" writes Slashdot reader PopeRatzo. "Well, it turns out that there are some problems with the study's methodology." The Washington Post reports:
First, their data exclude workers at businesses that have more than one location; in other words, while workers at a standalone mom-and-pop restaurant show up in their results, workers at Starbucks and McDonald's don't. Almost 40 percent of workers in Washington state work at multi-location businesses, and since Seattle's minimum wage increase has been larger at large businesses than at small ones -- right now, a worker at a company with more than 500 employees is guaranteed $13.50 an hour, while a worker at a company with fewer than 500 employees is guaranteed only $11 an hour -- these workers' exclusion from the study's results is an especially germane problem (note that low-wage workers in Seattle have had an incentive to switch from small firms to large firms since the minimum wage started rising).
In earlier work, in fact, the University of Washington team's results were different depending on whether these workers were included in their analysis; including them made the effects of the minimum wage look more positive. Second, the University of Washington team does not present enough data for us to assess the validity of its "synthetic control" in Washington -- that is, the set of areas to which they compare the results they observe in Seattle. The Seattle labor market is not necessarily comparable to other labor markets in the state, and given some of the researchers' implausible results, it's hard to believe the comparison group they chose is an appropriate one.
Suggesting Seattle's booming labor market may have skewed the study's results, two nonpartisan economists concluded it "suffers from a number of data and methodological problems that bias the study in the direction of finding job loss, even where there may have been no job loss at all." And the Washington Post also notes the researchers' findings are suspiciously "out of step with a large body of research," including another study from U.C. Berkeley researchers [PDF] which determined Seattle's wage increase "is having its intended effect."
In earlier work, in fact, the University of Washington team's results were different depending on whether these workers were included in their analysis; including them made the effects of the minimum wage look more positive. Second, the University of Washington team does not present enough data for us to assess the validity of its "synthetic control" in Washington -- that is, the set of areas to which they compare the results they observe in Seattle. The Seattle labor market is not necessarily comparable to other labor markets in the state, and given some of the researchers' implausible results, it's hard to believe the comparison group they chose is an appropriate one.
Suggesting Seattle's booming labor market may have skewed the study's results, two nonpartisan economists concluded it "suffers from a number of data and methodological problems that bias the study in the direction of finding job loss, even where there may have been no job loss at all." And the Washington Post also notes the researchers' findings are suspiciously "out of step with a large body of research," including another study from U.C. Berkeley researchers [PDF] which determined Seattle's wage increase "is having its intended effect."
>And the Washington Post also notes the researchers findings are suspiciously "out of step with a large body of research
As in, "the large body of research" where 79% of economists agree that "a minimum wage increases unemployment among young and unskilled workers"? This is undergrad economics at any college worth its salt.
You misunderstand what a free market is.
Free market means that governments or regulatory bodies cannot set the PRICE of goods and services. There's nothing wrong in setting minimum acceptable standards.
Ex: Sure.. mandate $150/Hr. then businesses can choose to either sell at existing price+$150, get rid or replace some employees and sell at same price.
Get it? the final PRICE is what's free to be decided by businesses.
Minimum wage and free markets can co-exist. Imagine if businesses said "Hurr-durr how dare government say I have to keep my premises clean huh? this is a free market dammit!"
As with code "smells", the response to the Seattle study suffers from study "smells."
It seems the people want a certain outcome, namely, that increasing the minimum wage puts more money in the pockets of working persons trying to get by. I mean, who can be against that apart from some mean-spirited Conservatives and clueless Libertarians, no?
But isn't science supposed to be about where the data lead instead about what we want the outcome to be? This study isn't what we want to hear so oh noes, the study has flaws and it doesn't agree with all of those other studies.
I am sure this study has flaws along with every other data-collection and interpretation effort in the social sciences. My concern is with the confirmation-bias-y tone of the parent post, like the Wild West prospector who sees a few yellow sparkles and starts hopping up in down, "There's goooolllld in them thar heels!"
Most businesses pay minimum wage because they can. Not because they have to in order to stay in business.
When Walmart raised their worker's pay to $10/hour, they didn't go out of business and they are still very profitable.
There are a lot of desperate people out there who really want the work and will just about work for any pay. I've seen them wait in line at 5AM with the hopes of being called in and working on the line packing video games. Those bastards took advantage of them. They make a killing on those games and they couldn't pay a decent hourly rate?
Oh, and if there wasn't any work, sorry! Come back tomorrow and see. And they had to wait in security unpaid and wait until the line started - unpaid. So, they were at work for at least an hour and half every day - unpaid. 2 or more hours if they actually worked.
No, the lowest levels of our working people are being shit on because they can be shit on.
You have to explain to journalists at the WaPo that "Maybe hurting some hourly workers", and "Some companies maybe cutting hours" meant that it didn't include all businesses such as McDonalds and Starbucks who play by a special and exclusive set of rules. They are part of that "elite" and "special" group and comparing them to smaller mom and pop businesses is like comparing apples and oranges.
The real story on this should be about how USA Today failed to make the bias known to readers. But then we wouldn't be feeding those snarky know-it-alls at the Washington Post now would we?
Just because you can find an intuitive justification doesn't mean your intuition is correct either. And the fact that the study is flawed and the *other* studies on the same issue that don't have known major flaws point in the opposite direction are pretty good evidence. Time will tell, of course.
A more advanced economics course would explain that a distribution of wealth amongst the poorer increases monetary velocity (simply put: more people can afford to buy simple luxuries), which increases demand for products, which increases demand for employment, thus counterbalancing the depressing effect of higher wages in a virtuous cycle.
The above sometimes happens, empirically. But it doesn't always happen. Your introductory scenario also doesn't always happen. It turns out that economics is very complicated and you can't just top at what was taught in the first week of high school economics, you need to study the actual effects.
There are other factors. Industries sometimes choose low-wages and high turnover instead of higher wages and lower turnover, when the actual cost difference to the business is minimal. A higher minimum wage forces the business to choose something closer to the higher-wages lower-turnover end of the spectrum, to minimal effect on the business. It's also known that, to a point well in excess of any minimum wage anybody is considering, higher paid people tend to be more effective at their jobs -- it's not just that more effective people are more highly paid, it's actually a virtuous cycle. They've done studies where people test 13 points higher on IQ tests overnight when they go from having no money to having about a year's worth of money.
Obviously at the extreme of a $10k / minute minimum wage, nobody would hire anybody (unless hyperinflation happened), so there are limits. But if you're unconvinced of the possibility, I invite you to also consider something less politically fraught: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Paradoxically, one can sometimes improve traffic by removing roads, and make traffic worse by adding roads. There are classes of problem for which the optimal form of the "Invisible Hand" gives suboptimal results. Optimizing the economy by optimizing each employment contract is a greedy algorithm, which is not always going to be globally optimal.
Even if the study has flaws, it makes sense in economic theory. .
But showing that the study has flaws gives a large swath of people reason to dismiss it. Those same people will readily accept similarly flawed studies claiming the benefits of min wage.
News for all you idiots; there are pros AND cons to min wage. If you can't see both you are not very intelligent.
...This is taught in introductory economics courses...
...and makes intuitive sense...
... to some people it makes intuitive sense that the earth is flat but gut feelings are not a scientific method.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
Since forever.
A person can't simply decide not to work and die instead.
Labor isn't a supply & demand market; it's supply (laborers) is fixed, giving the demand (employers) limitless bargaining power.
That is why there are things such as social wellfare and minimum wages.
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So reading between the lines, the study's results were largely correct when talking about small businesses, higher minimum wage hurts small business. But it doesn't matter, according to these idiots because McDonalds isn't affected by it as much as true small businesses. Since when are we vouching for McDonalds and Wal-Mart as good corporate citizens?
You can't lump in McD and Starbucks because even though they do employ minimum wage, they will employ minimum wage regardless of the cost. They are large enough enterprises with high enough profit margins to absorb these costs and in the process drive out any competition from small business, which is exactly what McD and Walmart do when they're coming to a new market anyway, they operate at a loss until all the competition has starved out.
I'm surprised actually that McD, Starbucks and Walmart don't actively drive minimum wages up just so they can completely drive out every other local business. If I were an 'evil CEO', I'd do that and then when I have 90% of a market, I'd lobby to get it reduced again or even just to get my company excluded.
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It's what everybody does lately. If you like the minimum wage you'll find a way to trash the original analysis. If you agree that the wage increase depresses hours, jobs and overall pay then you will dismiss any criticism of the original report. In the end, what matters is what employers actually do. The workers will speak up on their own if it's bad or good. Spin or bias is not going to convince people that their paystub says something different than it actually is (and that it's gone up or down as a result of the new policy)
Imposing a minimum wage that's greater than what results from an efficient market should result in higher pay but fewer workers.
This is where things get muddled. There's a difference between an optimally efficient market and an optimally efficient organization. An optimally efficient organization may do things like pay workers the least amount possible, avoid paying corporate taxes by moving assets to offshore accounts, and automating many jobs. Now, if many workers are give poverty wages, that may pad employment statistics but it certainly doesn't provide the market as a whole with an optimal solution. When people don't have much of a discretionary income they can't buy many things and they certainly can't take out loans (if you want an optimally efficient marketplace, you want people to be able to take out loans because loans are what create more money).
The problem with companies relocating money into offshore accounts to avoid taxes compounds this problem because their poverty-wage workers need welfare to provide them with healthcare, food supplements, and other aid such as childcare that they can't afford with their job. This problem is further compounded by the hoarding of liquid assets by executives. Without a strong progressive tax system (and all the many loopholes that allow one to avoid the intentions of our weak progressive tax system), those who make the most have such a surplus of liquid assets that most of them just sit in a bank account. While this looks good on paper, as the interest they gain increases the money supply, this surplus of money doesn't help the economy because it's not being exchanged on the marketplace. This is the problem with wage disparity. If executives made less and low-wage workers made more, then more money would be exchanged in the economy and it would create more wealth. It's a fallacy to assume that corporations and millionaires reinvest their excess profits. At some point one has all they need/want and excess wealth just gets hoarded in bank accounts.
Finally, when it comes to automating new jobs, this rarely (if ever) results in the remaining jobs reaping the benefits of the increased efficiency. The money saved goes to the top, to those executives who are already hoarding more money than they come close to spending.
The problem with a lot of the formulas you learn in introductory economics is they are based off assumptions. Furthermore, economics can make an abstraction of human life. What may look good on paper can be a miserable existence for many. I find economics to be an extremely interesting field that provides tools for evaluating systems that cannot be adequately assessed using science, but perspective is necessary when applying these ideas. Too often we can't see the forest for the trees.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Actually it's nearly but not quite as bad as OP's argument.
This is actually a known and well understood problem in engineering disciplines. The optimum for an entire process is NOT the same as the optimum for each part of a process. Usually the two are not even related. That is why we have things like Whole Process Optimization. This was a basic part of my classes for chemical engineering and drilled home in quite a number of assignments and projects.
What I don't get is why is this a surprise to people in other fields or in economics. If you want a system to work efficiently you have to optimize for the entire system not just tiny parts of it. With society that is a very complex problem and requires a lot of analysis so you do have to simplify to some extent but the more variables you take into account and MEASURE the more likely the system is to work.
Right now I see companies doing what is best for them and then trying to justify that it means it is also best for the system. This is a losing proposition and without some kind of external correction the system will end up tearing itself apart.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Who exactly do you think works in minimum wage jobs? Look, you can set minimum wage to $100/hour and you will have a fantastic increase in average wages—nobody is disputing that—but you should not be surprised when you create an enormous deadweight loss in the economy and the overall prosperity drops.
You're right, they don't pay minimum wage. They usually pay $2-4/hr more then the minimum wage, it's the small business owners like mom n' pop restaurants, gas bars, small hobbyist stores, convenience stores that pay right at the minimum wage because their monthly profits are just enough for the owner to make ends meet if they're lucky(and providing they're not the ones who are there for 15hrs/day anyway). Strange thing though, every time these bumps in the min. wage happen those big name stores also stop hiring full-time workers, and rely more heavily on part-time. That's the case going on here in Ontario as well, which has had 2 big bumps in the min. wage and the same government just pushed through a $15/hr min. wage.
People who would have worked their way through the layers from PT to FT to management will never get there now, and there's far greater chance that their job will simply be automated out of existence. That's what the Mc'D's in Ontario are planning, and Wendy's and Burger King and Tim Horton's are now looking to do. Places that are unionized like Zeher's are also increasing self-checkouts, more automation, the bottom of the barrel stores like Food Basics or NoFrills are pushing more automation more self-checkouts as well. All those people are going to end up jobless, and the best estimation is talking 25-43% unemployment for this province. How the fuck is that not going to cause mass social unrest?
Om, nomnomnom...
No, what we have here (your message) is a hyper partisan upset the one study that confirms his pre-existing bias turned out to be deeply flawed. Of course this article must seem like a liberal conspiracy! The one (and only) study showing job losses just has to be true.
This same thing happens with anti-vax and climate change denial. People who really want to believe these things cling to a small number of discredited studies and insist the large number of others contradicting their views don't exist.
Numerous states and cities have passed substantial minimum wage increases. Most are still gradually phasing in, many reaching $15 around 2020 to 2022. Plenty more studies will be published over the next several years.
I have a feeling you're going to be quite busy denying more and more of them as liberal conspiracy.
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Easier yes, but dramatically less accurate. Quite suitable for an introductory class attempting to communicate the basic concepts, but not for anything else.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
This is basically what Ford did in his production plant back when the Model T was the craze. He paid an insanely high wage, which led to very few sick days and near perfect retention, because people would have rather killed themselves than losing a job that paid about twice of what they could otherwise earn. This in turn led to very high productivity because people knew what they were doing, which also led to much higher product quality and very low waste.
Higher wages will make people move to the area if possible, and they will also want to keep their jobs. And people with money spend it, and spend it locally which in turn drives the economy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I need money. Not an occupation. I can find something to do with my time just fine.
If you job doesn't pay decent money, it's worthless and you can as well shut down for all I care because the world is no poorer without your "jobs".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That is from various polls from non cited source in a text book (" I include a table of propositions to which most economists subscribe, based on various polls of the profession") and limiting the scope of the proposition in the poll on young people is suspicious. What is the overall effect for example is not cited. And frnakly polls are useless they only represent what people EXPECT, they do not represent what study finds.
Call me crazy but I am untrusting your blogspot source about polls, and expect peer reviewed litterature, just for the reason that at least peer review and publishing allow to uncover the flaw cited in the summary.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Labor supply is anything but fixed. People take a gap year or go to law/grad school instead of getting a job, they retire early (possibly very early on disability), they work fewer shifts or less overtime or whatever, they work one job instead of two, they stretch their unemployment benefits out, they marry and raise kids at home rather than work. In the long run, they have more children or fewer.
One of the biggest changes in the workforce since 1970 or so is the increase in the number of women working full time, which happened almost entirely because they could specialize and improve their lives more by working outside the home than by working in the home.
How is the UW study to be considered flawed for excluding multi-site businesses while the UCB study ONLY looks at restaurants, where in many of which, minimum wage doesn't even apply?
>This is taught in introductory economics courses Had you continued past 'introductory economics' you would have learned that most of what you learned isn't how world works in practice. Supply and demand regularly fails and rational actors generally are not. Empirical evidence is what to believe, not theory, and not 'what sounds intuitive'.
Or, has been found before, the increased business that resulted from the increased minimum wage more than paid for the increased cost of labor.
And fyi, Walmart has also done the opposite multiple times and cut labor (and labor costs) so much that it resulted in a much larger loss of business.
Put it another way. If you give all the profits to one person, they can only buy so many cars, tv's, lattes, etc. If you share the profits with a hundred employees, they can buy 100 cars, a hundred TV's, and a hundred latte's.
Right now- we have way too much capital piled up with too few people. The catastrophically low bond yields is strong evidence of this fact.
And productivity has risen along with profits- but those profits were not shared with the workers due to the global labor glut and due to practices of using less workers and forcing them to work longer hours.
We need higher over time pay (back to double time), and we need a lower work week badly (like 35 hours).
It took measures like this to help end the great depression.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That doesn't work any more thanks to entitlements. The reality is that making twice of minimum wage isn't worth it. All it does is reduce your government assistance. Be it child care, rent reduction, food stamps, college assistance, etc. I'm not saying these things are bad, just that things aren't as simple as make a little more, lead a better life.
Hold up a minute. If the smaller business is allowed to employ people at a lower minimum wage than the larger business (and remembering here we're talking in both cases about a wage above the unregulated market wage for that job) then the smaller business has gained a competitive advantage relative to the larger business, compared with the prior situation.
So you'd expect the larger businesses to be contracting, and the smaller businesses to be expanding.
If the study shows that the smaller businesses are actually contracting, that means the damage in absolute terms to those businesses is greater than the benefit from being able to steal a march on their larger competitors. But that doesn't mean they aren't winning some trade away from the larger businesses, just that it's not enough to fully cancel out the damaging effect.
Not covering the larger businesses is a limitation of the study. But far from proving - or even suggesting - that they've expanded by an equal or greater degree to the contraction by SMEs, actually we can guess that the contraction there is EVEN WORSE. (Note here that we're talking about contraction in employment: it's possible the larger corps limited the damage to their profits by contracting employment even more sharply, e.g. the robo-servers we see taking orders in McDonalds).
Bottom-line: OK, that study had limitations. What study doesn't? But don't be too quick to say that implies the opposite of the study's conclusions: it might be even worse than you think.
Mom and Pop places are not required to pay the new minimum wage in Seattle. That is the problem with the study. It doesn't include employees actually making the new minimum wage. Seriously, SlashDot used to be a place for intelligent discussion.
once more into the breach
Except that it doesn't make sense in economic theory.
Supply-side, Chicago School and Austrian School are not economic theory - they have both been utterly debunked.
For higher wages to drive inflation: the potential profit from new customers (higher-earning workers at other businesses) must be less than the cost of the higher wages. This cannot happen with moderate wage increases -in fact mathematically it only becomes likely at truly insane raises. Otherwise the businesses will make more money by absorbing the cost and selling more goods at lower margins.
For higher wages to drive job-loss -they must be so severe that it's no longer possible to operate the business at all. Contrary to what you think economic theory is - hiring rates are relatively independent from the cost of labour because companies need to meet demand in order to stay in business. The amount of work that needs to be done is therefore the primary driver of hiring. Assuming the company is meeting current demand if the cost of labor goes down the company won't hire more people, so why would they fire people if it goes up ? Both decisions would cost them money ! A company will expand if it can credibly determine that there is unmet demand. Not because workers are cheaper. There's no point in having workers make goods you can't sell, anymore than there is any sense in having to turn customers away because you don't have enough workers to make the goods for all the customers. The impact of labour cost on hiring levels then is miniscule.
In theory the wage increases should, actually, increase demand and make expansion more likely - more people with more money means more of them can potentially be your customers.
All in all - study after study after study has consistently found that moderate increases in minimum wage have a nett-zero effect on employment rates, and this is also born out by historical data.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
That doesn't work any more thanks to entitlements. The reality is that making twice of minimum wage isn't worth it. All it does is reduce your government assistance.
Yes, that's just another argument in favor of MGI. If everyone gets it, not only do we not need a minimum wage at all, but people aren't motivated not to do work so that they can keep their assistance. They won't lose it if they make some money.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So reading between the lines, the study's results were largely correct when talking about small businesses, higher minimum wage hurts small business.
Nope. You're ignoring the effect of the different minimum wage for "mom and pop" businesses and larger businesses.
Pretend you're going work at a cheap restaurant. Your choice is $13/hr at a restaurant with one location, or $15/hr at a restaurant with multiple locations. You'd tend to choose the latter option, right?
It turns out, so would a lot of other people. So now the small business is dealing with a crappier, less-productive pool of workers because all the "good" ones are working for the large companies.
It's not that minimum wage hurts small business. A lower minimum wage causes labor to go to where they get paid more for the same work. And supply-and-demand results in lower productivity and lower quality workers when you're paying less than the other employers.
But since nobody is actually proposing that- it's meaningless to study it.
What DOES make sense is to study what effects small and moderate minimum wage increases have on employment - since those are what actually happens.
Nobody would set such a high minimum wage because everybody knows it's insane and would have terrible effects. But it does not logically follow that a small increase would have the same bad effects.
Your bathtub is at 25C. Increasing the temperature of your bathwater by 100C would kill you, increasing it by 3C just makes for a nicer, more comfortable bath. Small interventions do not always have the same effects as a large version of the same would have.
The overwhelming evidence is that moderate minimum wage increases have little to no impact on overall employment rates. It makes sense too - what business would choose to LOSE money by firing people it needs and losing out on sales because it couldn't produce enough goods ?
A business would only start looking at layoffs if the increase is so big that they would lose MORE money paying those people than they will lose turning away customers (and that's BEFORE we even consider the possibility of having more customers when wages go up).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
This is an entirely baseless claim. There is an external correction system and economists have been well aware of it for quite some time. The term being externalities. This typically refers to parts of the economic process that cannot be regulated by supply and demand mechanisms alone and require collective action, i.e. a government. A classic example of this is pollution controls. You can't expect the individuals to, as people like to say, "vote with their wallets" on whether the factory next to them should be pouring poison into a nearby river. By electing official to represent them and agreeing to abide the authority of the said individual, the externality can be addressed, e.g. through fees per barrel of poison added to the river, and the externality is said to be internalized.
I would suggest you actually take a course in a subject before you lambast us for being as smart as you.
This is basically what Ford did in his production plant back when the Model T was the craze. ....Higher wages will make people move to the area if possible, and they will also want to keep their jobs. And people with money spend it, and spend it locally which in turn drives the economy.
Ford's action was voluntary, not government-mandated.
Not really. What you would also have is low end businesses undercutting each other to save costs on hygiene, imposing health costs that probably overcome the savings of not taking care of hygiene. Businesses and customers don't have, and can't afford, perfect information, and don't make the most rationale decisions for themselves.
why not follow that to it's logical conclusion and drop everybody's wages to 1 cent/hr?
Yeah, I'm being facetious. But it's a core argument made by the other side (raise minimum wage to $200/hr!).
And yes, those studies are correct. They're correct because you'll see adults competing for jobs that only kids can hold right now. That's because only kids could make that little and survive. It's a minor thing since poor economic conditions forcing adults to take second jobs and increasing workload at school has forced most of them out of the job market anyway. It does, however, let you take their research out of context and make it look like raising the minimum wage hurts people that live off it; which is wrong.
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they capped CEO pay to something like 20x the lowest paid employee (can't remember the scale but it was pretty high). It worked great. If the CEO wanted more pay they had to pay better. Naturally the law didn't last long.
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I don't think the answer is central planning. Most of the problems I see stem from externalities where a business can push off some of the costs of their doing business onto society. Classic examples would be pollution. If companies had to pay for the FULL cost of the pollution they created the costs of their products would rise. It would also mean that companies that do a better job would create a cheaper product. There are many other examples like walmart helping workers apply for welfare. That allows them to push off part of the cost of doing business to someone else that is paid for with tax dollars.
I don't know what a complete solution is and I doubt we could make all industries pay the full cost of all activities but at the very least we should know the full costs and for those we don't have the industries pay for it should be a very conscious choice. If we know how much they are costing us to clean up we also know how much to invest in cleaner technology and where the payoff is and is not worth it. If you factor in the full externalities for an electric car, hybrid car, gas car, diesel car etc which one really is cheaper? How much we are truly paying for these vehicles? Are our cars cheaper at the cost of higher healthcare? Does our food cost us more in health care than better food costs? Is it cheaper to clean up the pollution from coal power plants than to clean up chemicals from making solar panels?
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
Oy. Words continue to lose all meaning. A factual report pointing out gaping holes in a study used to make a phony right-wing point ends up being called the conspiracy. And the guy calling it that doesn't even realize that's what he's doing...
What amazes me is that this shit shows up on Slashdot - the site that used to specialize in pointing out skewed sampling and 'tuned to the test' studies of, oh, Microsoft software vs the competition, etc. But make it a subject that can conceivably be categorized as on a 'liberal' vs 'conservative' axis, and all ability to see facts is lost. Liberals may see a study they don't like and attempt to refute it - and admit when they can't. But conservatives see a study they do like and support it in the face of contrary facts. That's just how it is - don't tell me both sides are the same. They aren't.
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Those countries also have little niceties like free healthcare, child care - and probably subsidized housing. But who's counting...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Even if all externalities are taken into account I don't know if that is enough for whole system optimization. Would that increase our average education level to support a higher tech economy? It would probably fix the roads and other infrastructure at least. I just don't see it as the whole solution. Right now though we do very little of it.
I have only taken a few economics classes in college. What I see in real life though is politicians that have a certain view on the world and then they find/twist some kind of evidence to support their view point and then they do what they wanted to do and say that it makes sense no matter what the cost. It is very hard to get an actual sane discussion about almost any topic because it becomes politicized and turned into some kind of team sport. People choose sides instead of rationally looking at the issue and making a real discussion.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
so it never occurred to them to have minimum wage laws. For all practical purposes they have minimum wage laws, they're just enforced by Unions (which are themselves quasi-government bodies in many countries).
Basically, they've achieved the same thing with a different set of laws. Government intervention was still necessary to prevent worker abuse. They just went about it a different way.
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