Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by c1ccccc1 1547 days ago
It would only take one example to disprove the theory, but finding that example is probably going to be somewhat difficult, since you'd need to establish that the increase in minimum wage caused the increase in employment. In the examples you give, maybe employment went up because those countries increased the minimum wage, or maybe it would have gone up anyway as those countries recovered from the financial crisis. Or maybe some third factor caused the increase. Or, if unemployment was unusually high during the crisis, it could be pure reversion to the mean.
1 comments

https://davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers.html#6

"Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania." (with Alan Krueger), American Economic Review 84, September 1994.

“ The inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price is the core proposition in economic science, which embodies the presupposition that human choice behavior is sufficiently rational to allow predictions to be made. Just as no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teaching of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.” ~James M. Buchanan, 1986 Nobel laureate in economics, writing in the Wall Street Journal on April 25, 1996