[BirdieNZ]

Yes, economists thought for a long time that minimum wage increases reduce employment, as their models showed that it should.

Reality doesn't care about models, though. In reality, you can increase minimum wage without decreasing employment.

[throwaway73838]

You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.

If you understood economics, you would understand the absurdity of what you just said.

You’re rejecting the most fundamental basic of economics. It’s what you learn on day one. Changes to price will alter the equilibrium point and therefore quantity demanded.

For example: If I raise the price of milk, people will buy less milk. How much less they buy depends on elasticity of demand. But to say that increasing the price of milk will result in increased demand for milk is the equivalent of saying that water flows uphill.

[BirdieNZ]

Economics 101 might start with that, but you need to progress to Economics 201 and so on. "Changes to price will alter the equilibrium point and therefore quantity demanded." is only true if certain assumptions are true, such as "people are rational actors that have sufficiently complete knowledge to act in their own self-interest", and "people always work to maximise meeting their own needs and wants".

In reality, people act against their own self-interest, people don't always act rationally, and people have limited knowledge.

This is why when we look at specific real world examples of price changes, sometimes a change to price does not affect quantity demanded. With minimum wage, a common explanation for this is that minimum wage workers have limited knowledge of the available supply of workers, and don't realise they could bargain for higher wages. In other words, there is a market inefficiency that they are unable to exploit because of limited knowledge; moving the minimum wage higher results in that inefficiency being reduced or removed, despite the workers not having increased knowledge.

We can see this at a very simple level: I have worked with colleagues who are unaware that they are being significantly under-paid for their skills and experience. Technically, the price on offer for their services is set at a higher point than what they are being paid, but due to limited information, they are not selling their services at that point.

Sometimes, even though they have the information, they don't act in their own self-interest and don't change job or bargain for higher pay, for a variety of reasons. Now, if the software firms around collectively increased pay to all those under-paid workers by $10,000, there would be no reduction in employment. There would be a reduction in profits for the software firms, because they were exploiting a market inefficiency that was reduced, but they are still making sufficient profits that they won't change their number of employees in response.

[throwaway73838]

That would work both ways though. Employers could also be overpaying staff by the same token. So what you are saying is just a lie told to stupid people to take their money away from them.