>> I repeat: study after study has shown that whites are hired before blacks in this labor market.
No one was talking about whites being hired BEFORE blacks. I have provided the context of the entire quote, including the paragraph which preceded the portion I quoted:
At the end of World War II the minimum wage was 40 cents an hour. Wartime inflation had made that so low in real terms as to be unimportant. The minimum wage was then raised sharply to 75 cents in 1950, to $ 1.00 in 1956. In the early fifties the unemployment rate for teenagers averaged 10 percent compared with about 4 percent for all workers— moderately higher, as one would expect for a group just entering the labor force. The unemployment rates for white and black teenagers were roughly equal.
After minimum wage rates were raised sharply, the unemployment rate shot up for both white and black teenagers. Even more significant, an unemployment gap opened between the rates for white and black teenagers. Currently, the unemployment rate runs around 15 to 20 percent for white teenagers; 35 to 45 percent for black teenagers.
As you can see, the unemployment rates for whites and blacks BEFORE the MW increase were equal. Friedman cited: Yale Brozen and Milton Friedman, The Minimum Wage Rate (Washington, D.C.: The Free Society Association, April 1966); Finis Welch, Minimum Wages: Issues and Evidence (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1978); and Economic Report of the President, January 1979, p. 218. |
