But the credible ones clearly show that minimum wages cost jobs.
Credible to you, maybe. But that is a far different thing from credibility from a current understanding of economics. In particular, the research on the subject. Take the work published in the past few decades. While some reflects the understanding in the 1970s of minimum wage increase, most show little or no effect on employment. Which actually makes sense. Those minimum wage jobs that can be offshored, have already been ages ago. For the rest, if the price to make a hamburger goes up $0.10, you can't realistically shift production of them to Mexico. It may be that some consumers will decide to pass, but relatively small increases usually have no impact on demand. Granted, if the price were to double or triple over a short period of time, that likely would have that result. But, just like if the cost of the other ingredients of a hamburger goes up, it probably doesn't have that much of an impact on demand.
But we have been over this.
I'm telling you I had economics in high school, maybe about the 11th grade, and we learned that the first week. How do you think that works?
One, high school economics tend to be simplified. Two, some of the deeply held beliefs in economics of 4 decades ago have been proven to be in error.
This is one of them. Oddly enough, the assumption that labor demand is strictly inelastic is very simplistic. To the point of being wrong in many cases. |
