Seattle's socialist member of the city council fired the Unversity of Washington team after the results came out and hired an anti-capitalist professor from berkeley to ensure the study finds the right results.
Please don't use HN primarily for political or ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that (regardless of which flavor they favor) because it's destructive of what HN is for.
Why stop there? Just make it 100$ and hour and everyone will be rich!
This argument -- "well, if you think a little increase in the minimum wage is good, then you must think any increase in the minimum wage is good, or you're not being consistent!" -- gets trotted out by somebody on HN every time the subject comes up. And c'mon. If I believe that San Francisco's minimum wage hikes to $14 and $15 an hour are not going to cause undue economic collapse here, that does not somehow obligate me to believe "hey, if that works, we can raise the minimum wage to ELEVEN BILLIONTY DOLLARS AN HOUR with minimal impact, too!" Real life is full of examples, from salt in your soup to water behind a dam, where we understand that's good to increase the level to a point, but only to a point.
Oh wait, arbitrary wage increases don't really work out in real life.
"Most past research has found that modest increases to the minimum wage have little impact on employment, and that if employers do eliminate jobs or cut back hours, those losses are dwarfed by the income gains enjoyed by the majority of workers who keep their jobs." That quote is...from the FiveThirtyEight article that you linked to. The evidence so far seems to be that some of the time, for some levels, minimum wage increases do really work out in real life. The UW study criticizes the methodology of past studies, but it's at least worth acknowledging that there's criticisms of the UW study which are not, despite Fox's take, "this is not the result the socialists wanted." Notably, UW's study excludes businesses with multiple locations but only one account with Washington State's unemployment office, which eliminates 38% of the state's workforce from consideration, including all chain fast food and retail workers. They exclude them specifically because they can't get "___location-based" data for workers in those cases; while that may be true, being inconvenient to UW's methodology doesn't render that data irrelevant.
> Real life is full of examples, from salt in your soup to water behind a dam, where we understand that's good to increase the level to a point, but only to a point.
And somehow this point is lost on many proponents of raising the minimum wage, who find obvious that any increase in minimum wage can only be good and anyone saying otherwise is evil. Sometimes the soup would be better with less salt, minimum wages could be too high already!
Note that your fivethirtyeight article even mentions a caveat to the study:
> The paper’s findings are preliminary and have not yet been subjected to peer review. And the authors stressed that even if their results hold up, their research leaves important questions unanswered, particularly about how the minimum wage has affected individual workers and businesses.
> Many economists, meanwhile, have acknowledged substantial uncertainty over the likely effects of the recent wage hikes. Most — though by no means all — past research has found that modest increases to the minimum wage have little impact on employment, and that if employers do eliminate jobs or cut back hours, those losses are dwarfed by the income gains enjoyed by the majority of workers who keep their jobs. But those studies were mostly based on minimum wages that were much lower than the ones beginning to take effect now. Even some liberal economists have expressed concern, often privately, that employers might respond differently to a minimum wage of $12 or $15, which would affect a far broader swath of workers than the part-time fast-food and retail employees who typically dominate the ranks of minimum-wage earners. Other economists said there simply wasn’t enough evidence to predict the impact of minimum wages that high. The new laws in Seattle and other cities, then, could provide an ideal testing ground.
Additionally, here is a post by Jared Bernstein related to the minimum wage hike[0]. Here is the book mentioned in the aforementioned post [1].
Another analysis[2] finding that "Once this publication selection is corrected, little or no evidence of a negative association between minimum wages and employment remains."
While I also do not know for certain the effects of a minimum wage, one of your sources fairly lists caveats and uncertainty for the study it mentions, and the other is fox news.
This post is an insult to hacker news. You are not deploying any kind of rational logic. If $100 is good, then make it $1,000,000. That is your logic and it is dishonest at best.
Oh wait, arbitrary wage increases don't really work out in real life.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/seattles-minimum-wage-h...
Seattle's socialist member of the city council fired the Unversity of Washington team after the results came out and hired an anti-capitalist professor from berkeley to ensure the study finds the right results.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/06/29/seattle-commissio...