The workers are human, per the article mainly women with childen, poor, mobility is sometimes limited for low wage employees(jobs they can get to, time they have to look for new employment, ability to relocate to a different city) , so yes, they work for what they can get but not becuase they really want to or are happy with the wage; they have to. They do not have all of these fantasy options that you all dream up.

That is definitely a severe limitation of empirical economic analysis, and one that those using economic studies do not seem to fully appreciate when it comes to the confidence in which they assert their conclusions.

The solution to that problem is not to toss up your hands at the futility of economic knowledge. It is to place greater emphasis on an objective rational framework in which to interpret observed data. The depth and complexity of that framework must be greater than what is frequently necessary in the hard sciences. That, and an irrational skepticism against objective reason (and perhaps an element of intellectual laziness, or ideological defense), leaves many economists clinging to the impossible notion of an empirical economic science.

With minimum wage, we have a good example of this. You have the latter type of economist actually thinking that the C-K data proved (and could possibly prove) the objective necessary rational foundation of economics to be incorrect.

A good economist (e.g. one from the school of Mises) would rightly treat any empirical claim requiring that logical contradictions are real, or that human nature is not what it is, with extreme skepticism.

You’re correct we can’t test things in lab conditions, but natural experiments happen all the time. You just have to know where to look.

The way we have it now, is that you can test and prove almost anything you want, which is why we have Keynes.