Suppose that, say, Bob Higgs or George Will or Richard Epstein or Holman Jenkins or Deirdre McCloskey or David Boaz – or, really, any well-respected public intellectual known to favor free markets – wrote the following in a major publication:
There’s just no evidence that raising the minimum wage fails to destroy some jobs, even when the starting point is as low as it is in modern America.
What would be the political left’s reaction to this assertion? Almost certainly a reaction from the political left would occur quickly and be full of indignation and accusations about how libertarians and free-market conservatives lie. And if any free-market writer were today really to write such a thing as above, it would indeed likely be either a lie or evidence that the writer is inexcusably uninformed about the subject that he or she has chosen to write about.
The fact is that there is indeed some evidence that raising the minimum wage fails to destroy some jobs, even when the starting point is as low as it is in modern America. David Card’s and Alan Krueger’s famous article of more than 20 years ago is only the most notable of a long list of empirical studies that find no, or only the most insignificant, negative employment effects of raising the minimum wage in the United States. Perhaps the most intrepid researcher today whose research finds no negative employment effects of raising the minimum wage is Arindrajit Dube, a highly skilled and respected University of Chicago PhD economist who is now on the economics faculty at U-Mass Amherst.
Of course, that such evidence exists means neither that it is correct (or even persuasive) nor that there is no contradictory evidence. Yet however much one might question this evidence that finds no disemployment effects of raising the minimum wage, one cannot deny that this evidence exists. Nor can one dismiss this evidence by asserting that it is either insufficiently ample or that it comes from researchers who lack credibility.
Any such statement as above would deeply embarrass me – as an opponent of minimum-wage legislation – even though I didn’t write it. I would search for a plausible explanation other than the author being either a liar or inexcusably uninformed. Perhaps the writer was simply careless in his or her composition. Or perhaps the writer originally included the word “credible” immediately before the word “evidence” only to discover that some terrible copyeditor, incredibly, deleted the word “credible.” (Inserting the word “credible” before “evidence” would go some way toward mitigating the untruthfulness of the above quotation, but even that move would have given most non-economist readers a mistaken impression about the current view of economists on the matter of the minimum wage.) But it would be damned difficult – likely impossible – to find a reason not to elevate your distrust of anything this writer offers up in the future.
Yet what do we read in yesterday’s New York Times from Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman? We read this:
There’s just no evidence that raising the minimum wage costs jobs, at least when the starting point is as low as it is in modern America.
This statement is simply, verifiably untrue. There is indeed evidence – and lots of it – that raising the minimum wage costs jobs, even when the starting point is as low as it is in America.
David Neumark and William Wascher have done several empirical studies, all highly technical and careful, that find disemployment effects of raising the minimum wage. (They’ve even published a book in 2010 with the MIT Press on this matter.) UC – San Diego economists Jeffrey Clemens’s and Michael Wither’s recent study – containing evidence that Krugman says doesn’t exist – is much-cited. Jonathan Meer (of Texas A&M) and Jeremy West (of MIT) also have recently offered evidence that Krugman says is non-existent. Cornell’s Richard Burkhauser and American University’s Joseph Sabia are also among the economists who’ve recently found evidence the existence of which Krugman denies. Indeed, even the Congressional Budget Office, just this past February, presented evidence to support its prediction that a hike in the U.S. minimum wage to $10.10 per hour would destroy 500,000 jobs, and destroy 100,000 jobs if it is raised to $9.00 per hour.
Now Krugman surely does dispute this evidence (which is fair). But for him to say that no such evidence exists is…. well, perhaps he’s the victim of a terrible copyeditor. Let’s hope that the New York Times in the future is more careful about editing Mr. Krugman’s columns so as to ensure that his intended meaning isn’t lost in the final product.
