Some Links
by Don Boudreaux
on July 18, 2015
William Occam compares the insightful Dr. Krugman’s economics-full analysis of the minimum wage with the benighted Mr. Krugman’s economics-free analysis of the minimum wage.
Speaking of the mysterious transformation of Dr. Krugman into Mr. Krugman, I believe that I have not yet linked to this months-old Forbes essay by Tim Worstall.
And in his Forbes essay today, Tim Worstall explains that Mr. Krugman now has strayed so far away from economics that he – Krugman – seems to argue that labor is not subject to the law of demand.
Another scholar who has probing questions for Mr. Krugman about the minimum wage is economist Matthew Kahn.
I thank Warren Smith for alerting me to Thomas Sowell’s March 18, 2015, essay on the ruinous compassion that fuels support for the minimum wage. A slice:
Looking back over my own life, I realize now how lucky I was when I left home in 1948, at the age of 17, to become self-supporting. The unemployment rate for 16- and 17-year-old blacks at that time was under 10 percent. Inflation had made the minimum-wage law, passed ten years earlier, irrelevant. But it was only a matter of time before liberal compassion led to repeated increases in the minimum wage, to keep up with inflation. The annual unemployment rate for black teenagers has never been less than 20 percent in the past 50 years and has ranged as high as over 50 percent.
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