Speaking of the minimum wage, four full weeks have passed since I first shared the generous offer of the successful and skilled businessman Mike Long to help inexperienced academics who believe that monopsony power is real to start their own businesses in order to take advantage of this presumed profit opportunity. Amazingly, not a single person has taken Mike up on his kind offer.
The offer remains open, yet I must say that the empirical record by now is growing full and powerful that those academics who proclaim the reality of monopsony power in the market for low-skilled workers seem to be quite unsure of their hypothesis. I propose that henceforth these people – none of whom is willing to risk his or her own financial resources on the hypothesis of the real-world prevalence of monopsony power – be ignored and their calls for higher minimum wages be dismissed as talk that is as cheap for them as it is dangerous for low-skilled workers.
