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Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

False: http://www.nber.org/papers/w20313

Here is a link to the PDF of that paper. https://www.global-economic-symposium.org/knowledgebase/the-...

Thanks for sharing. This paper speaks to wages... not benefits, which Walmart avoids by classifying employees as part-time.

And mom and pops avoid because most ACA requirements don't apply to employers with fewer than 50 full time employees.

There's simply no evidence that Walmart is a drag on wages compared to retailers it replaces. Quite the opposite actually.

Follow the money. NBER's source of funding is dubious, at best.

It's the largest economic research organization in the US and the #1 clearinghouse for academic work in economics.

Furthermore, just because the paper is on NBER, it doesn't mean the organization did the research. It's just the organization that hosts the paper. If you click through, you can see that the work was done by faculty at Stanford and The University of Michigan.

And their "research" is used by right-wing conservatives to justify fracking, and other environmentally damaging agendas.

http://www.nofrackingway.us/2012/11/01/shale-boom-nber-conse...

The paper I linked to wasn't done by NBER. They just host a database of research done by basically all academic economists. Your ad hominem attack isn't even aimed at the right people.

Like I said... follow the money. I choose to filter this out as false authority, not ad-hominem.

Everyone chooses which science they want to deny so they don't have to confront inaccuracies in their world view. I guess this is yours.

There's no science required here. Walmart is a minimum wage body shop. Plain and simple. So at best, their presence in a community only displaces other minimum wage jobs, or creates more minimum wage jobs.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/03/walmart-can-afford-15-minimum...

The paper cited is a typical right-wing conservative position that corporate ladders with management positions provide workers with more opportunities for advancement, and thus possibly higher wages.

Oh please... an ad hominem attack on the NBER??

>...The NBER is the largest economics research organization in the United States.[2] Many of the American winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences were NBER Research Associates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bureau_of_Economic_Re...

Are you advocating for small businesses to be replaced by a handful of monopoly mega-corps?

"Research" can be used to defend any argument in this debate.

The NBER has 3-4 sources of funding and consistently reinforces conservative, monopolistic positions.

Probably should have clarified overall comp and benefits are lower... not specifically wages.

Do you have any evidence for that point of view?

Mom and pops very rarely have good benefits because they don't have the resources that larger firms have. It's complicated and expensive to set up things like health care plans and 401Ks. This is why the ACA employer mandate doesn't apply to firms with fewer than 50 employees.

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