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Comment by ABCLAW | Hacker News Reader

Oh boy. Time to read another page of comments written by people who think that price elasticity is always linear and that markets are always efficient!

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There are studies that avoid assuming perfect, instantaneous markets. They, too, show nuanced but negative long term effects of min wages.

http://voxeu.org/article/long-run-employment-effects-minimum...

"More recently, some researchers (e.g. Dube et al. 2010) exploit differences between counties sitting on each side of a state border where one state raised their minimum wage and another did not. Many, but certainly not all, studies that use these approaches deliver SMALL disemployment effects."

Daniel Aaronson, Eric French, Isaac Sorkin from your article ^^^

Dube et al 2010's ACTUAL result:

"We compare all contiguous county-pairs in the United States that straddle a state border and find NO adverse employment effects"

This a pathetic piece of weasel wording, although not something I'm terribly surprised to see from them specifically.

The paper itself is much more nuanced. Their model predicts the results of Dube, especially in industries where few of the employees receive salaries near min wage. It also predicts the minimal disemployment effects (or non-existent disemployment effects, as in Dube) in the short run.

Where it differs is in the long-run in industries where 1) many employees receive near min wage, and 2) capital can easily replace labor.

So, Aaronson finds disemployment in low cost / fast food restaurants in the long run, but not in expensive sit down restaurants (which can absorb additional labor costs).

How good is the model they are using? They are making all of the conclusions based on a model but data on the model doesn't seem in the scope of the article

The article is a summary of the paper. The full paper is available here:

https://www.chicagofed.org/~/media/publications/working-pape...

"Oh boy. Time to read another page of comments written by people who think that price elasticity is always linear and that markets are always efficient!"

I'll take that over a page of comments from people that are not aware that price elasticity exists.

Progress, yes ?

Prices elasticity doesn't need to be linear, nor do markets need to be perfectly efficient for higher labor costs to lead to lower employment. If you want to make an honest argument for higher minimum wage, you need to address the cost of lower levels of employments for the very poor.

Seems like otherwise objective open minded people find it hard to admit ignorance and humility when the topic is political. Climate change and economics are always so hotly debated by engineers.

I'm in SV and I've never met an engineer here who was a climate science denier. I've met conservatives (not many) but not a full on earth is cooling denier. On the interweb, sure.

^preach

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