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Comment by DavidWoof | Hacker News Reader

I'm more or less sympathetic to the idea that the Seattle minimum wage experiment can be having negative effects. Card/Krueger has to have a limit somewhere, and I suspect certain jurisdictions are approaching or exceeding that limit.

That said, excluding multi-location employers from a minimum wage study just seems to me to be so obviously flawed as to border on pure dishonesty.

I'm truly curious how things like this happen. Did UW publish this as a reasonable study with limited findings only to find the press massively misreported it? Or did the desire for media coverage lead the researchers to overstate the findings just to get in the press? I personally don't think political bias drove this. It looks like researchers at UW made a perfectly reasonable small limited study that added a small amount to our knowledge, but then either the researchers or the university or the press advertised it as an exhaustive answer to a complex question.

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It wasn't dishonest - they didn't have the data for those multi-site employers b/c of how Washington state keeps records. The authors are upfront about this and try to address the limitation by adding a a survey component---they talked to these employers to see if their responses to the MW were different.

I agree with that, so maybe my post wasn't as clear as it could be.

I would say that in the transmission between the study and the mainstream press, something happened that is best described as "dishonest", or at the very least a reckless disregard for nuance. As you point out, and I agree, the study itself doesn't have that problem. The study itself is quite clear on its limitations.

So where's the issue? Is it just the general incompetency of the mainstream press (I could absolutely believe that). Is it the authors crossing every 't' in the study, but then overstating the findings and dropping the caveats in their interviews with the media? Is it the UW PR staff overstating the findings in a way PR staffs are wont to do? A combination of all of these.

I could believe any of those things. But when this study came out a few days ago, I had to read the study itself to have even a remote awareness of what it actually said (and remember, I think the findings are probably correct). And yes, I think that process is best described with the word "dishonest".

Yeah - I think this is just inherent in the transmission of academic work to a broader audience. Nuance and caveats get stripped away, in part because the journalists themselves aren't capable of assessing these features.

Mentioned above, but the survey data indicates the effects on multi-site employers was likely more negative.

http://m.startribune.com/seattle-study-shows-low-wage-jobs-d...

>>That said, excluding multi-location employers from a minimum wage study just seems to me to be so obviously flawed as to border on pure dishonesty.

Please elaborate why. Generally, it is believed larger employers benefit from minimum wage laws because they can afford to pay more while small mom and pop employers can't. This reduces the pool of available employers for workers to choose from.

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