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Comment by elicash | Hacker News Reader

All the top-level comments are making excuses for inconvenient facts. I'm guessing a lot of folks on Hacker News believe themselves to be objective analysts and yet are blind to how their bias against the minimum wage is causing them to look foolish in ignoring any new information that might possibly conflict with their world view.

The ONLY proper response if you're a critic of this study (if not with the methodology, which nobody here has found ANY problems with) is to say, "well there's a wide variety of findings on minimum wage." Instead, you have people intentionally misreading the study, making ideological claims about the "value" of the work minimum wage workers do, or a conspiratorial claim they reversed because of "pressure" without any evidence whatsoever.

It's quite sad to see people so willing to reject inconvenient facts.

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The thing I find most obnoxious is that people don't seem to understand that a minimum wage is necessary to prevent employee abuse. Without a minimum wage, corporations will gladly hire people who are unable to negotiate hire rates despite doing the same work as everyone else. The disabled, prison labor and immigrants are all examples of people who have been historically abused by companies in order to pay them much less.

Ultimately when any job is better than no job, people will take what they can get. Companies know this, and will pay people obscenely low amounts to take advantage of people without any other options. Therefore to protect them and ensure they can have a livable wage, we need to maintain a minimum wage.

If I may rearrange your post a little (and please tell me if I am misrepresenting your view, because that is not my intent):

Employers may abuse employees in terms of wage, and this has been seen in the past.

Corporations have a stronger negotiating position than many (most?) potential employees, and one of the primary ways this is manifested is in the following manner:

When a person faces the choice of no-income (substituted for your use of "job") or income, the choice of income is near-universally better.

I think the conclusion "we need a minimum wage" is too strong. This is not the only way to provide bargaining power to potential employees. By way of proof I offer an alternative means to a minimum wage, namely some form of subsidy given to all humans. This type of arrangement is often termed a universal basic income and there are numerous specific implementations which have been proposed over time.

It seems that having identified a problem (employees may be faced with a raw deal when interacting with employers), we should look for multiple (though perhaps not all - exhaustive searches can be expensive (keep in mind time is a resource and that opportunity cost is always present)) approaches and weigh their positive and negative characteristics.

To do otherwise seems but a parody of rhetoric and reason, captured well in the "Yes, Minister" scene linked below[0].

I do not propose UBI as the only alternative to a minimum wage, or even as the best of all possible options, only to suggest that your obnoxious people may perceive both the problem you have posed and an alternative solution that they believe to be better than the one you propose.

The way you present your argument seems to me to assume that those who disagree with you must be ignorant or malicious. Starting a conversation with either assumption seems fruitless. To accuse (even obliquely) a person of ignorance and forcibly try to educate them is, in my experience, an exercise in insult and folly - even if a person is ignorant, an aggressive teacher is not likely to be listened to. To engage a malicious actor with reason and education seems simply folly - if they understand the problem you pose and enjoy the ill it brings to people, then you have nothing to gain by explaining that negative effect. It seems to me that such a rhetorical approach is geared to identify friends and foes, group these people together, and allow the speaker to dismiss the latter.

You have the unlucky position of being the first in this thread engaging in such a way. I see it equally among those that I imagine you would side with and those you would side against. I have the unfortunate disposition of occasionally ranting as I have above.

I hope that if you've stayed with me this far that you are, in fact, interested in reasoned discourse and willing to accept some unsolicited advice from an internet stranger who is ornery today. Perhaps you might do better at engaging those obnoxious people by finding common ground - it is usually simple to agree that you are both interested in improving the lot of those who are least well off and that you both agree that certain problems can and do exist. From there it is much easier to find a productive conversation about various means to address the specific problems, and the many positives and negatives of each.

[0]: https://youtu.be/trw1PbQt_Yo?t=11

Not OP, but in their defense -- we know a minimum wage is effective at increasing wages. I'm very open to the idea of UBIs but it's largely untested. You don't mention it, but I think the most effective way of shifting power is with strong labor unions.

The thing I find most obnoxious is the "a better end naturally justifies removing liberties" concept.

Suppose there was positive correlation between racial diversity and violent crime in the US. Would you support de jure segregation, because it reduces violence? Even if there seem to be good effects from segregation didn't necessarily mean the government should dictate living locations.

Even if there are good effects from legislated prices, that doesn't necessarily mean the government should dictate employment contacts.

I find it obnoxious to say "yes, a minimum wage makes for a better society overall but I'm going to take a principled stand because ideologically I'm opposed to forcing employers to pay a living wage." Seems silly to me. If I think something will make society better, I'm in favor of it.

> Even if there seem to be good effects from segregation didn't necessarily mean the government should dictate living locations.

To be clear, you're NOT saying there are good effects of segregation, right? That was just an example to illustrate a point? Because I see zero positives from segregation.

Your argument is moronic. De-segregation is not the cause of violence in your hypothetical and if it was then you were imagining a racist dreamland.

It's a (negative) example. It's supposed to be moronic.

To play devil's advocate (you can read my response to OP to see how I feel generally about the overall argument), it does seem to correlate that more homogeneous societies, e.g. Japan, Norway, have lower crime statistics, or lower violent crimes.

Possible reason being, the more likely you are able to socially connect with your potential victim and the less likely you are to see them as the "other," then the less likely you are to feel justified in causing them harm.

KKK feels justified because other races are inferior, the rich feel justified in exploiting the poor because poor people are lazy, e.g.

And you could find similar examples in the US as well. E.g, the least violent state (Maine) also is the least racially diverse.

Like you say, it's not hard to believe that homogeneity (whether race, religion, culture, ethics, politics etc.) causes less conflict. Naturally, that's an awful justification for a terrible practice.

But you find many tunnel-visioned "the statistics justify the means" arguments: minimum wage, gun control, privacy, etc. Proper laws are not just about statistically good outcomes.

Canada has a lower violent crime rate even in major city centres where diversity is crazy high.

Are you serious? That's almost the basis for our (U.S., Western) form of government.

"Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority of the ruler (or to the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights."

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

The only thing you're actually arguing against is applying it mindlessly regardless of any other concerns, as in, the reduction of violent crime is sufficient in and of itself to be a "better end" -- in actual fact, we've seen separate but equal doesn't work.

As an aside, look at people like Marcus Garvey. As an attempt to resolve the conflict in America between black and white, complete segregation has been seriously proposed; it was not (entirely) stopped or prevented due to ethical/moral arguments. As a slightly silly example, you have a family who has been living in a home for 100 years, but the neighborhood they live in has shifted. Perhaps you use eminent domain to remove them. Now multiply that by thousands -- will they all move peacefully? Where are you getting the money for this? etc. etc.

> Even if there are good effects from legislated prices, that doesn't necessarily mean the government should dictate employment contacts.

Doesn't necessarily mean it shouldn't either. I would argue the better solution would be mandatory union participation. Unions would equalize the power imbalance between the individual worker and, say, McDonald's, without the government dictating terms. But I'm guessing you, or people who also support your argument, would balk at that as well.

> Where are you getting the money for this? etc. etc.

A more plausible approach is discouraging immigration of heterogeneous population.

Sound familiar?

I read this comment and think instantly of a creation vs evolution debate. Neither side can disprove the other and things just get more heated as we talk past one another.

There is a fundamental logic to thinking that the floor for wages should be 0. Otherwise one can generate a bunch of facts regarding different values and circumstance and controls.

Neither set of arguments proves the other is wrong, they just reference different basic truths. With minimum wage is there are two competing claims, that interfering in the price of exchange is bad and that thumbing the price in favor of the worker vs business has good results. While both can be true, the moral claim can be completely true while the data based claim is at best true to an unknown point.

Studies like this do nothing to convince me there should be a minimum wage, regardless of the claimed optimum point, because a more transparent mechanism to increase lower income worker pay would be a government redistribution that is proportional to all transactions, not acutely affecting specific transactions. I.e. Tax and spend or print and spend, don't price control.

Just like creation and evolution, you can have it both ways but you need to iron it out consistently.

>Neither side can disprove the other and things just get more heated as we talk past one another.

Woh woh woh. Back the truck up. One side has a hypothesis that can be subjected to falsification. The other says "A wizard did it. Trust me."

The debate on minimum wage is an emperical question that both models fail and succeed on various tests. It's a truly hard question to answer and likely has no stable model.

Completely 110% different types of logical incongruity.

Agreed? An empirical claim that $15 minimum wage is better than $10 could be proven false by some set of metrics and controls. That $1 is better than zero? That is a different type of argument, and one for which expounding upon the scientific method is irrelevant.

The belief in chasing a continuous optimum is as much a belief as choosing the endpoint, so I think there is disagreement about what the debate is.

Mr. Ritholtz did three things. He found the most extreme over-reactions to the law, he criticized those over-reactions for being too extreme, and he provided one graph of one statistic that charts restaurant employment from 1990 to 2018.

This is his only argument in the piece:

> [Restaurants] were in fact opening; employment in food services and drinking establishments has soared.

But does that data support his conclusion? Could Seattle's population growth explain the gains in restaurant employment? Why a chart starting from 1990 for a law passed in 2018? Has enough time elapsed to understand the impact of the law? Was the downturn in restaurant employment in 2018 related to the minimum wage law?

Though I love it, let's skip the Socratic dialogue. The $15/hr minimum wage does not go into effect until January 1st 2019! Let's wait and see how customer's react to higher prices before declaring victory.

I think the more noteworthy article (since I agree the OP is lacking) is the NYT article that it links to:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/business/economy/seattle-...

Here's the new paper it describes: https://www.nber.org/papers/w25182?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medi...

>Mr. Ritholtz did three things. He found the most extreme over-reactions to the law, he criticized those over-reactions for being too extreme, and he provided one graph of one statistic that charts restaurant employment from 1990 to 2018.

You missed the fourth thing that prompted this story, he discussed two studies done about the new data. The first made several mistakes that they addressed in the second, and the conclusion showed that pay was rising.

>Why a chart from 1990 for a law passed in 2018?

>The $15/hr minimum wage does not go into effect until January 1st 2019!

The law was passed in 2015, and it mandated a gradual increase of the minimum wage over the next four years. In 2018, the minimum wage is $15 for businesses with over 500 employees, $14 for other businesses.

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