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Comment by barry-cotter | Hacker News Reader

People whose labor is worth less than the minimum wage become unemployable. Being unemployed means you can’t acquire skills or experience and is bad for your mental health and social attachment.

If you want to look at the literature you can start with Card and Krueger, which shows minimal effects for a small minimum wage discontinuity, I believe on the NJ/NY border. The Seattle minimum wage study showed a reduction in hours and benefits and reduced likelihood of new entrants to the labor market. It’s an exciting example of people looking really hard for ways to confirm their priors on both sides.

Or you can look at Europe. Greater employment protections raise the price of employing someone leading to greater unemployment. Minimum wages do the same thing more explicitly. Businesses buy less of things that are more expensive.

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> It’s an exciting example of people looking really hard for ways to confirm their priors on both sides.

It seems like you're doing that here yourself:

> The Seattle minimum wage study showed a reduction in hours and benefits and reduced likelihood of new entrants to the labor market.

https://ritholtz.com/2018/10/seattle-studys-shocking-conclus...

Minimum wage may have some complexities to be played out and examined, but to go back to the parent, the net harm here seems to be minimal at best, if not helpful over harmful, quite unlike how most feel about eugenics. That comparison, while criticizing the moral compass of economists generally, is quite something.

Is that article accurate? My understanding was that Seattle commissioned a multi-year study, and then when the results didn't go their way, quickly rushed a study out the door that said what they wanted. I got this from Marginal Revolution, and I can't find the article, but here is the actual study https://evans.uw.edu/policy-impact/minimum-wage-study and here is an MR article summarising the report: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/06/se...

The first two points from MR:

> – The numbers of hours worked by low-wage workers fell by 3.5 million hours per quarter. This was reflected both in thousands of job losses and reductions in hours worked by those who retained their jobs.

> – The losses were so dramatic that this increase “reduced income paid to low-wage employees of single-location Seattle businesses by roughly $120 million on an annual basis.”

> My understanding was that Seattle commissioned a multi-year study, and then when the results didn't go their way, quickly rushed a study out the door that said what they wanted.

Do you have any source for that? Because the same author sets are on both studies. The article I linked to is directly criticizing the study you linked to (and also directly links to it).

Admittedly I am not a field expert and I haven't dived into the weeds on these studies. But my points I think aren't reliant on these details. The are simply:

1. There is much debate over if minimum wage laws or even specific implementations do more good or harm, which would seem contrary to the parent appearing to try to claim the harms as facts.

2. All of this seems to make the claim that the harm of eugenics is equal to minimum wage quite egregious.

I'm not trying to start a flame war over the details of viability of minimum wage here - I don't think that will be productive for anyone. I just want to underscore how egregious comparing minimum wage to eugenics is here.

> Do you have any source for that?

Found where I got it from: https://www.seattleweekly.com/news/seattle-is-getting-an-obj... I'm not American so no idea if this is accurate or not.

So this is discussing two competing studies done at the same time. I linked to an article about the authors from the original study actually revising their results a year later with new data and basically saying "our previous conclusion was wrong".

The problem with minimum wage is that there is no minimum wage guarantee by the state. The same problem applies to price controls of any kind. If nobody is willing to sell you a product that satisfies the price controls then you go home empty handed. If the rules are too strict and end up preventing the market from working then the government is to blame and the government has to step in and actually provide whatever nonsensical guarantee it made.

If the government wants to prevent you from getting a job that pays less than minimum wage it has to provide you with a job that actually does pay minimum wage.

> If the government wants to prevent you from getting a job that pays less than minimum wage it has to provide you with a job that actually does pay minimum wage.

I like this way of putting it. I'll use it in the future.

Similarly here, if the government wants to make it illegal to sell hand sanitizer at $5/bottle, they should provide hand sanitizer at $1/bottle.

> People whose labor is worth less than the minimum wage become unemployable. Being unemployed means you can’t acquire skills or experience and is bad for your mental health and social attachment.

Could being employed on a low wage also have it's own negative hedonic consequences? I suppose you have answered the question: 'What happens if you change this single lever of minimum wage in terms of employment?' But whether it is harmful also depends upon other government economic policy, specifically welfare. The trade-offs for minimum wage, in this light, don't exactly speak of how it is 'harmful' in an ethical sense, but it's specific effect on unemployment.

In terms of minimum wage and how it harms the economy, it would be interesting to know if a higher minimum wage has as effect on Economic Complexity and whether that would have a net benefit to an economy?

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

> People whose labor is worth less than the minimum wage become unemployable

Or you get into the awkward situation the US is in with immigrants working farming, janitorial, etc. jobs off the books with no protections.

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