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Comment by adjkant | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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".

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