When people get paid more, the prices of everything go up, including other people's wages. Inflation is often a self-reinforcing cycle.
“Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”
In 2021, "the quantity of money" is a much harder concept to measure than it was, but the basic insight stands.
That is, if you publish your findings. I assume there are unpublished insights people use to get rich off.
I think Friedman's analysis was mostly historical. At least that what I got from reading his book. I've certainly not read any academic papers.
In Microeconomics, people can and do prove things based on models that are quite good at approximating reality.
The interest/unemployment mechanism for controlling inflation has worked really well, and is why most of the Western world can hit its 2% inflation targets.
Evidence from LA suggests that this has happened as restaurants negotiated cheaper rents in response: https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/a-15-minimum-wage-may-have-...
Restaurants do also have a tendency to be run out of business and replaced by other restaurants when the minimum wage gets hiked though. Restaurant owners take hikes extremely personally. The market can be an unkind mistress.
There's a reason most new restaurant close after 1-5 year. [0]
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/20/heres-the-real-reason-why-mo...
this also gives rise to ununionized outfits as well. as theyre able to keep wages lower and bid more competitively.
Ford has been unionized since before World War II. Actually the opposite happened in its case, unionizing GM and Chrysler made unionized Ford easier.
I don't mind playing an extra 50 cents for a big mac if it means the person serving it to me makes enough at the end of the day to support themselves.