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Comment by Aloisius | Hacker News Reader

This is in stark contrast to the Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment study that claimed the law had no negative effects on fast-food employment.

The Berkeley study has been cited quite heavily by policy makers.

https://irle.berkeley.edu/publications/brief/effects-of-the-...

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This group is well known for bias, over and over through the years. Nothing they report should be taken at face value.

"A considerable amount of financial support for the Center comes from labor unions: According to federal reports, over the last 15 years it has received nearly $1.2 million in labor funding."

"The IRLE’s highest-profile researcher is Michael Reich, who co-chairs its Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics. Reich made a name for himself at a young age co-founding the Union for Radical Political Economics, with the stated goal of supporting “public ownership of production and a government-planned economy.”"

https://us.fundsforngos.org/news/nonprofit-accuses-uc-berkel... https://epionline.org/release/biased-uc-berkeley-research-te... https://epionline.org/release/biased-uc-berkeley-research-te...

You have made a good case for a close reading of the study. Are they wrong? Is the methodology bad?

Even their abstract seems biased:

"...and price increases of about 1.5 percent— or about 6 cents on a four-dollar hamburger."

Ah, yes, the fabled four-dollar hamburger. I know I never need to spend more than 4 dollars nowadays when I get fast food.

A hamburger is at McDonalds is $1.89 in my area, a McDouble is $3.29. The double cheeseburger is $3.99. What they call the "daily double" which is a silly name for a hamburger with the works is also $3.99.

I don't think using the basic burgers is a bad choice since specialty burgers probably don't compare well across chains.

This is based on my very quick reading of the studies so take with grain of salt. The NBER study (OP) studied the entire fast food worker industry using data from BLS, whereas the Berkley study cautions against using BLS because it applies to the entire industry. The $20 minimum wage requirement only applied to fast food workers who work at limited service restaurants with 60 or more chains.

If your concern is only for who the $20 minimum wage was supposed to affect, then there was likely no decrease in jobs based on only that data. However, since causes have effects on more than one intended group, it's very likely that the $20 increase did reduce employment overall and the Berkley study was very careful to downplay that data as not being useful for the purposes of their study, even though they are related. The effects on one part of the industry can affect the rest and to ignore it is a questionable choice.

In contrast the study that's linked by OP is funded by:

Amazon, giant banks, ExxonMobile, Google, Microsoft, investment firms.

https://www.nber.org/about-nber/support-funding

Well unions are not for profit so even if they funded a study they don't have as strong incentives to influence the study's outcome. That's different from when the study is founded by for profit entities. No?

They did a study of Seattle’s minimum wage that did not hold up well in subsequent studies, in part because their assumptions about how adverse effects would manifest were poor. They seem to have memory-holed that. Seattle’s minimum wage is higher and more broad based than California.

Regardless, with the passing of time the adverse effects have worsened to the point that even proponents in Seattle acknowledge there are serious issues that have resulted which need to be addressed.

California looks like it is trying to speedrun Seattle’s mistakes.

Is this true? I don't agree with the point of view of Seattle politicians but I've never seen even a hint of them acknowledging problems with their approach to anything. If anything the politics seems to be moving further left, after a very brief shift due to the truly disgusting state of the city during COVID.

The Berkeley report doesn’t count number of jobs. It looks at pay and number of restaurants operating (both went up).

It could be that part time positions decreased but full time positions increased, along with hours per job position / total hours / hourly pay and restaurants operated. That’d be a good thing for everyone involved (except maybe the cardiovascular health of the customers), and is compatible with both studies’ conclusions.

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