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Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

I'd really like to see an experiment conducted that can put the whole debate to rest: raise the minimum wage in half of the states, lower it in the other half. Run this experiment for three years and compare the results, and apply the strategy with the best outcome to the rest of the country.

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This has been more or less done, on a more global scale.

Have a look at the minimum wage in every developed country compared to America. Now have a look at the standard of living for the average person on the street in all those countries compared to America. You have your answer.

Comparatively, America is a developing country.

The result of this experiment would be mostly useless unless the results were stark and causation can be traced back to this policy via other methods. It doesn't control for the millions of other factors that could affect the outcome.

I don't think that would help much. Let's say you have 7$ minimum wage in one state and 10$ minimum wage in a neighboring state. I would think it's very likely that more low end jobs get created in the 7$ state compared to the other.

However, if all states have a 10$ minimum wage then there's no easy substitute, except for going to another country, but that's much more complex.

This is exactly what the cited research in the original post did.

It looked at contiguous US states, where one raised the minimum wage and one did not. It measured the gain or loss in jobs with all these "natural experiments".

This study found minimal effects on employment when comparing the states that raised minimum wages against those that did not.

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