Quote (NetflixAdaptationWidow @ May 3 2023 11:00pm)
I'm making a strong claim because it's well substantiated over the past 30 years of research. When you look at every level, from national to local, you find at best a small and inconsistent change in employment as a result of minimum wage increases.
The reason is pretty simple. Workers produce income for the business. If your worker produces $50 for you, and you have to pay them $7, you aren't going to hire fewer people if you now have to pay them $10. They're on aggregate income-generating tools. You already want to expand your business as much as you can with as few workers as possible, and workers are still making you a healthy profit.
Here's an actual peer reviewed article that comes to the same conclusion using national level data (I've noticed this is a trend. When you say something that is overwhelmingly supported in the scientific literature like, modest minimum wage increases don't decrease employment, or illegals on average commit significantly less crime, conservatives retort with crap tier studies from non-peer reviewed journals and then claim you can't really control for everything)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/irel.12267Yeah you can cherry-pick studies to find a consistent decrease in employment, but the reason for that is pretty simple. It's a small impact that hovers around zero. Even with no significance you would expect random variation to produce a certain amount of papers above a 5% or 10% confidence threshold in the negative direction.
Your claim is that rises in the minimum wage have no consequence on unemployment, and that this has been widely acknowledged for a period no less than 30 years. That would be news to both the PhDs who write the textbooks and the PhDs who teach economics courses themselves; and it would be news to the the PhD economists who write and publish in peer-reviewed academic journals.
Your second claim is that Alabama could easily absorb a ~$15 minimum wage, which would place Alabama's minimum wage / median wage ratio well above that of France. Given France's well-documented struggles with youth unemployment and unemployment in general, that should be news to everyone.
Neumark (the author of the paper I first linked) is a well known, well published economist who responded directly to the 1992 paper you mentioned in your first post. If you want to hand-wave away the opinion of everyone who disagrees with what you want to be true, you shouldn't take it personally when no one takes you very seriously.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3863757#references-widgethttps://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.35.1.51https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/711355What's interesting is that even when no employment effect is found, its often not to the employee's benefit, as in California, where increases to the minimum wage led to lower hours per employee (but more employees scheduled) so that net pay minus benefits was roughly equivalent.
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The reason is pretty simple. Workers produce income for the business. If your worker produces $50 for you, and you have to pay them $7, you aren't going to hire fewer people if you now have to pay them $10. They're on aggregate income-generating tools. You already want to expand your business as much as you can with as few workers as possible, and workers are still making you a healthy profit.
Even very successful businesses that utilize fairly described slave labor have net profit margins at a fraction of a fraction of the example above. When you increase the price of labor, and the cost of the product must remain stagnant (i.e. elastic demand), the marginal product of labor and the marginal cost of labor both change. That in turn can lead to decreased employment, although as I said earlier, businesses can often find creative ways around that by manipulating local regulations to their benefit.