AD'S 2021 POLITICS CATALINA WINE MIXER & JILL BIDEN BANGBUS II: TURBO EDITION

the whopper and dairy queen's blizzard are in shambles right now

 

I suspect it was politically motivated. Your normal run of the mill thief wouldn't shoot the dogwalker and open themselves up to a whole list of additional crimes. My heart goes out to Lady Gaga. All she's ever done was sing, perform, help and inspire people. Even stood up for those who needed someone to tell them life gets getter. It seems to me its always.... ALWAYS someone on the right side of the political spectrum who commit the worst of crimes and inflict damage and pain on those who deserved the exact opposite. I don't think she'll ever see her dogs again.

 

Wait. Haven't we been here before?

In fact, the argument is called the fallacy of appeal to authority. It's particularly questionable in economics because it's such a soft science. It's lacking in rigor to a certain degree because it has to be. It's a social science with an infinitely complicated number of variables that are often very difficult to measure. It relies on assumptions that can completely change the outcome of a study. As the joke goes, "ask two economists a question and you'll get three answers."

So when an American says, "The CBO is non-partisan, so it must be trustworthy," that translates to the rest of the world as "well, the study and its assumptions were a compromise between the economic right wing and economic far-right." Most of the assumptions it makes are probably centre-right to far-right by world standards.

Economic studies by their nature rely on assumptions. So while a study might be interesting. It's not necessarily definitive. The assumptions it relies on might be completely wrong.

You know what doesn't rely on assumptions? Real world economies where high minimum wages have been proven not only to not impoverish people, but have probably contributed to lesser levels of inequality than the US.

In fact, I'd go further. If a national minimum wage had been introduced in the US in the 1960s, those extreme "price variations" would not today exist. The poorest areas of the US would not be so poor now.

 

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2705499

Statistical analysis of the effect of the minimum wage on employment, has been very active for the last quarter century. More than 60 analyses using U.S. data have appeared since the exchange between David Neumark and William Wascher, and David Card and Alan Krueger in the AER (December 2000). This study presents a meta-analysis of the 37 that report results in a way that makes them easily comparable and suitable for this technique. The most important result is that the consensus range of -0.3 to -0.1 has shifted considerably toward the origin: -0.12 to -0.05. We find a moderate degree of publication bias in this literature, but no support for the proposition that the minimum wage has had an important effect on U.S. employment.

 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793917692788

The authors assess the critique by Neumark, Salas, and Wascher (2014) of minimum wage studies that found small effects on teen employment. Data from 1979 to 2014 contradict NSW; the authors show that the disemployment suggested by a model assuming parallel trends across U.S. states mostly reflects differential pre-existing trends. A data-driven LASSO procedure that optimally corrects for state trends produces a small employment elasticity (–0.01). Even a highly sparse model rules out substantial disemployment effects, contrary to NSW’s claim that the authors discard too much information. Synthetic controls do place more weight on nearby states—confirming the value of regional controls—and generate an elasticity of −0.04. A similar elasticity (−0.06) obtains from a design comparing contiguous border counties, which the authors show to be good controls. NSW’s preferred matching estimates mix treatment and control units, obtain poor matches, and find the highest employment declines where the relative minimum wage falls. These findings refute NSW’s key claims.

 

https://www.bankofcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/san2017-26.pdf

This note reviews the channels through which scheduled minimum wage increases over the coming years may affect Canadian economic activity and inflation and assesses their macroeconomic impacts. From reduced-form estimates of direct minimum wage pass- through, we find that consumer price index (CPI) inflation could be boosted by about 0.1 percentage point (pp) on average in 2018. A structural general equilibrium simulation suggests that minimum wage increases would reduce the level of gross domestic product by roughly 0.1 per cent by early 2019 and boost CPI inflation by about 0.1 pp. While the net impact on labour income would be positive, employment would fall by 60,000—a number that lies in the lower part of a range obtained from an accounting exercise (30,000 to 140,000). Consumption would decline because higher inflation would elicit a slight interest rate increase, which would more than offset the higher labour income. Potential output should remain unchanged in the short run. Longer-term effects are possible through automation, productivity gains or participation in the labour force, but the signs of these longer-term effects are ambiguous.

 

Sure, a model can be wrong, and economic models are often more wrong than most, & with good reason. You haven't provided any criticisms of their modeling, though. "Other developed nations have a higher minimum wage and poor people are doing well there" isn't even in the stratosphere of "criticism of their quantitative forecasts".

re: "white knighting all experts" -- I'm perfectly willing to lose trust in whether a person or body of people are experts, if they systematically fail at their work. I'm generally very skeptical of any new psychological study that I don't have the time to review carefully myself, for example; that certainly wasn't always the case.

I'm also happy to discuss why the CBO modeling might forecast too-large employment losses, but I don't think anything you've brought up is even remotely related to that. And, in the absence of knowing of any specific compelling reasons that might be true, yes, I'm inclined to trust their modeling effort over your bizarre, vague attempts to claim a $15 minimum wage will cause no large employment losses because other developed countries have high minimum wages and are.. doing OK, I guess?

The CBO's a bunch of professional economists arguing about how best to model & forecast policy outcomes. That's a lot weightier than "non-partisan".

Uh, no, this kind of argument is saturated with ceteris paribus assumptions; it is pretty telling that you think it "doesn't rely on assumptions". It is not a straightforward exercise to conclude from "lots of developed nations have high minimum wages in a range [A,B]" to "if this particular developed nation passes a high minimum wage in the range [A,B], its experience will be the same as those other nations". International comparisons are useful in broad strokes, but not for determining details. Quantitatively calibrating a national minimum wage is such a detail.

? The US has had a national minimum wage since the 1930s. You even posted a graphic earlier extolling the virtues of its national minimum wage in the 1960s. This entire thread, so far, is about the right value for that national minimum wage (and whether it would be better to supplement it with locally price indexes minimum wages, though that was my specific tangent), not whether one should exist at all.

 

Yeah, this is the literature I mentioned earlier (and note they unsurprisingly cite Card & Kruerger even in the abstract). It has generally found very small employment effects of minimum wage increases, but I believe it has also generally studied much smaller increases relative to local prices than $7 to $15 nationally in the US.

 

Agrul, we'll have to agree to disagree about the usefulness of economic models and predictions.

Muk's first link is more persuasive for me, because it summarizes a lot of studies rather than rely on one study. One study is more likely to reflect the biases of its authors.

Re; the US national minimum wage, I should have said, "If the national US minimum wage had kept pace with those in the rest of the developed world, those pockets of poverty that now apparently preclude a higher national minimum wage would not be so poor."

That would certainly be the case if we accept the assumption that a rise in wages in Kentucky would lead to a rise in consumption in Kentucky, which would flow on to business profits, which would flow on to employment in Kentucky. KFC stores in Kentucky would have a higher wage bill, but they'd also have a state with higher levels of spending power to buy chicken.

If we accept that it is true that higher minimum wages in the rest of the world have contributed to keeping inequality there low, then the argument against raising a national minimum wage starts to look circular. "We can't address income inequality in the US by raising the national minimum wage because income inequality is too pronounced in the US."

 

I'm not disputing that meta-analysis. I cited what I believe is the foundational paper in that literature (Card & Krueger), before 'muk posted that link, exactly because it's important. But: (A) that literature has mostly studied modest changes in minimum wages relative to local prices, and (B) they still do not report 0% or positive elasticity.

Even taking their lowest estimate of -0.05, a 100% change in the minimum wage (i.e., doubling it to $15) should yield a 5% loss of employment. It's been a while since I've thought about how elasticities work, but unless I'm making a mistake, that's actually considerably larger than the 1.3 million person estimate given by the CBO; 5% of the 123 or so million people currently employed in the US is 6.15 ish million jobs lost.

I don't know what that difference is attributable to, because I haven't tried to dig into the CBO's models in any detail. It may be due exactly to increased consumption by people who experience wage increases; I expect that would be a more, not less, important effect for a national MW change than for a local one. But, in any event, I don't think their meta-analytic estimates give any reason to doubt the CBO's forecast (except maybe to think it could be worse than the CBO suggests -- but, again, the literature is based on very modest, local MW changes).

EDIT: Or maybe it's more appropriate to apply the elasticity only to the population that makes <$15/hr; not sure. That would cut the 6.15M to around 2.46 million. Still worse than the CBO estimate, but closer.

 

this thread is ruining my like ratio so im done

 

Out of curiosity, does UHC in other countries cover the cost of plane tickets and hotels for patients and/or their families? It sounds like that girl has insurance (pretty sure all children can be covered through a state insurance program) but the family is trying to raise money for travel expenses.

 

Nope. I will be supply a minimum like wage to ensure you can post with effort and still make ends meet.

 

utumno already provides a healthy $7.5 minimum likes per post wage, but w/ kanmuk doubling down to a full $15 2 likes per post safety net, i can now afford to move to downtown LA and become an actress like i always wanted

 

Depends. In Sweden there is some coverage for travel expenses, but HC is divided into autonomous regions (for better or worse), so you rarely have to travel that far. OTOH, support for experimental or super specialist treatments that do not exist in the region is somewhat flaky.

Everybody basically has guaranteed access to A-minus level of American care, but there are no guarantees beyond that. If you are rich, you are generally better off in America. Also, high-end American HC invests a lot more in customer service and hospitals looking nice, while Swedish HC is entirely focused on throughput and health metrics. You basically need to convince a nurse you might have a non-trivial issue before you can even access a physician, and if you need a specialist, you need to convince the physician. None of these normally have any financial obligation to you so it's quite utilitarian. Although there are some loopholes via private insurance and online doctors of late. Many also end up abusing ERs for non-emergencies, as they are also very cheap. Healthcare is hard.

 

Stop posting garbage takes and you might get likes