Because life is too easy these days, I'm going to weigh in on the topic of @jenniferdoleac's minimum wage tweet.

(The original is at https://twitter.com/jenniferdoleac/status/1350147987490672644, and the whole thread is worth reading).

I haven't spent that much time on Twitter the last few days (and when I have I've been on briefly) thanks to having a bunch of work that I had to finish. So I don't know all the details, etc etc.

But I gather that many people took umbrage at Jen's saying this

I've supported increasing the fed minimum wage for probably all my adult life. I also support other income support/poverty alleviation programs such as the EITC (which Jen later mentioned as an alternative) and the old AFDC program.

But if you convinced me that, those policies hurt low-income people more than they helped, I would oppose them.

(I'm bracketing the question of how to weigh one person's loss against another's gain-just saying that however you do it, if end result's a net loss, I'd oppose.)

Whether raising the minimum wage is a good or bad policy is a complex question because there are, in fact, both winners and losers.

Jen's tweet illustrates that: those who still get hired get paid more, those who don't don't get paid.

I haven't paid a lot of attention to the recent literature on the question, tho David Card & Alan Krueger's work from the 1990s convinced me that the net impact on employment was probably small and maybe zero. So, arguably a net plus for low income people. Great--I'm pro!

For more recent work, definitely read up on @arindube's papers and (of course) tweets.

So, does that mean there was something wrong with what Jen wrote?

No.

All she wrote, as @IlliniBizDean well put it, is that her demand curve slopes down. https://twitter.com/IlliniBizDean/status/1350663875671126017

I don't understand the controversy about that.

Outside of those with monopsony power, it is prosaic to say that people will buy less of something when its price rises.

There's no reason to think Jen has monopsony power (ie she'd have to pay all RAs more to hire the next one).

Maybe people were upset about the "silver lining"/"less paperwork" part. But actually there can be a lot of paperwork in Universities, and many RAs (esp undergrads) gain a lot more from the experience than the prof who hires them does. Just the nature of learning.

(An aside: I myself am atrocious at effectively using all but the best trained RAs, and so I don't hire many. I recognize that as my own weakness, and I regret it. I digress.)

Jen surely has other things she can spend her research funds on, so if undergrads are going to cost more, it should surprise no one that she will redirect her spending at least some. Others in our economy might act similarly. We should bear that in mind in choosing the min wage.

The theories of why the min wage needn't cause net reductions in unemployment are really interesting, come from really smart theorists (and are tested by really smart empiricists), and do not at all require believing Jen is wrong either factually or morally.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether increasing the minimum wage is a good or bad idea on net, especially if there are alternative policy levers that could be used instead (though maybe there *aren't*).

Fwiw I do worry about a nationwide minimum wage as high as $15 because I worry that in some especially low-wage areas of the country whatever disemployment effects there are might be very large. That's not because I don't value hard working low-wage people; I certainly do.

If you doubt the possibility that the minimum wage could ever hurt its intended beneficiaries, do the thought experiment of a fully enforced $100,000/hour minimum wage. I will lose my job at that price. Not b/c I don't value my work, but because no one values it *that* much.

I have also seen the suggestion that Jen's tweet was "tone deaf". I didn't think it was, but I'm me and not someone else. I recognize people hear things differently, so I won't venture an assessment about that.

I do wish we could have more charity of interpretation sometimes.

That's all, and I hope everyone will be safe and healthy.

/fin