…is data, as the late UC-Berkeley political scientist Ray Wolfinger once said.
David Boaz used Wolfinger’s quote when emailing me this short note from the Economic Policy Journal’s website about the apparent harmful effects on employment of Washington state’s recent minimum wage increase. A snippet:
As we were seated, I couldn’t help but notice that there were no busboys in sight—waitresses and the manager were busy clearing and cleaning tables. There were no young people in sight either, only employees in their late-20s and up.
I waited for the manager to man the checkout register and couldn’t pass up a brief economic discussion. I commented that I’m from out of state (Idaho, where the minimum wage is the federally mandated $7.25/hr) and couldn’t help but notice the impact that Washington’s minimum wage ($11/hr) was having on his restaurant.
Well-intended proponents of higher minimum wages will likely dismiss this note using the far-more-common but very wrong misquotation that “the plural of anecdote isn’t data.” More sophisticated proponents will go further and cite David Card and Alan Kreuger’s 1994 American Economic Review paper on the apparent beneficial effects on employment of a minimum wage increase on fast-food restaurant employment in the Philadelphia metropolitan area in the early 1990s.
Thing is, there has been an awful lot more empirical research on the effects of minimum wage increases than this one paper by Card and Kreuger. The overwhelming balance of that research has found harmful employment effects, falling mainly on an especially disadvantaged population: young black males. In a review of this academic literature, economists David Neumark and William Wascher find:
Nearly two-thirds [of the 102 analyses they reviewed] give a relatively consistent (although by no means always statistically significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages while only eight give a relatively consistent indication of positive employment effects. … [Further, of the 33 analyses we] view as providing the most credible evidence; 28 (85 percent) of these point to negative employment effects. Moreover, when researchers focus on the least-skilled groups most likely to be adversely affected by minimum wages, the evidence for disemployment effects seems especially strong. … We view the literature—when read broadly and critically—as largely solidifying the conventional view that minimum wages reduce employment among low-skilled workers.
The plural of anecdote, indeed.
For more on minimum wage research, see this Cato Policy Analysis by former U.S. deputy assistant labor secretary Mark Wilson. Or this brilliant little Cato Handbook on Policy chapter.
