I know this is a litmust test for club, so here's
an interesting article by Steven Landsburg in Slate opposing increases to the minimum wage. Further to the exchange club and I had about this, the reason isn't that the minimum wage kills jobs:
- In fact, the power of the minimum wage to kill jobs has been greatly overestimated. Nowadays, most labor economists will tell you that that minimum wages have at most a tiny impact on employment.
Twenty years ago, they'd have told you otherwise. Back then, dozens of published studies concluded that minimum wages had put a lot of people (especially teenagers, blacks, and women) out of work. As the studies continued to pile up, you might think we'd have grown more confident about their common conclusion. Instead, the opposite happened.
Instead, Landsburg says the real reason to oppose them is that the benefits and costs are arbitrary and unfair. This strikes me as plausible, but I don't think he really makes the case that it's any worse than the alternatives.
