Last year, President Obama proposed a hike in the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00 an hour. After the predictable failure of his proposal, Obama and his party have returned with the Harkin/Miller proposal to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. What I’m going to do in this video is make several points to confront the myths and address the reality behind the minimum wage.
Point #1
Elizabeth Warren’s assertion about a $22-an-hour productivity-adjusted minimum wage is highly misleading.
First of all, the fact that the minimum wage has fallen behind in value does not mean that the jobs themselves have been held back just as much. In fact, over the past 34 years for which the BLS has maintained this data, the percentage of jobs paying at or below minimum wage has fallen precipitously. So the fact that the minimum wage is lower does not necessarily mean that most low-end workers are worse off for it. What’s more, the federal minimum wage law in 1960 did not apply to as many sectors of the economy as it does today, so Warren’s comparison is not entirely commensurable. Second, her suggestion overlooks a very crucial distinction between average productivity and marginal productivity. Not only did she cherry pick one of the highest estimates of productivity growth, but the statistic that Warren uses is based on an aggregate measure of productivity growth for the whole economy. However, we have to recognize that different jobs have changed in marginal productivity by vastly different amounts. Given the changes in technology and composition of the economy since 1960, some types of jobs have grown tremendously in productivity, whereas others have not grown nearly as much. Economists refer to this phenomenon as skill-biased technological change. As Christopher Wheeler notes in his 2005 St. Louis Fed study, increased wage dispersion since 1983 is significantly correlated with the increased relevance of college education and occupational computer use. Long story short, if we want more workers to earn $22 an hour, it requires getting more people the skills to actually take on these higher productivity jobs.
Point #2
The minimum wage is not a big stimulus to the economy. Many proponents of a higher minimum wage argue that giving workers more money to spend will set off a virtuous cycle leading to more jobs and more economic growth. Putting the transient nature of Keynesianism aside, the quantitative effect of a minimum wage increase on spending is actually quite trivial, because only a small portion of workers earn at or near the minimum wage, and much of their increased spending would come at the expense of others. As Obama's former chief economist Christina Romer writes, “the income increase from the higher minimum wage would be about $50 billion. Even assuming all of that higher income was redistributed from the wealthiest families, the difference in spending behavior is likely to translate into only an additional $10-20 billion in consumer purchases. That’s not much in a $15 trillion economy.” Now granted, that was in consideration of the $9.00 minimum wage proposal. But even if the minimum wage hike boosted total spending by as much as $40 billion, that would still amount to less than one quarter of one percent of GDP, which isn't much to get excited about.
Point #3
Australia’s minimum wage is not $16 an hour in US terms. People who make this claim are not doing the currency conversion properly. The exchange rate between two currencies in the foreign exchange market does not necessarily reflect what the currencies are valued at domestically. The nominal exchange rate is often skewed from the real exchange rate due to various factors, such as taxes on imports and exports, or international financial flows that favor one currency over another. Making an accurate price comparison between two countries requires taking account for something called purchasing power parity. Doing this, we discover that Australia’s minimum wage is actually $10.51 in US terms. While that is measurably higher than the US, it’s a far cry from the $16 an hour that many have suggested, and it doesn't come without its share of unintended consequences. Along these lines, people will also occasionally cite higher minimum wages in Canada. But applying the same process to Canada using Ontario’s minimum wage results in a figure of only $8.03 in US terms.
Point #4
The minimum wage does little to reduce poverty. Supporters of a minimum wage hike usually take it as an article to faith that it will effectuate a reduction in poverty by raising incomes for the working poor. Yet the vast majority of empirical evidence suggests otherwise. Most studies, such as Neumark and Wascher in 1997, Vedder and Gallaway in 2001, Sabia and Burkhauser in 2010, and Sabia and Nielsen 2012 find that minimum wage hikes have no significant effect towards reducing poverty. This is because there are several factors either trivialize or negate the positive effects of a higher minimum wage. First of all, 80 percent of minimum wage earners are not in poverty. The mean household income for a minimum wage worker is around fifty-one thousand dollars a year, because most minimum wage workers are actually second and third earners in their household. Three out of five minimum wage workers end up getting a pay raise anyway within their first year. As it currently stands, the median age of a minimum wage worker is 24, and single parents working full time only constitute four percent of minimum wage workers. Ironically enough, raising the minimum wage is least likely to benefit the workers who actually are in poverty, because as their income rises, many see their government benefits sharply reduced. And of course, the minimum wage is going to have a hard time reaching the 65 percent of impoverished adults who are not employed. To make matters worse, raising the minimum wage comes with adverse side effects. Among these include higher food prices, and a decrease in employment opportunities, which brings me to my next point.
Point #5
The minimum wage worsens unemployment for the low-skilled. Now this point has been heavily researched and discussed amongst economists, especially with the new minimum wage research that has proliferated since the 1990s. Nearly two-thirds of new minimum wage research studies indicate a negative employment effect associated with the minimum wage. But a few studies have purported to find a zero or positive effect of the minimum wage on employment. One such study was done by David Card and Alan Krueger in 1994. More recently, another was done by Dube, Lester and Reich in 2010, and another by Allegretto, Dube, and Reich in 2011. These studies have numerous flaws, as David Neumark and William Wascher have pointed out. Most of the details are too extensive for this video, but I would like to indulge in the following. Suppose it were true that the minimum wage has zero effect on the quantity of labor employed by low-wage employers. In that case, it would still be likely to have deleterious effects on the employment prospects of the low-skilled because of something called “labor-labor substitution.” Hypothetically speaking, even if employers paid for the higher minimum wage entirely through prices, productivity, and reduced turnover, the positive supply effects of a higher wage would give the employer a larger labor pool to draw from. Consequently, they would be able to select more-skilled applicants at the expense of those who are less-skilled. And to add insult to injury, lower turnover means fewer job openings for those looking to get a foothold in the job market. Thus, a higher minimum wage would still make it more difficult for the low-skilled to find employment, even if the employer’s elasticity of labor demand were zero. So it should come as no surprise that when we segment the labor force by skill level, as economist Antony Davies and many others have done, we find that a higher minimum wage is correlated with higher unemployment for the lowest-skilled members of the work force. This is also why in their meta-study of new minimum wage research, Neumark and Wascher concluded that, “the studies that focused on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger dis-employment effects for these groups.” All in all, three-quarters of economists recognize that the minimum wage has negative effects on the employment of low-skilled workers.
Point #6
The minimum wage hurts the disadvantaged. Most advocates for a higher minimum wage are undoubtedly motivated to improve the well-being of the worst-off members of society. But good intentions are no excuse for bad results, and the minimum wage is just that for the lowest-skilled members of the workforce. Not only does the minimum wage make it more difficult for less-skilled prospective workers to find jobs, but evidence suggests that it also has a long-term negative effect. A 2004 study from Neumark and Nizalova found that exposure to a higher minimum wage during young adulthood is associated with lower earning several years later, and that the main reason for this is a deprivation of work experience during younger years. They also found that this effect was more pronounced for blacks than any other racial group. This is unsurprising, given how black teenage unemployment is exceedingly high, in great part due to the minimum wage.
So there you have it. Average productivity is not the same as marginal productivity. $16 in Australia is not the same as $16 in the US. Being on the minimum wage is not the same as being in poverty. Raising the minimum wage is not the same as helping the disadvantaged. Good intentions are not the same as good results. And for those reasons, raising the minimum wage is not the same as a good idea.
Special Thanks to Skyler Lehto for permission to transcribe as well as my wife for transcribing this.
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