The Minimum Wage Fantasy

MaxSpeak is pushing a letter from economists, already signed by notables Alan Blinder, Clive Granger, Rebecca Blank and others, to raise the minimum wage.  Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with the usual story about unemployment.  A small increase in the minimum wage will have only a small unemployment effect, nuff said.  Nevertheless, parts of the letter strikes me as absurd.  The letter says, for example, that "The minimum wage is also an important tool in fighting poverty."  Rubbish.  But don’t take my word for it. 

The minimum wage is a blunt instrument for reducing overall poverty, however, because many minimum-wage earners are not in poverty and because many of those in poverty are not connected to the labor market.  We calculate that the 90-cent increase in the minimum wage between 1989 and 1991 transferred roughly $5.5 billion to low-wage workers…. an amount that is smaller than most other federal antipoverty programs, and that can have only limited effects on the overall income distribution.

The source? Card and Krueger in Myth and Measurement (p.3).

The letter also states that most of the people earning the minimum wage are adults.  Most workers are adults so this is hardly surprising.  What is more surprising is that 25% of the workers earning the minimum wage are teenagers, even though teenagers are a much smaller percent of the workforce.  In addition, over half the workers earning the minimum wage are younger than 25.  The letter can spin things how it wants but it would be more informative to say that most of the workers earning the minimum wage are young workers who with a little age and experience would have their wages increased in anycase.

That brings me to a second strange statement, the idea that "the minimum wage helps to equalize the imbalance in bargaining power that
low-wage workers face in the labor market."  One wonders how bargaining power is defined.  Do these economists really believe that the fat cats are getting rich slurping up surplus from the low-wage workers?  If you measure bargaining power as a difference between wages and marginal productivity it is surely high wage workers who lack bargaining power.

The real rebuke, however, to the bargaining power idea is this: a lot of people earning the minimum wage are teenagers but more than 90 percent of working teenagers earn more than the minimum wage.  Either most teenagers are very good bargainers or wages depend less on "bargaining power" than on productivity.  Either way the letter is confused.

The debate over the minimum wage is more about rhetoric than reality. 

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