Reality disagrees. The higher the minimum wage in a given country, the higher the labor force participation, - Ie, the percentage of the total population working goes up as the sums offered for their labor increases.
The effect you describe may be real, but if so it is extremely consistently swamped by the basic law of supply and demand. Offering more money for labor causes more people to work.
Offering more money for labor causes more people to work.
Forcing an employer to pay more money per worker doesn’t magically mean the employer can employ more workers, it simply means he has to pay more for however many workers he would have hired anyway. Furthermore, as I mentioned here, having to pay more for each worker is going to encourage the employer to look for ways to reduce his need for labor.
The effect you describe may be real, but if so it is extremely consistently swamped by the basic law of supply and demand. Offering more money for labor causes more people to work.
Which supply, and which demand, are we talking about?
There is the demand of workers for work, the demand of employers to have work done, and the demand of consumers for stuff. There is the supply of work from employers, of man-hours from workers, and of stuff being produced. Most people occupy at least two of these roles and sometimes all three.
The effect you describe may be real, but if so it is extremely consistently swamped by the basic law of supply and demand. Offering more money for labor causes more people to work.
I could just as easily reverse that argument, increasing the price of labor causes fewer people to get hired.
Abstract argument here is useless. Data is needed.
I have been looking for actual academic work on this, but most of what I can find is either behind paywalls or such trash that it can only be explained as work-for-hire for right wing ideologues. - comparing minimum wage increases with teenage employment over time and such.
Which has to be active deception / malice—increasing educational attainment over time is the actual cause of variation in that variable, and there is no way any economist could fail to see that. So I am going to have to do my own work here:
Commitment: Going to go dig through OECD databases to find median, minimum and average pay, and graph against labor force participation. At least two data sets: one international comparison, and at least one time series for a single nation.
Prediction: all correlations will be obviously significant, and positive. I expect median to have the largest effect.
Secondary prediction; If I am wrong and this is a weak effect, the international comparison ought to be a shotgun plot. If so, will include multiple time series..
This should not take more than a day, so check back monday,
Well, as point out here your abstract argument doesn’t hold up to looking at the details.
comparing minimum wage increases with teenage employment over time and such. Which has to be active deception / malice—increasing educational attainment over time is the actual cause of variation in that variable,
I assume you mean that the reason for the drop in teenage employment is that they’re spending more time in school and/or studying. This is not at all obvious, after all most teenagers have been attending high school for >50 years. Traditionally they’d take part time jobs in addition to attending school.
Going to go dig through OECD databases to find median, minimum and average pay, and graph against labor force participation.
The claim was specifically about minimum wage. This is quantitatively different from median and average pay. Minimum wage is determined by law, whereas median and average pay are determined intrinsically by the economy.
Also how are you planning to compare wages in different countries?
I expect median to have the largest effect.
I also expect median wage to be positively correlated with employment and suspect you have the causation reversed there. The better the general economy is doing, the more demand for labor there will be, the higher the median wage will get bidden up.
Reality disagrees. The higher the minimum wage in a given country, the higher the labor force participation, - Ie, the percentage of the total population working goes up as the sums offered for their labor increases.
The effect you describe may be real, but if so it is extremely consistently swamped by the basic law of supply and demand. Offering more money for labor causes more people to work.
I would like to see some data, along with arguments for causation and the direction of the causality arrow.
Forcing an employer to pay more money per worker doesn’t magically mean the employer can employ more workers, it simply means he has to pay more for however many workers he would have hired anyway. Furthermore, as I mentioned here, having to pay more for each worker is going to encourage the employer to look for ways to reduce his need for labor.
Which supply, and which demand, are we talking about?
There is the demand of workers for work, the demand of employers to have work done, and the demand of consumers for stuff. There is the supply of work from employers, of man-hours from workers, and of stuff being produced. Most people occupy at least two of these roles and sometimes all three.
I could just as easily reverse that argument, increasing the price of labor causes fewer people to get hired.
Abstract argument here is useless. Data is needed.
I have been looking for actual academic work on this, but most of what I can find is either behind paywalls or such trash that it can only be explained as work-for-hire for right wing ideologues. - comparing minimum wage increases with teenage employment over time and such. Which has to be active deception / malice—increasing educational attainment over time is the actual cause of variation in that variable, and there is no way any economist could fail to see that. So I am going to have to do my own work here: Commitment: Going to go dig through OECD databases to find median, minimum and average pay, and graph against labor force participation. At least two data sets: one international comparison, and at least one time series for a single nation.
Prediction: all correlations will be obviously significant, and positive. I expect median to have the largest effect. Secondary prediction; If I am wrong and this is a weak effect, the international comparison ought to be a shotgun plot. If so, will include multiple time series.. This should not take more than a day, so check back monday,
Well, as point out here your abstract argument doesn’t hold up to looking at the details.
I assume you mean that the reason for the drop in teenage employment is that they’re spending more time in school and/or studying. This is not at all obvious, after all most teenagers have been attending high school for >50 years. Traditionally they’d take part time jobs in addition to attending school.
The claim was specifically about minimum wage. This is quantitatively different from median and average pay. Minimum wage is determined by law, whereas median and average pay are determined intrinsically by the economy.
Also how are you planning to compare wages in different countries?
I also expect median wage to be positively correlated with employment and suspect you have the causation reversed there. The better the general economy is doing, the more demand for labor there will be, the higher the median wage will get bidden up.