Does Raising the Minimum Wage Cause Unemployment?

 I signed up for The Conversation's newsletter and found interesting Does raising the minimum wage kill jobs? The century long search for the elusive answer shows why economics is so difficult – but data sure helps. There is some interesting information here:

Then, in 1994, David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of this year’s Nobel winners, and the late Alan Krueger used a natural experiment to show that, in the real world, this doesn’t actually happen. In 1992, New Jersey increased its minimum wage while neighboring Pennsylvania did not. Yet there was little change in employment.

So why do the Republicans balk at raising the minimum wage? Why does Indiana persist in being a low wage state?

You may also want to consider the following from Who Are the 9.9 Percent? A Closer Look at the Math of American Inequality:

The spectacular rise of the 0.1 percent has received plenty of ink over the past decade, but the expanding chasm between the 90 percent and the 9.9 percent in some ways matters more to the real story of inequality in American life. In 1963, a household at the national median (that is, the 50th percentile) needed to increase its wealth by a factor of 10 to reach the median of the 9.9 percent. Now, the median household has to multiply its wealth by 24 times to achieve the same result. If you think of the American Dream as a mountain, that mountain is now more than twice as steep.

According to the same math, the Dream is now also at least twice as cruel. The traditional theory of the Dream says that the universal striving for material riches is a good thing because, win or lose, everybody gains in the end. A rising tide lifts all boats, or so the song goes. This was a credible view in the postwar decades, when economic growth generated matching increases in median wages. Over the past forty years, however, real wages have remained anchored to the sea floor, even as tuition, housing, and health care costs have raised the price of admission to the middle class. Only the top decile have floated up with the tide. The new theory of the dream is: winning is everything, losers stay put.

From a statistical perspective, the 9.9 percent is more or less what you get when the middle class goes underwater. (Or, maybe more accurately, when the middle class turns on itself and shoves the other guys off the boat.) But there is no reason to get particularly fixated on the current number. By the time you read this, it may well be the 8.9 percent, or the 7.9 percent. The only certainty is that, as long as inequality is rising, the number will go down. Not all of the people on the boat have figured this out yet, but the nature of rising inequality is such that the circle of joy is always shrinking.

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