Any honest economist who writes a textbook will recite what more than seventy years of experience and hundreds of academic journal articles and books have concluded about increases in the minimum-wage law: They cause unemployment among the least-educated and least-skilled workers by pricing them out of jobs, thereby harming the very people they are supposedly designed to help — mostly teenagers. Furthermore, they are especially harsh on black teenagers, whose unemployment rate is usually about double that of white teenagers, mostly because of the dysfunctional and fraudulent public schools in American cities where there are large black populations. (See Walter E. Williams, Race and Economics, 2011).
Despite this, it’s all the rage on the left today to call for a super minimum wage of $15/hour. As a college professor I get a lot of free textbooks from publishers who would like me to use their books. Here’s what the latest one to come into my office says about a super minimum wage, referring to the experiences of countries like Greece and Spain that have adopted such policies: The victims of such policies are “disproportionately young, from the ages of 18 to30” and “are locked out without any prospect of finding a good job,” thanks to high minimum wages.
“[A] generation of young people is unable to get adequate training, develop careers, and save for their future . . . . These young people are also more likely to engage in crime.”
—Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, Microeconomics (New York: Worth Publishers, 2015), p. 144.
6:01 am on March 11, 2016
