Our Innumerate Overlords
By Mitch Berg
When Representative Ryan Winkler talks, people listen.
And then the smart people snicker.
He tweeted this yesterday:
My favorite point in this op-ed: low wages do not cause poverty. http://t.co/jBfXzKYSiF. Only an economist could be so enlightened.
— Ryan Winkler (@RepRyanWinkler) September 8, 2013
Of course, he had the point of the op-ed all wrong. Read it for yourself.
The point is that low wages aren’t the sole cause of poverty. In the great scheme of things, they aren’t even especially important, in and of themselves.
Much more important? When there is no opportunity to earn higher wages.
How does that happen?
- When a preponderance of people don’t have the tools to do better themselves. For example, when our overpriced education system continually short-changes them. Especially minority kids, who have both the highest poverty rates and are the most systematically shortchanged by the education system Ryan Winkler’s party designed.
- When mandatory wages for entry level work are so high that the market for entry-level, unskilled labor gets depressed – ensuring fewer people, especially poor people, get into the labor market at all.
- When an overabundance of regulation makes entrepreneurship – starting ones’ own business – less tenable. Like the DFL has done for Minnesota, giving the state the worst climate for entrepreneurship in the country.
To further address the point, though, I’d like to ask Rep. Winkler (or his defenders) this question: at what minimum wage hourly rate will poverty disappear?
Put a number on it.
That’s the question I’d like to ask. In fact, I asked it.
Hopefully we’ll see an answer.
I’m sure we will.
Of course, Winkler would be correct in answering my question “It’s more complicated than that”. And he’d be right – it is. Raising the minimum wage doesn’t cure poverty…
…anymore than not raising it causes it.
September 9th, 2013 at 2:15 pm
Winkler (and those like him) have only a dim grasp on economics. The idea that economies obey a set of natural laws (analogous to the same laws that make the earth orbit the sun) is foreign to him. Yes, the laws are more complex than Newtonian physics, granted, but nations ignore the laws at their peril. Look what happened to the Communist bloc countries’ economies after a few generations of trying to legislate prosperity. We might as well pass laws outlawing earthquakes and hurricanes. I guess the carbon tax is supposed to do that, but it won’t work either. Cheap, simplistic slogans might look great on TV, but they won’t create wealth, just rent-seeking politicians.
September 9th, 2013 at 5:00 pm
I don’t know that economics is really more complicated than physics. Let’s take two basic questions, one from each discipline:
1. The friction coefficient of a popular tire is .8. How long, assuming optimal brakes, will it take for a vehicle moving 55mph to come to a full stop?
2. The price of a commodity increases 20%. Does the average person purchase more, or less, of this commodity?
Yes, you can get into the minutiae of econometrics in the same way one can get into the variations of tire friction with speed, air flow, and the like, but most sensible people can answer #2 without picking up a calculator.
September 9th, 2013 at 6:53 pm
Bubbasan, that’s marvelous. We have data to answer the “how much” question, but my principles students would know the answer to #2 and they are allergic to theirs (oddly, their calculators are on their cellphones, and yet…)
September 9th, 2013 at 6:57 pm
More important, I think: Suppose I could show you that a $.50 rise in the minimum wage would produce $10 million in transfers from employers to employees, but this caused employers to lay off 20,000 workers. (That’d be about 2/3 of 1%, so it’s statistically in the ballpark of the “how much” question.) What does Rep. Winkler propose to do for the 20,000? How would he know who they were?
September 9th, 2013 at 8:28 pm
economics to liberals is like oil and water, they just don’t mix
September 10th, 2013 at 4:20 am
The only way demand side solutions work is if they are ultimately supply side solutions.
*Obama and Bernanke benevolently “give” each community a compact nuclear reactor for cheap electricity.
*Obama could have given away free tuition for all of the high skill trade jobs we are reportedly in short supply of.
*Widen a road that requires it. Shovel ready job.
The venal and ignorant led by the venal and ignorant. We are doomed.
September 10th, 2013 at 9:07 am
King; thank you. It would suggest that our DFL overlords are not just innumerate, but also impervious to logic. Praying that we make it to the next election….
May 22nd, 2015 at 12:53 pm
[…] course, his consistent, serial rape of fact in pushing for demigogueing the minimum wage […]