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Academic articles are overrated. They're usually very context-specific and only meant to be read by experts in that field. You might find one saying "a minimum wage increase in this particular experiment had an effect of X, controlling for other factors" but it would be a huge mistake to generalize from there to "minimum wage increases will have an effect of X no matter what the context." You might find a Big Data-style survey of tons of different cases that says "in general minimum wages tended to do X" but in the social sciences, comparing data across lots of different contexts requires a lot of assumptions, and changing the assumptions can radically change the outcome, so these studies frequently contradict each other. There's been lots of big, reputable studies done on minimum wages and they've all reached different conclusions. Basically, if a topic is controversial, there's probably not going to be an academic consensus on it. Sometimes because there's value judgments involved. Sometimes the topics that are controversial in everyday conversation are actually just poorly thought-out and don't have a right answer. A minimum wage increase is going to be good in some contexts and bad in others, anyone who tells you it's "always bad" or "always good" is lying, the argument just distracts from the real issue which is income inequality. It might sound terrible, but what I'd do is find some respected public intellectuals who you mostly agree with. Seek out people who are "biased" in the same way you are and who get paid to have opinions on lots of different issues. Then find out what those people say for any given controversial topic. This way, if it's one of those issues that just comes down to value judgments, at least you're reading people whose value judgments you agree with in other contexts. And if you find out that your favourite authors don't spend any time talking about the minimum wage at all, that tells you something too. Sometimes smart people say stupid poo poo when they're outside of their areas of expertise so you never want to rely on just one author, though.
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Nov 7, 2014 16:13
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 03:00 |
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