The Fiscal and Monetary Policy Thread - All Things Equalibrium

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > The Fiscal and Monetary Policy Thread - All Things Equalibrium

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

Regardless of the proportion of stock held by executives and the board, large proportions of shares are held by institutional investors and they move basically with the wind- they only vote to oust or whatever when it's practically a fait accompli. Shareholder democracy is a fairly incoherent idea in and of itself, but the way in which stocks are held makes it largely dead.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 03:39

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 03:02

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

e_angst posted:

That's terrible political strategy. Raising minimum wage to a level that will be a drag on employment makes the next attempt to raise it that much harder (hell, if there were actual studies/evidence showing that the last minimum wage hike hurt employment that could kill another attempt to hike it for a whole generation). Instead, you raise it to the level that won't be a drag on employment, while also pegging it to inflation so you never have to go through this fight again.

This presumes that the point at which the minimum wage becomes a drag on employment is necessarily a functional minimum wage, that is a "living wage", which is not obvious. Neither is the presumption that minimizing drag on employment should be the primary purpose of labor laws.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 20:06

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

JeffersonClay posted:

A policy which increases wages without affecting employment is unambiguously good. A policy which trades increased wages for increased unemployment can actually make the poor worse-off, depending on the relative magnitude of the increases.

Another way of reading krueger's piece is "don't use my research to argue a $15 minimum wage won't cause unemployment because it doesn't support your conclusion"

Sure, sure, we can reasonably say that once you reach the point of drag on employment, there's a sudden crash such that it's better to have 35 million people on the edge of desperation than not. This is certainly far more reasonable than suggesting a still-inadequate $15/hr minimum wage would have marginal effect on employment. Indeed, one might say infinitely so, if that weren't taken up by appealing to authority's halcyon place at the apex of reasonable.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2015 22:13

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

JeffersonClay posted:

I think kreuger might suspect that a $15 minimum wage would make the poor better off, but doesn't support a $15 national minimum wage for a few reasons.

1). He's an empiricist and feels less comfortable than you in making faith-based predictions about economic policy.
2). He wants to prove with research that a higher minimum wage would help the poor, and doesn't want a national $15 wage because that would destroy the best natural experiments; contiguous state and city borders with a minimum wage differential.
3). He knows there's a lot of noise in economic data, and fears that factors exogenous to the minimum wage could cause an economic downturn that would then be attributed to the minimum wage.

You should learn what words like "empirical" mean so you don't end up saying silly things like "We can't implement this policy in the real world until we have data from its implementation in the real world." If economists engage in this kind of sloppy thinking regularly, that explains a lot. Unfortunately, you didn't respond to anything I actually said, so there's nothing else to say without repeating myself, which looks to be pretty pointless.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2015 02:47

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

JeffersonClay posted:

So far in this thread you've described the conclusions of experts as appeals to authority and empiricism as sloppy thinking. What, then, informs your understanding of economics? Do you derive it from first principles?

I said that saying "this guy said it and he's smart" is an appeal to authority. I am right in that statement. I said that empiricism is concluding based on observations, and I am right in that statement. I said that confusing empiricism with other forms of reasoning is sloppy thinking, and I am right in that statement. The simple fact of the matter is that, if I take you as knowledgeable about economics, economics is nonsense. If I take you as an idiot, you're not worth talking to. If I take you as a monomaniac, discussion requires some prerequisites. Which of the three is true, JeffersonClay?

# ¿ Oct 14, 2015 21:15

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

e_angst posted:

You completely miss the point there. Doing a nationwide $15/hour minimum wage would make empirical study of that wage level's effects impossible, as it would remove any control group for your study. Any argument about if it was helpful or hurtful, if it was a drag on employment or not, would come down to arguing counterfactuals. The current path, where some areas are implementing it and some aren't, gives you real data that can be studied and compared between areas where it was implemented and where it wasn't.

But that doesn't provide empirical data on a national implementation, because moving within national borders is easier than moving internationally and so the employment effects will be distinct from a national implementation. You could get relevant data to extrapolate from, but you can't actually get empirical data specifically on what you're looking to test. Economics, like many academic disciplines, doesn't jive very well with experimental methods. That's not a crime, but it is important for people to understand.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2015 21:19

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

e_angst posted:

Oh come the gently caress on with that goalpost-moving bullshit.

Getting data on the effects of a $15/minimum wage as it's implemented in some areas and comparing it with control areas over the same period of time where the minimum wage stays the same (and/or is raised to a lower level) is tremendously useful data to have to better understand its effects if it were to be implemented nationally (especially since there will be plenty of other information about spending and job levels between the two different areas that can be used to understand the basic differences between the two areas and account for those differences to localize as much as possible). This kind of study has been done in the past, and the data that results has proven very worthwhile.

At this point you're just making GBS threads on economics as a principal because everyone isn't joining you in your wild bloodlust for $15 right-this-minute-no-exceptions. Suddenly deciding that this type of study is especially disingenuous when you consider that you were originally posting...

The data is worthwhile, but it's not empirical analysis. Economics is not amenable to empirical analysis for most things you want to test, so different approaches are necessary. That you consider this "making GBS threads on economics" makes it clear that you view empiricism as a magical totem rather than as an approach to thinking and doing research. Or you just have an unreasoning bias, which would be disheartening if I hadn't quickly realized that the best and brightest of ordoeconomics don't post here.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2015 21:52

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

Whenever I see someone say "political axe to grind", I know that they are opposed to democracy and will not stop ceaselessly working to create aristocracy, at best. At worst, they're totally amoral.

# ¿ Oct 14, 2015 21:57

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

JeffersonClay posted:

"Here is a researcher at the top of his field's conclusions about the sufficiency of evidence for an economic proposition" is the good, non-fallacious, kind of appeal to authority.

And kreuger is stating that we don't have sufficient observations of the effects of a $15 dollar minimum wage to conclude that a national $15 minimum wage would be positive. So you must be engaging in sloppy thinking to assert he's not engaged in empiricism.

Apparently your understanding of economics is based on a guilt by association fallacy?

The pills I take were never tested on my body. They were tested on animals that have some similarity with me, and then some other humans who have more similarity with me, and there were enough of these tests that medical researchers felt confident that I would be safe taking them, despite the fact that there was no direct empirical data about how the drug would affect me.

Congratulations on figuring out that empiricism is not the only means by which research can be conducted. Now you need to stop treating empiricism as a magic word that will make economics chemistry. Because, you see, there is no way to accumulate empirical data on something like this, because there's no way to isolate controls. You can simply model and collect analogical data to extrapolate from. Now, we could get back to the original point, which is that it's just as much "faith-based" to insist that 15/hr would be disastrous, or imply so fervently that it amounts to an insistence. And then we could move to looking at the range of possible effects and their relative likelihoods to determine what should be implemented, once we are all on the page of a living wage, which I doubt will ever happen.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2015 15:46

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

JeffersonClay posted:

So now you're arguing that medical research isn't empirical?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment

This is the third time someone has tried to explain this to you. Alan Kreuger has studied the natural experiments which occur when a state raises its minimum wage but a neighboring, comparable state does not. Those empirical studies demonstrated convincingly that small to moderate minimum wage increases did not cause employment losses, and caused only small increases in prices. But he also believes those studies are not sufficient to prefict the effects of a $15 national minimum wage. And a national $15 wage would destroy future natural experiments on the effects of that wage by eliminating all states and localities with a sub-15 minimum wage that could serve as a control.

You're too retarded for your condescension to be anything other than a sick farce. You're presenting, in biological terms, a study of foxes as a study of dogs, because the differences between international and international borders are substantial. You seem to not understand why I am making this distinction, pedantic as it may seem- it's because you're using the technical jargon as a magic spell, which is quite simply damaging to the rest of the academic world.

You are also dishonestly implying that it's obviously far more credible for a 15/hr minimum wage to be disastrous in employment effects than benign, but too cowardly to actually state this out loud. Screw your courage to the sticking place, the worst that can happen is words.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2015 16:46

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 03:02

Effectronica: May 31, 2011; Fallen Rib

JeffersonClay posted:

I don't think you're being pedantic, I think you're being desperate. Kreuger does empirical research. You are wrong.

Again, you're desperate for some shred of an argument where you haven't been proven wrong, and have been reduced to arguing with figments of your imagination rather than the words I or anyone else has posted.

See, you should read posts before responding to them, because I didn't say anything about whether Krueger did empirical research directly. Indirectly, I said that he did, because my point is that there is no way to conduct empirical research on something like national minimum wages, and that claiming there is is a misuse of the term. Instead, you can extrapolate from analogous empirical research that can be conducted.

Given that the very limited ability of economics to conduct experiments is generally accepted by economists, the conclusion where you're not a loving idiot is that you've already made up your mind that I'm wrong, and so argue from that as an axiom. I hope that you are merely an amateur or undergraduate, and not polluting academic research with your brain problems.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2015 00:25

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