7 Comments

Condemnation of item #7 seems inadequately justified. It is plausible that their statistical controls were inadequate even in light of the online Appendix G, and personally I would have liked a lot more discussion because I have nothing like the background to judge. But it is unfair to imply they did not consider the hypothesis; they inadequately discussed it, but they do seem to consider that they have largely ruled it out by statistical means.

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Re: #5: the second finding of minimum wage workers not being from impoverished families 90% of the time doesn’t surprise me at all (although I have done a lot of research on the matter, so I am cheating). The vast majority of minimum wage workers are high school/college students and stay at home spouses who want a part time job while their kids are in school or the like. Usually full time workers making minimum wage stop making minimum wage quickly if they are sticking with the job, or quickly move to a new job once they have proven themselves.

For example, I used to know a guy who head hunted fast food restaurant drive through employees. The good ones made 3-4$ per hour more than minimum wage and were actively sought, and the best made 5-6$ more, and this was back when the minimum wage was about 7$ or so (2000’s). Most fast food employees were kids on the first jobs and were bad at their job, but the good ones quickly got a premium to stay.

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Does this depend on the characteristics of the job market? I mean urban vs rural conditions.

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That’s a good question, and I am not really sure I have a good answer insofar as I can’t think of a study that differentiates between rural and urban, or suburbs for that matter. On the one hand that might mean that there were no interesting differences between where people lived, on the other that they never bothered to check, or all their data was urban, etc.

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Yeah, I see. But you know in a rural area service work job seekers are more beggars than choosers

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Yeah, I can see that. However in rural areas service workers are more beggars than choosers, they know it, and te employers know that they know it, and te social service officers have an attitude towards prioritizing those job seekers that make them look good. The job seekers get more or as good help from the bulletin boards. So, I don’t see there’s much crossover effect between the upper group and the middle group of workers, they are in separate worlds. Some of this doesn’t matter about locations, but urban job seekers have larger networks more encouragement from their environment. I’ve been there.

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So if I understand the study and the argument against the experiment conclusion, it seems to me that there’s a significant difference between the two types of job markets, and maybe locations as well, which are have uncontrolled conditions

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