,
15 tweets,
4 min read
Read on Twitter
Some thoughts inspired by this @ritholtz article on Seattle's minimum wage, which was loudly declared a job destroyer -- but wasn't 1/ bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
As Ritholtz says, the reality is now clear: there has been no visible hit to employment in the restaurant sector, where you'd expect to see one if anywhere 2/ 
Furthermore, this is no surprise: at this point there's a large body of research on the effects of minimum wage hikes, which shows little if any employment effect in the U.S. context. This literature is very solid, because state actions provide natural experiments 3/
But there's steady drizzle of claims that minimum wage hikes do too kill jobs -- a sort of minimum-wage skeptic literature -- that continues no matter how strong the evidence gets. And the usual suspects predict disaster every time a hike is proposed 4/
Why can't this issue seem to get settled? Because there are powerful, wealthy interests who don't want to accept what the evidence says. 5/
I hereby propose we call this "Upton Sinclair economics", after the famous line "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." And minimum wages are hardly the only example 6/
In fact, the most important example of Upton Sinclair economics surely involved taxes, where the belief that tax hikes destroy economies and tax cuts work miracles survives no matter how many times it fails in practice 7/
You'd be hard pressed to get a better test than the contrast between, on one side, Jerry Brown's California, which right-wingers declared was committing "economic suicide" by raising taxes (and increasing the minimum wage) 8/ nytimes.com/2014/07/25/opi…
And, on the other side, Sam Brownback's Kansas, which Brownback himself declared was conducting an "experiment" by slashing taxes. How did that work out? 9/
Yet the usual suspects trotted out the usual arguments for the Trump tax cut -- and will not be deterred by the failure of that tax cut to deliver the investment or revenue booms they promised. Why not? Because they are, essentially, paid not to learn from experience 10/
And there's lots of other Upton Sinclair economics out there. All the work requirements and other hardships imposed on the poor are based on a theory of poverty that has been thoroughly refuted. 11/
Environmental degradation is being justified with claims about economic harm from regulation that are easily shown to be vastly overblown. Austerity policies in a depressed economy were justified with economic arguments that failed test after test 12/
Of course, Upton Sinclair economics is part of a broader phenomenon; the same thing poisons discussion of climate change, crime prevention, and more. So what can be done about it? 13/
Well, gatekeepers and referees in public discussion need to try to avoid serving Upton Sinclairization. Every time CNN describe Stephen Moore as a "top economist"; every time cable TV highlights a climate denier as if he were an expert; they're feeding the malady 14/
And yes, professionals need to tell the truth about their colleagues too. This is a real problem in my field, where bad faith economics by prominent economists is all too common. I guess what I'm saying is that we need less civility when this happens 15/ bradford-delong.com/2017/11/monday…
