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Tragic news today about the death of Princeton economist Alan Krueger. Among his contributions to economics and public policy, he helped to lay the intellectual groundwork for the revival of minimum wage laws. (1/x)
Back in the 1980s, it was widely accepted that minimum wage laws were bad. By widely I mean that Democrats thought so too. In 1987, the Times described "a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed." nytimes.com/1987/01/14/opi… (2/x)
Then in 1992, New Jersey raised its minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.05. A pair of young professors, David Card and Alan Krueger, seized the chance to compare what happened at fast food restaurants in NJ with adjacent areas in Pennsylvania. (3/x)
Their conclusion rocked the economics profession: "We find no indication that the rise in the minimum wage reduced employment."
davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/njmin-a…
davidcard.berkeley.edu/papers/njmin-a…
The Nobel laureate James Buchanan wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Card and Krueger were undermining the credibility of economics as a discipline. He called them and their allies "a bevy of camp-following whores."
But Card and Krueger succeeded in reopening the debate. A new body of research emerged. Our understanding of the effects of raising the minimum wage, positive and negative, has become much more nuanced. nytimes.com/2018/10/22/bus…
And workers are once again succeeding in driving up minimum wages, which had languished for a generation. nytimes.com/2016/04/03/sun…
RIP Alan Krueger.
More here: nytimes.com/2019/03/18/obi…
