The don't listen to experts, its fake information works on the extremes of the spectrum.

KUOW keeps leading with the meme that the new minumum wage isn't benefiting workers beacuse while they're earning more per hour, they're working fewer hours - so their wages remain the same.

I don't about KUOW, but I'd rather work $450 a week by working 30 hours at $15/per than make the same money working 40 hours at $11.25/per. I'd be taking home the same money, but have extra time to spend with my family, in school, or pursuing other job opportunities.

I'm glad the Stranger (aka General Directorate for the Protection of State Secrets in the Press under the Council of Ministers of the USSR) was kind of enough to let the plebeian's know to ignore the local University Economics Department for their unwillingness to confirm the glorious success of the local working class wage adjustment!

#2 - The UW study showed low wage workers taking home $125 less per month overall because the reduction in hours was more than could be overcome by the higher wages. Since the Stranger was too cowardly to link to the actual study here it is:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w23532?utm_ca…

The left is just as hostile to science as the right.

NYT article comparing UW and Berkeley manuscripts, basically questions the validity of the 'synthetic control' calculated for the UW study

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/26/busin…

@5: bullshit. Charles is suspicious of this particular economic study, and he's not alone. that's not equivalent to saying that ACC is a hoax, and if its real then a. it's too late anyway so we'll muddle through, or b. a Deity will end the world before it gets too bad.

calling economics "science" is questionable in the 1st place. at best it's a dismal one.

I hope that #BLM will stage a similar protest during the SeaFair parade that is coming up. It would show that the movement is more than protesting it's allies and is wiling to take it's protest to the larger community of Seattle and the region that is more conservative and the real hinderance to it's goal of justice.

There is a shit-ton of research on the effects of minimum wage laws, and this study is one data point -- at the higher-wage end, granted, but even so its results are quite an outlier.

This type of methodology is very sensitive to what you successfully control for, so it's not anti-expert to want confirmation by another means. Poll some economists, I'm sure most will say "interesting result, but don't bet the farm on it."

That said, would Charles accept similar results if they were handed down by singing angels of the People who had conducted a randomized controlled trial? Doubtful.

Comment @5 provides us yet another (unnecessary) example of how having an incompetent, boorish, cheeto-colored imbecile in the White House has degraded public discourse and emboldened the nation's bigot morons to give voice to their mental diarrhea.

The tactic borrowed from cheeto in this case is the PROJECTING of ones own failures / inadequacies / small fallus onto others in order to distract from said personal flaws. Spite is right and it is right to spite! It makes great policy!

@13: Ah yes, we all long for the days before Trump, when no one believed or said anything stupid.

Also, it is spelled "phallus."

Well, $15 had a nice trial period. Clearly it's not working though and it's time to repeal it along with healthcare. Problem solved!

@14

You don't long for the pre-Trump era?

@12 You are correct, of course. One study is not the final say-so on this, especially if it is as flawed as indicated. But I submit that if the exact same methodology was used but they came to the opposite conclusion; that the increased minimum wage increased the income of those earning it, Mudede would be loudly defending the study and accusing anyone who didn't agree with it as being white supremacist. Anyway, this is NOT the place to come for reasonable reporting or discussion. Slog is for poo-flinging only.

Trump as president is merely a symptom of the ignorance, anger, and fear of so many people in this country.

Remove Trump and you still have the underlying disease.

If they hadn't elected him, you can bet they'd have elected someone even more repulsive in four years (they still may).

@16: Well that is completely missing the point, but I am unsurprised.

But in a larger sense, I find reminiscing about the past to be fruitless and masturbatory. The past is boring, the future is exciting.

Memories are nice, but that is all they are. The present must be met with clear-eyed vigor.

@18: Not totally, some thought he'd actually pivot and so they rolled the dice. After all, it was just a binary choice.

@Max Solomon calling economics "science" is questionable
Oh no, you're not hostile to science at all.

@blip: Charles quoted an economist from a reputable institution...
Charles has instructed us to "ignore" the most rigorous study conducted to date on this subject because he can't imagine a world in which his brilliant ideas might have unintended consequences. That's not how science works.

As for Reich's critique, it's hardly a damning one.

For example, he offers the circular argument that because this study's results differed from prior studies, it must wrong. If you read the UW paper, however, they list good reasons why previous studies have missed the economic impact of the wage increase. Reich's own study at Berkeley, for example, was based only on data from the restaurant industry, making the dubious assumption that it's somehow a suitable model for all industry. Other studies uses teenagers as a proxy for low wage workers, also very dubious. The UW study used data from Washington state's payroll records, and thus had a much more representative cross-industry sample.

As for the UW statistical model, it actually replicates Reich's findings of zero net impact to jobs within the restaurant business, and offers an explanation for why the dynamics in restaurants might differ from other industries. Also, the UW study picked up the change in total hours worked among restaurant workers, something that Reich's study missed..

@Achaiwoi: incompetent, boorish, imbecile degraded bigot morons diarrhea small fallus
Wow, way to elevate the level of discourse! For the record, I voted Bernie in the primary and Hillary in the general. I'm guessing you wrote in Sawant for president.

I've finally reached the point where I can recognize an article as being Mudede's without reading the title or the article. I simply allow my eye to rest on a word or phrase in a sentence -- any word or phrase in any sentence. This time I saw "neo-classical" and bingo.

PS. One more thing to the masterminds who've got it all figured out.

I believe in increasing the minimum wage in conjunction with other wealth redistribution policies. I've read Pickety and I found his data and conclusions about increasing wealth disparity frighteningly compelling. I just don't think magical thinking and bullshit are part of the solution.

@17 have to say I'm pretty tired of poo-flinging and I appreciate that some comment threads on Slog can involve a critical mass of reasonable human beings.

And yes, some Slog articles are pretty poo-flingy themselves.

Did the gays immediately counter-counter protest for 30 minutes to protest the 30 minutes the counter-protest lasted for, only to initiate a counter-counter-counter protest?

The modern Left is no longer real; it is one giant, never-ending parody, getting exponentially more retarded every day.

@20,
That's quite a risky die roll, as the guy can't go 30 seconds without lying or changing his position. But yeah, it was a limited choice and I'm guessing lots of people felt they had nothing to lose. That's ignorant thinking, and even willfull denial, but I guess they didn't really care.

Everybody knows that logic is a tool of oppression.

@5,7, 21 -- Indeed, "Economic Theory" appears riddled with partisan bias, has a concerning lack of predictability, and employs just a touch of magical thinking. The field has aspired to be considered a science, but appears to be really quite far from it. Even economists will sometimes refer to themselves as being "early Church" with regards to their economic "doctrine". It's far more a faith than a science.

Astronomy as a science can get a spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter.
Economics as a "science" couldn't anticipate a 'Great Recession', even when simpletons like me could tell something bad was coming back in 2005.

--

@27 - "That's ignorant thinking, and even willfull denial, "
Maybe. But also there is a lot of desperation out there... and mass media manipulation & the exploitation of fear to condition the general population has come a long way since the late 1930s.

@26:

No. We let them have their 30 minutes of protest, at which point they cleared the street, and then the parade continued. Nobody appeared to be angry or take offense, or begrudge the protesters in any way except apparently all the goobers in the peanut gallery who have no vested interest either way.

Ben Casselman and Kathryn Casteel at FiveThirtyEight wrote up a good summary of the new UW study, including some comparison versus the older Berkeley restaurant study -- https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/sea…

It's more informative than Charles's fingers-in-your-ears-la-la-la-I-can't-hear-you excuse for a summary.

@29 I think it's an awesome point you make -- economics is a science yet sucks at producing clear, testable predictions. The way economics was explained to me made a major distinction between microeconomics (supply/demand, decision and monetary theory, very scientific and provable/disprovable) and macroeconomics (GDP and trade deficits, predicting the next stock crash, way too complicated to be modeled or tested).

The basic economic truth that "raising minimum wages will eliminate marginally-valuable jobs" is widely accepted except by those who redefine economic truth according to their political objectives.

@30 It did seem pointless. Much farther down the route, nobody knew what the fuck was going on. People were leaving because it was too damn hot to look at an empty street and pontificate on what was happening when there were festivities already happening in Seattle Center. The majority thought it was due to medical injury or bad parade organization. It was only by getting on Twitter that I found out what was happening and that was after I left the route.

By doing it in as a small huddled square at Westlake, they assured that nobody down the mile+ stretch would get the message. They need a better vehicle for their interruption. How about sending down a few people with a BLM banner explaining there would be a 30 minute interruption to represent the killing of Ms. Lyles. There'd be some grumbling from the conservagays, but most would understand and respect the effort...AND WE WOULD GET THE MESSAGE.

@3
LOL! Agreed

Ok, Charles doesn't understand much, as is obvious from this article.

First, the UW report found the same general increase in per-hour pay for restaurant workers as the Berkley study, 2-3%. So it seems that a big chunk of their studies agree.

But what the UW study does is actually look at the minimum wage earners as a separate entity, which the Berkley study didn't. I mean, if 4,000 tech workers were hired but 2,000 restaurant workers lost their job, that would be a net increase in workers even though it would be shitty for restaurant workers.The UW study just looked at low-wage workers and checked out their hours, pay, etc.
And also, can anyone really trust a study by BERKLEY?! If Liberty University released a study that said climate change was false, Charles would call bullshit, AND RIGHTLY SO. But of course, for der SStranger, it is all about their ideology, and not facts.

And I still want to see how employment across "hard-to-hire" demographics have been effected. What happened the the employment rate for ex-felons, for example?

Charles is basically the Sean Spicer of the left.

...economics is a science yet sucks at producing clear, testable predictions.

Creationism is a science, yet sucks at explaining the fossil record, or why we need a new flu vaccine every year.

This article about the minimum wage story has bothered me all week. Pieces like this really make me wonder about the truth and integrity of everything I read on this site.

I'm sure it's incredibly disheartening to have such a rigorous analysis dismissed out of hand because it doesn't conform to your version of reality. The analysts at the Congressional Budget Office know what I'm talking about.

Lastly, I see that Charles edited the disparaging remark about this study coming from a bunch of white men. The Evans School faculty is mostly women and has for a decade committed to hiring professors from nontraditional and diverse backgrounds.