Must-read: Noah Smith: “101ism in Action: Minimum Wage Edition”

Must-Read: Noah Smith waxes wroth about really lousy economics perpetrated by Alex Tabarrok, Mark Perry of the invariably-execrable American Enterprise Institute (sorry Norm Ornstein: you inhabit a really bad neighborhood), and a guy who puts things on the internet while remaining anonymous. It need not to be said that randomly tweeting art put on the internet by guys who do not have real names rarely ends well…

But it does need to be said that, for Noah, “Econ 101ism” involves pretending that Econ 101 says things that it does not–that it involves getting the elementary economics 180 degrees wrong, all the while claiming that you are merely parroting elementary economics.

I suggest renaming it: “False-Flag Econ 101ism”. But Noah is right on the big point. This one is a beauty, for Econ 101–the real Econ 101–tells us that the first-order effect of a minimum wage is to transfer wealth from consumers and business owners to low-wage workers…

Noah Smith: 101ism in Action: Minimum Wage Edition: “American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark J. Perry tweeted the following

Noahpinion 101ism in action minimum wage edition

…I was annoyed by the word ‘actually’…. So I started giving Mark a hard time about ignoring the empirical evidence on the minimum wage question. That’s when Alex Tabarrok jumped in and defended the cartoon, saying that it’s just a basic supply-and-demand model…. But that’s not right…. While the cartoon and the D-S model both predict that minimum wage causes job loss, it’s only a coincidence–they’re not the same model at all… some sloppy political crap made by a cartoonist who doesn’t remember his intro econ class very well…

April 10, 2016

AUTHORS:

Brad DeLong
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