d*2
发帖数: 2053 | 1 http://finance.yahoo.com/news/15-minimum-wage-kill-jobs-1100081
This is a story about ethics and economics, winners and losers, and the
philosophical muddle on both ends of the political spectrum, as told through
two of the hot-button issues of the 2016 U.S. presidential race: the
minimum wage and free trade.
Start with an unpopular but irrefutable fact: Raising the minimum wage to $
15 an hour, as some states are doing, will create both winners and losers.
The winners will be workers who get paid more, of course. The losers will be
low-skilled workers who don't get paid at all, because employers couldn't
afford to keep them on
Should you care that a measure intended to make people better off will
actually make some worse off? That's a deep question that has exercised such
greats as John Stuart Mill, Vilfredo Pareto, and John Rawls. Before you
answer it, though, please consider the case of free trade, which involves a
similar conundrum. Like raising the wage floor, lowering barriers to cheap
foreign imports makes a lot of Americans better off (by cutting the cost of
baby clothes, toys, televisions, etc.) while undeniably hurting others (by
closing down their factories).
This is where it gets interesting. As similar as the two cases are, the
political reactions to them are not. Liberals like Bernie Sanders are
strongly in favor of raising the minimum wage, yet suspicious of free trade.
When it comes to the minimum wage, they're all about the greatest good for
the greatest number, but on the topic of trade they're focused intently on
protecting the disadvantaged minority.
Conservatives are just as self-contradictory on these two issues, only in
the opposite direction. They worry a whole lot about Americans losing their
jobs because of a higher minimum wage, but are less concerned with people
losing their jobs because of lowered trade barriers.
These don't seem to be cases of outright hypocrisy. Instead, they simply
reflect the human tendency to be impressed by evidence that confirms our
beliefs and reject information that challenges them. "We see what we want
to see," economist and author Tim Harford wrote in a recent column.
Advocates of a $15 minimum wage argue that economic research has shown
little or no job loss from raising the floor. The U.S. Department of Labor
even posted an undated page on its website called "Minimum Wage Mythbusters"
that says it's "not true" that a higher minimum wage will cost jobs.
But that all depends on how much it's raised. That Mythbusters page cites a
letter by more than 600 economists, including seven Nobel laureates, who say
minimum wage hikes to date "have had little or no negative effect on the
employment of minimum-wage workers." But wait—click on the link and you'll
see the economists, in 2014, were advocating raising the floor to $10.10 an
hour by this year. That's a far cry from $15. “We have no experience with
an increase in the national minimum of that size and I am concerned about
what a $15 minimum nationwide would do to employment,” former Bureau of
Labor Statistics Commissioner Katherine Abraham wrote to me last year.
On trade, of course, everything is backward. Liberals dwell on the stories
of factory workers thrown out of work. Conservatives counter that the gains
from trade are so great that a portion of the societal benefit can go toward
compensating those who lose out. That is true in textbooks, but not so much
in real life. As I wrote in a recent Opening Remarks column in Bloomberg
Businessweek, "trade adjustment assistance, as it’s called, is hardly a
cure-all. The sums are tiny in comparison with the scale of the problem, and
the success rate is low."
It's fine to favor a higher minimum wage but oppose freer trade, or vice
versa. Just be aware that the argument you're using to make your case on one
issue could be used against you on the other. |
|
