Click on the cartoon to see a larger version.
You can also read this cartoon on the Dollars and Sense website, where they have an accompanying short article by Jason Son about how inflation tends to wipe out the gains of the minimum wage, because it’s not indexed to inflation. They also have more good articles on the minimum wage here and here. Please do click through — I think they feel paying me for my cartoons is more worthwhile if they get some traffic. :-)
This Crooked Timber post about the minimum wage by Kathy (who usually blogs at “The G Spot,” which is an excellent blog) pretty much explains the state of research on the effects of the minimum wage:
In response, Krueger and Card did another study that looked at the impact of that same minimum wage increase on employment in fast food establishments in New Jersey. To counter the previous criticisms from economists like Kevin Murphy who said that their data was problematic and that they’d got the timing wrong, this time they used a more reliable data source (employer data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) and looked at the data over a longer time period. And guess what? This new analysis confirmed their original findings: the increase in the minimum wage did not lead to a decrease in employment.
There are a number of other reliable scholarly studies on the minimum wage that report similar results—such as this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one, for example. There are also quite a few very good studies that show the opposite—that an increase in the minimum wage does indeed bring about a decrease in employment. A fair characterization of the literature is that the minimum wage’s impact on employment is ambiguous. But the fact that the findings are mixed is fairly compelling evidence that there must be something wrong with the standard perfect competition model of employment. […]
Krueger and Card have written a paper that provides strong evidence that “specification searching and publication bias” have led to an overrepresentation of studies that find that the minimum wage has a statistically significant disemployment effect. The ideological character of much of the economics profession in the United States suggests that there are rewards for producing scholarship that confirms the idea that the minimum wage causes unemployment, and punishment for scholarship that finds otherwise.
It’s worth mentioning that even those peer-reviewed studies that find negative effects of the minimum wage, usually find very small effects.
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“So shiny…!” I love that. Nice work.
I am curious why you’ve chosen the gender assignments you have for this strip.
Is it that the powerful person is upper class while the less powerful person working class, and so gender is less important?
Or are you justing playing with the roles so people like me/us sit up and take notice?
What cues are you reading that one person or the other has more power, Eva? The interlocutor says almost nothing; he’s a talking head for the economist character to expound to.
You know, it does point to one general behavior that you often see. People put together hypotheses using various logical constructs to fit what they believe (or would like to believe) to be the truth. But they forget that for a hypothesis to become a theory it has to fit the known facts and it has to be testable. Then when someone comes up with a test and comes up with facts that contradict their hypothesis they either ignore them and talk louder or they do an ad hominem attack. They just whip out a razor and shave those facts off and pretend they’re not there.
A few of my recent strips have had positive women of color characters, and it occured to me that it’s been a while since the last time I did a positive black male character. So I decided to make the skeptic in this strip a black guy.
Since there was already a male in the strip, and since being a right-wing economist doesn’t correspond with any negative stereotypes about women I could think of, I made the right-wing economist a woman.
I don’t think there was any particular reason to make the economist white, other than that when I sketched her I thought her hair lines looked nice without coloring the hair in. In retrospect, it would have been good to make her a person of color; too many political cartoonists only show two POC talking to each other when the cartoon involves race, and I’ve been trying to move away from that lately.
I am confounded – with myself.
I had to go back and have another look at the strip to see that indeed the guy is a person of color.
That is, his face is mostly shaded in, whereas the woman’s face is mostly not-shaded in.
But he’s got caucasian features (at least, they look caucasian to me…but, yeah, that doesn’t make him NOT a person of color…), so I didn’t see his not-whiteness until you pointed it out.
Am I the only one who didn’t see this? This is not a rhetorical question…and not intended as disrespect. I. just. didn’t. see. it. Which makes me wonder at my own aculturated myopia.
Phxt.
Eva, I think you’re using this as some sort of Rorschach test. It’s a cartoon with simple illustration’s, i don’t see what you see.
Amp, if you redraw this cartoon you should make the woman a lot taller and give her brown hair, than you can start a nice debate with Megan Mcardle. Who has made some pretty good posts about minimum wage. Her opinions on it are a little more complicated than you’ve described in the cartoon, but it’s not really an argument that can be fairly summarized in a short cartoon.
I think Tyler Cowan did a post (too lazy to dig it up) that explained why he favored theoretical models.
Amp, Have you done any cartoons showing the paradox of angry why guys that simultaneously claim affirmative action holds them back and that minorities should be able to boot strap themselves up the economic scale?
This paper: The Economics of Early Childhood Policty, while somewhat tangential to the topic, may nevertheless be of interest to readers here.
I didn’t see it either. Although I didn’t consciously evaluate the figures’ shading, on looking at it more closely it seems as though I parsed it as shadow rather than skin colour. The very back of his head, presumably intended to show a reflective ‘shine’ is the same colour of her face, while the back edge of her face, presumably intended to be in shadow is the same colour as his face. That there is much more shading on him doesn’t seem to be ‘sufficient’ to render him black in my perceptions.
There may also be a degree of ‘defaulting to white’ going on here.
As far as class is concerned, a short-sleeve top over a long-sleeved shirt suggests an older working-class man. His bald head and paunchiness also suggests age. I see no indicators of class or age in the woman’s appearance, though her rhetorical stance suggests that she is an academic, so probably middle-class. Her non-wage-minimumness also suggests this.
Amp, did you intend to convey anything by the woman’s gesture in the fifth panel?
And while we’re on the subject of form, can I also say much I like the way you add a secondary punchline in a final subpanel. You do that in a lot of your cartoons. It’s a nice touch.
I noticed that too.
The assumption implicit in your remark is that you would have ‘expected’ the genders to be reversed. The stereotype of women as holding moral high ground over men is prevalent thoughout society, and it’s one aspect of ‘patriarchal’ society that feminism usually works hard to reinforce. kudos to Amp for subverting it.
My own crackpot theory:
Minimum wage, rather than a price floor, acts as a commitment mechanism.
In the Econ 101 model of a competitive market at equilibrium, a binding price floor results in there being more people who want to sell at the imposed price than want to buy at that price. If you model the market for unskilled labor this way, a minimum wage that actually mattered would mean that there are people looking for jobs that can’t find employers. As economists define “unemployment” as the state of looking for a job but not finding it, if the model holds, a minimum wage should increase unemployment. (The model also predicts that abolishing the minimum wage would result in more people employed and more people “not in the labor force” who decide that working at the prevailing wage isn’t worth it.)
However…
Employee: Give me a raise, or I quit!
Employer: Quitting will hurt you more than it hurts me. I’m calling your bluff.
Employee: Darn it, you’re right. My threat isn’t credible.
::gets minimum wage law passed::
Employee: There! Now, if you don’t give me a raise, I can’t work!
Employer: Darn it, you’re right. Here’s your raise.
“and it’s one aspect of ‘patriarchal’ society that feminism usually works hard to reinforce.”
Sometimes, Daran, you do your best to look like a troll.
Yes, yes, Darin. Feminism is eeevvvviiiiiilllll. We know.
But just for the fun of it, what particular feminists have been arguing that women always hold moral high ground over men, and in what works did they make this argument? Citations, please.
* * *
Perhaps she expected the positions to be reversed because most economists are male (I’ve read that it’s the most male-dominated of the social sciences), and most minimum wage workers are female. (Not that the skeptic character in this strip is necessarily earning minimum wage, but he’s certainly representing that side of the equation.)
I’m glad you like the secondary punchlines. They’re fun, but they don’t fit in well with every strip.
The fifth panel was meant to be a scratching the head “this is puzzling” gesture, but I don’t think it worked. Oh, well.
Did anyone but me think the guy was Black?
Yes, yes, Amp, feminism is perfect. We know. There can be no substantive criticism; any objection to it boils down to calling it eeevvvviiiiiilllll.
You set the bar very high, Amp. There are many people whose words and actions imply a belief that men are more capable than women. I doubt you’d refrain from criticising their sexism merely because they don’t state it explicitly.
Here’s Barbara Ehrenreich, doing her best to look like a troll:
.
Daran, you’re being far too kind to your comment by implying that it in some way comprised “substantive criticism.”
If you had said that there is “a sort of feminism” which suggests that women are innately morally superior, which is what B.E. wrote, that would have been an improvement; it’s obvious that certain genres of feminism do see women as possessing innately superior morality. These feminist views have, in turn, frequently been opposed by other feminists arguing against such essentialism. This is hardly something new since we saw Liddie England’s photos; see, for instance, Katha Pollit’s essay “Marooned on Gilligan’s Island” (pdf link).
However, what you wrote was a statement about what “feminism” is “usually” like: according to you, feminism usually “works hard” to reinforce the idea that women hold higher moral ground than men. (Feminists who see men and women as morally about equal are, presumably, unusual exceptions.) I don’t think it’s unfair of me to ask you to support that statement. B.E.’s statement, which you quoted, doesn’t support the “usually,” nor the “works hard.”
If you want to modify your statement to “some feminists have implied that women are morally superior to men,” then I’d agree; obviously some feminists have implied that. But that’s a considerably weaker statement than the one you initially made.
I thought the figure on the left was black. Robert FTW!
But why are all of you sexist monsters assuming the figure on the left is male? :P
(This would be a better body-type-normative shaming comment if I hadn’t said “he” in my own first comment. Nuts. So to speak.)
Did anyone but me think the guy was Black?
I thought he was Hispanic. I’m not sure why.
I also thought that the woman explaining her theory was an undergraduate or maybe an early graduate econ student. Someone not necessarily that far from minimum wage jobs herself but very, very happy to think that she has probably escaped them permanently in her new shiny position as a person with or soon to have a degree. She looks too young and bouncy to be a prof.
Ampersand wrote:
“Perhaps she expected the positions to be reversed because most economists are male (I’ve read that it’s the most male-dominated of the social sciences), and most minimum wage workers are female. (Not that the skeptic character in this strip is necessarily earning minimum wage, but he’s certainly representing that side of the equation.)”
That’s it – that is what I was expecting.
That isn’t what you said:
A depiction of a women as having a non-stereotypically female interest/career, here? On a feminist blog? By a feminist cartoonist? Fancy that!
Of course it’s not really remarkable at all. Feminist do, routinely challenge and subvert negative stereotypes about women, (and it’s right that they do so.)
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Right – not what I said.
Just another example of a person not expressing themselves as they intended the first time around.
It’s been an interesting conversation, though, hasn’t it?
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Didn’t see he was black. I guess I mentally assumed he was in shadow or something, since his “normal” shade is the same as the shadow on the woman, and his “highlight” shade is the same as her “normal” shad, and neither have any other shades (no highlights on woman, no shadow on man).
And I do think it is remarkable that somebody asks your motivation for choosing the genders when nobody (except panicky MRAs) asks when one paints the “good guy” as a woman, and the “bad guy” as a man. But I may have picked up some MRA paranoia along the way.
This is a sort of interesting Response, it’s not a cartoon…but it’s close in a lot of ways.
http://www.examiner.com/a-1431559%7EKristen_Lopez_Eastlick__Dude__where_s_my_summer_job_.html
I’m open to the argument that because of cultural changes, the minimum wage may possibly be not as effective as it used to be. (I’ve heard that a guaranteed minimum income is preferable to the minimum wage, though I’m still somewhat skeptical about this.) The group we are specifically trying to help, after all, are people who need to support themselves and/or loved ones. Could it be these people make up a smaller proportion of minimum wage earners as a whole? It could be, although it still doesn’t stand to reason that we should therefore not raise the minimum wage, let alone get rid of it, if that smaller proportion still constitutes a majority and/or their interests still eclipse those of bored middle class teenagers. Still, perhaps 2008 is fundamentally different from 1948.
The paternalism of the anti-minimum wagers, though, really, really puts me off. According to the theory, a higher minimum wage lowers the chances for employment but raises living standards for those who *are* employed. (There are situations in which it could lower both or raise both, and I think the latter works through a method so commonsensical and obvious that it’s easy to ignore.) Sounds like a pickle of a tradeoff to me. Whose call should it be? Minimum wage workers themselves. What are their positions on this issue? Or are minimum wage workers too stupid and puerile to make this judgment, and they need conservative politicians, advocacy groups and the corporations that fund them to make the call for them?
Whose call should it be? Minimum wage workers themselves.
Sounds good to me – as long as you add in “minimum wage workers who don’t currently have a job”.
Statistically, even those peer-reviewed studies which find that unemployment effects of the MW exist, find that such effects are small. What we’re talking about here is “would you rather get paid more, but next time you’re between jobs it’ll take several days longer on average to find a new job”? Or “would you rather get paid more, but work 38 rather than 40 hours a week?” These are both ways that are, technically, reducing employment.
Robert, are you confident that if you did a survey of folks looking for jobs, they’d all turn down being paid more for years to come if it meant waiting several more days to begin working?
No legitimate study I’m aware of suggests that the effect of the MW will be to throw workers permanently out of the workforce. Even assuming the worse-case scenario supported by studies, the effects of the MW just aren’t that bad — not even for those who lose work as a result.
Also, to measure the effects of the MW, you can’t just look at who’s being paid the MW; folks who are being paid not very much above the MW also, on average, see their incomes increase when the WM is raised. I’ve been told that accounting for this effect vastly reduces the truth of the claim that mainly part-time teens benefit from raising the MW.
Yes, definitely. That’s why it’s important that minimum wage workers themselves make the call. If the minimum wage depresses employment to an extent that makes the wage increase not worth it (a scenario I highly doubt occurs often in rela life), they wouldn’t support it. If it doesn’t, they would. They may not be an encyclopedia of employment statistics, but they have a pretty firm grasp on the realities of the situation, and really, this is a normative judgment at heart that may not have a straight right or wrong answer. We’ll have to trust the broad consensus.
Conversely, the non-minimum wage worker doesn’t have the on-the-ground experience to know that, say, the issue is 36 hours vs. 40, as opposed to 30 vs. 40 or 39 vs. 40. Or that it would take an extra five days to find a job, as opposed to an extra one day or an extra five months. All (s)he has to go on is what provides personal ideological gratification.
Personally, I’m not entirely sure he’s being stridently anti-minimum wage – that is, if it can be showed that the sum total of minimum wage workers both employed and unemployed preferred a higher minimum wage, he’d acquiesce. But just in case he isn’t, I’ll just say that insisting that the unemployed have more say in economic policy isn’t sound conservative strategy. The RNC would disapprove.
Exactly. The cascade effect of the minimum wage is one of the main reasons I support it – or to put it to a finer point, the cascade effect that would occur in the absence of a minimum wage is the reason I support it. (The minimum wage, that is, not the cascade effect.) All the workers who are not making very much more than the minimum wage would see their hourly wages drop also. Hell, all least some of the effects of the race to the bottom would be felt by anyone who gets paid with an hourly wage and not a salary.
Robert, are you confident that if you did a survey of folks looking for jobs, they’d all turn down being paid more for years to come if it meant waiting several more days to begin working?
No. I’m just correcting a sampling bias in sylph’s characterization of who should get to decide.
Also, they won’t get that wage for years to come. Very few people work at minimum wage jobs over the long term.
I will confess that in my misspent youth I believed the theory, that minimum wage increases would result in a loss of income. Having spent some time on the managerial side of low-wage enterprises in the interim, I now think that business adjusts for changes in the minimum wage by tolerating longer lead times in hiring and being more selective, in order to bring up the economic productivity of the people they hire.
If raising the minimum wage, lowers unemployment, and is good for the economy, then we should raise it to $100/hour.
Justine, that’s a really bad argument.
“55 degrees is uncomfortably cold for you and you’d prefer it to be 70? Well, then you’d be really happy at 100 degrees!”
“The Sahara desert is too dry to grow wheat? Well, I guess we should just grow the wheat at the bottom of a lake, then!”
“A little nitrogen fertilizer is good for plants? Well, let’s dump the whole bag on that rosebush, then!”
I’m fascinated by bad arguments and the people who make them. I think closetpuritan did a nice and succinct job of illustrating why justine joseph’s argument was bad.
Now, pointing out that a single argument was bad does not, in itself, disprove the larger point that the arguer may have been trying to make.
But it ought to encourage a person to rethink the point that they made the bad argument in service of.
I think it also, means, ethically, that you should never make that argument again.