Economics: Minimum Wage, Who Gets Hurt?

[Fife]

It's not an appeal to authority. We both know nobody can suggest this partisan crap as a legitimate macroeconomics textbook with a straight face (for now).

That's where you faceplant. Sowell is no "partisan." He's a milquetoast Chicagoan, as far as economists go.

Oh well, run back to your Krugman blankie and break some windows on the way, I guess.

[Speaker to Animals]

It's not an appeal to authority. We both know nobody can suggest this partisan crap as a legitimate macroeconomics textbook with a straight face (for now).

That's where you faceplant. Sowell is no "partisan." He's a milquetoast Chicagoan, as far as economists go.

Oh well, run back to your Krugman blankie and break some windows on the way, I guess.

Sowell is no "partisan."

[PartyOf5]

Jedi, quit playing games and answer DB's question. Where would the businesses get the money to pay their employees that much?

I'm not playing games, the question is complicated. If you don't take a holistic view of the situation, then perhaps you miss the truth of the thing. He argues for businesses, I argue for labor.

So, are you ever going to even attempt to answer this or not? You can each argue your own sides, but part of that argument is answering questions like where the money is going to come from in your solution.

You argued with only a couple parties interests in mind.

FYI, I'm not trying to attack you or your position. Answering that question is very important to the original statements you made.

[PartyOf5]

No, just working my way through Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.

I started this a while back, and really need to get back to it. Right now it's sitting on the bookshelf waiting to be read.

[DBTrek]

No, just working my way through Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.

I started this a while back, and really need to get back to it. Right now it's sitting on the bookshelf waiting to be read.

It’s a great book. You’ll find a lot of folks (our host included) really dislike Sowell. But you’ll be hard pressed to find someone that will prove his assertions wrong. The best counter argument I’ve encountered so far is that his narrow focus on Economics overlooks non-economic factors that are equally important to individual happiness.

Which is all well and good ... but his book is called Basic Economics, not Basic Everything That Contributes to an Individual’s Happiness.

[Speaker to Animals]

The main criticism is the sophistry and the not presenting actual macroeconomics at all.

[DBTrek]

Multiple threads available where I lay down Sowell’s take on the economics driving a particular market behavior or reaction. If his assertions are contrary to common marcroeconomic theory folks have as much space as they’d like to demonstrate his errors.

I have no particular attachment to Sowell as an economist, any more than I have particular attachment to Dan Carlin as a narrator of history. In both cases I appreciate these men doing an exceptionally good job of explaining a topic and making it interesting. But if Sowell’s Economics (or Carlin’s history) are wrong, the entire internet-connected world is free to demonstrate how.

For me, Sowell has the best ideas and best explanations. If someone has access to better ideas and explanations, I’m sure we’d all appreciate them sharing the details. This forum is populated by users who generally like to learn and like to be right.

[Speaker to Animals]

Well, we do point that out and you just insult people who try to explain to you what you'd learn if you read an actual textbook on macroeconomics.

If you want to believe Sowell's take, that's fine, but don't pretend like that's the truth and everybody else is confused about "facts". Like I said before: presenting price gouging as some response and solution to scarcity is laughably dishonest. In some cases that might be true, but just decriminalizing the practice is more likely to generate artificial scarcity for private gain. Likewise, the toy definition of a monopoly requiring absolutely no competition is just silly. This is sophistry, not an honest presentation of economics.

Economics is not like a science where you have falsifiable hypotheses with some easily verifiable claims about the truth of the matter. It's more like psychology (not a science) where you can have multiple theories that arrive at different interpretations of the same data. There exist no easy "one way" theories in economics. There are only some basic principles that you would learn in a textbook and then a handful of dominant theories that build off of them. What people are doing, which I find exceedingly dishonest, is presenting their economic ideologies as facts in such a way that they trivialize all the other schools and then frame their own assertions with silly little anecdotes and thought experiments deliberately designed to mislead people.

[DBTrek]

I haven’t insulted anyone. On the contrary, I weather countless comments from others about how Sowells book, which serves as a course text in college economics courses, Sowell also being an economics professor who taught at multiple prestigious universities, is somehow inferior to real macroeconomic text books.

That’s fine, but until the detractors get around to telling us what a real economics book looks like we’re in that Martin Hash situation where contrary claims are made, but contrary arguments can only be found in some book that is apparently impossible to summarize.
/shrug

[Speaker to Animals]