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Don Boudreaux On Using Both Economic Reasoning And Empirical Analysis To Evaluate Minimum Wage Laws
See
Prices Are Not Arbitrary. Excerpt:
"The following is part of an e-mail that I opened earlier
today from Aaron the Aaron. Mr. Aaron remains unusually perturbed at
Russ and me for suggesting that minimum-wage legislation might have some
ill, unintended consequences that escape empirical detection:
“You [Boudreaux] and Russ … are too anxious to
substitute your own theorizing for measured, verifiable data. I do not
trust your and Russ’s theorizing any more than I trust anybody else’s
theorizing…. Your way of going about economics is cheating….
You would both be taken more seriously by people who matter if you both take empirical work more seriously.”
Neither this forum nor this economist is properly equipped to launch
into a lengthy discussion of scientific method. But I can’t resist
writing a few words here in response.
First, I do take empirical work – including, by the way,
non-quantitative history – very seriously. I emphatically do not
believe that reality can be divined merely from armchair, a priori theorizing.
(I’m sure that the same holds true for Russ, but I’ll speak here
formally only for myself.) But to take empirical work seriously is not
at all the same practice as naively swallowing asserted ‘facts’ and
quantitative relationships whole and uncritically. Quite the opposite
is true. To take empirical work seriously requires thinking seriously
about methodology and epistemology – a practice that leads to mature
evaluation of empirical claims. In turn, a mature evaluation of
empirical claims often leads to a rejection of many such claims (for a
variety of possible reasons). Such rejections of empirical claims
reflect not a rejection of the importance of empirical information but,
rather, a recognition of the inescapability of evaluating any and all
empirical claims through theoretical lenses.
Second, the nature of economics and other social sciences means that
the proper role of abstract theory in these sciences is greater even
than it is in the ‘natural’ sciences. Not only is ceteris almost never paribus in
social and economic reality, but many of the ‘predicted’ effects of
postulated causes are often too fine and too small to detect with any
practically useable tools of observation and measurement – even when ceteris is paribus.
Here’s an example, one that I first used, back in 2006, in another context: Suppose
you’re standing beside a swimming pool that’s 1,000 times larger than
an Olympic-sized swimming pool. This gigantic pool is full of water.
The surface of the pool is calm. You drop into the pool a grain of
sand. Question: what happens, as a result of dropping the grain of sand
into the pool, to the pool’s water level?
Answer: it has risen. (Or, more precisely, the water level of the pool with the
grain of sand in it is higher than that level would have been had you
not dropped the grain of sand into the pool.) How do we know this fact?
Reason tells us. By “reason” I mean here only – and perhaps in a way
annoying to professional philosophers – that amalgam of human thought
processes made up of experience with basic, everyday physical
relationships as well as of ‘common-sense’ logic.
But no practical method for empirically measuring this pool’s water
level will detect that that level has risen in response to your dropping
into the pool a single grain of sand. Surely, though, you would be
justified in dismissing as mistaken some sophomore who, standing beside
you, insists that because the pool’s measured water level is
unchanged, you are engaged in unjustified and anti-empirical theorizing
when you conclude that the grain of sand dropped into pool actually
raised the water level. Likewise if some empirical study found that,
after the grain of sand was dropped into the pool, the water level fell.
The sophomore, believing only what is empirically detectable,
concludes that the dropping of grains of sand, one by one, into a huge
pool does not raise the pool’s water level (or that it actually causes
the water level to fall). You – not rejecting empirical studies but
also not rejecting what you know reasonably well about cause and effect –
reach a conclusion opposite to that reached by the sophomore. And no
protestations by the sophomore about your alleged scientific
Neanderthalism and his or her devotion only to ‘the facts’ will, or
should, change your mind.
Who, in this case, is the better scientist? You or the sophomore?
My pool example is intentionally extreme. But it’s perfectly valid
for justifying why those of us who insist that a higher legislated
minimum-wage will have some negative effect on
low-skilled-workers’ employment options continue to accept this
proposition despite failures of some measurement attempts to detect
those effects.
Of course, like all such scientific propositions, the one defended
here – about the inevitable negative consequences of a modest legislated
minimum wage – must be held not as a dogma but, rather, as a scientific
proposition that is the result of theoretical and empirical analysis.
The possibility that this proposition is mistaken must never be
forgotten. But because the case against the validity of this
proposition challenges the very foundations of well-accepted economic
science, the burden of proof borne by those who would have us reject
this proposition is enormously heavy. A few empirical studies that find
no negative consequences, or that find positive consequences, hardly
suffice to meet this burden."
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