Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

Two go-to academics for the pro-minimum-wage crowd are the aforementioned David Card of Berkeley and Alan Krueger of Princeton. In 1994, when both men were teaching at Princeton, they coauthored a widely cited case study that compared employment changes in fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania after New Jersey’s minimum wage rose from $4.25 to $5.05 per hour. Following the increase employment fell in New Jersey, as most economists would have predicted. But because it also fell by just as much in Pennsylvania, which hadn’t hiked its own minimum, Card and Krueger argued that the drop in both states must have been caused by something else. “Contrary to the central prediction of the textbook model of the minimum wage,” the authors concluded, “we find no evidence that the rise in New Jersey’s minimum wage reduced employment at fast-food restaurants in the state.” In their subsequent book, Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, the authors went even further. Under close scrutiny, the bulk of the empirical evidence on the employment effects of the minimum wage is shown to be consistent with our findings . . . which suggest that increases in the minimum wage have had, if anything, a small, positive effect on employment, rather than an adverse effect.7 But others immediately pushed back at that notion, and quite hard. Becker wrote that the Card and Krueger studies had “serious defects,” and other economists—including Donald Deere, Finis Welch, a...