#margrev

[cameronpauly]

The Seattle Minimum Wage Study - Marginal REVOLUTION

The Seattle Minimum Wage Study, a study supported and funded in part by the Seattle city government, is out with a new NBER paper evaluating Seattle’s minimum wage increase to $13 an hour and it finds significant dis-employment effects that on net reduce the incomes of minimum wage workers. I farm this one out to …

There are always positives and negatives when you’re dealing with a minimum wage. Evidence from Seattle and Denmark (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/06/minimum-wage-evidence-danish-discontinuity.html) appears to indicate that low-wage workers as a whole end up worse off after large minimum-wage hike, due to massive job losses to offset higher wages. Time to take a look at the data and come up with a better way to improve the lives of the poor. I’d suggest trying to cut healthcare prices, which would require a drastic overload of the entire healthcare system, and some sort of universal basic income, most likely funded by privatizing the Interstates (http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/06/libertarian-universal-basic-income.html) or by a Land Value Tax.

Back to the drawing board...

[cameronpauly]

Catherine Rampell has an excellent blog post on this question, here is one bit: "Since the mid-1990s, the biggest increases in spending have gone to those who were middle class or hovering around the poverty line. Meanwhile, Americans in deep poverty — that is, with household earnings of less than 50 percent of the official poverty line — saw no change in their benefits in the decade leading up to the housing bubble. In fact, if you strip out Medicare and Medicaid, federal social spending on those in extreme poverty fell between 1993 and 2004."

Interesting piece on the safety net and its shortcomings.

[cameronpauly]

The President and other apologists for the NSA have defended the NSA’s illegal mass surveillance of US telephones by arguing that it’s “only” metadata, so “nobody is listening to our telephone calls.” But where, when, how long and to whom customers […]

This Stanford study dispels the claims that many have made, that metadata is not the same as what is said on the line.

Even the collection of metadata, even if it is constitutionally allowed, must not be tolerated by the American people, or any reasonable government.

[cameronpauly]

There has been a recent kerfluffle over the Sabia and Burkhauser paper (ungated here) suggesting that minimum wage increases do not very much help the American poor.  Sabia and Burkhauser report facts such as this: Only 11.3% of workers who [&]

I believe that this paper affirms the libertarian belief that governmental assistance does not generally help people.

[cameronpauly]

David Henderson writes: Economists Joseph J. Sabia and Richard V. Burkhauser examined the effects of state minimum wage increases between 2003 and 2007 and reported that they found no evidence the increases lowered state poverty rates. Further, they calculated the [&]

Intriguing evidence in favor of a more libertarian view of poverty policy.

[cameronpauly]

EMBO reports: The new approach is possible due to recent advances in mathematics and  computer technologies. The system involves giving all scientists an annual, unconditional fixed amount of funding to conduct their research. All funded scientists are, however, obliged to [&]

Interesting idea for a new system.

[cameronpauly]

The governments of the world should issue shares in their GDPs, securities that pay to investors as dividends a specified fraction of GDP, in perpetuity (or until the government buys them back on the open market). Governments need to end their historic reliance on debt financing: governments issuing shares in GDP is analogous to corporations issuing equity. My Canadian colleague Mark Kamstra and I propose issuing trillionth shares in GDP, and so to call these “Trills.” Last year, a U.S. Trill would have paid $15.09 in dividends, a Canadian Trill C$1.72. The dividends will change every year as GDP is announced, and predicting these changes will certainly interest investors, just as in the stock market. Governments can auction off Trills when current government debt comes due and needs to be refinanced, as part of a debt reduction program.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/12/shiller-on-trills.html

Robert Shiller has a great idea to lower debt by replacing it with "Trills."

[cameronpauly]

James Hamilton directs our attention to a useful new paper on this topic by Alan Blinder and Mark Watson (pdf).  Blinder and Watson conclude: Democrats would no doubt like to attribute the large D-R growth gap to better macroeconomic policies, [&]

Useful paper on the D-R growth gap, refuting actual policies as a reason.