Month: December 2010

Righties love to claim that minimum-wage laws hurt the poor because they discourage employers from hiring. They claim that the disemployment effect cancels out the higher-wage effect, making the poor worse off. But over and over again, research shows that it just ain’t so. Here’s more (PDF). A new and stunningly well-executed study comparing adjacent counties…

Over at Angry Bear and Presimetrics, Mike Kimel makes his usual brilliant case for the stupidity of right-wing and many orthodox economic beliefs. But he makes one statement in the course of it which he considers to be unobjectionable by all, that as far as I can tell is almost completely false. It’s one of…

“The red-state, blue-state war is happening in the upper half of the income distribution.” Or more accurately, I think, the red-blue war is happening… And it’s happening in the poor states. And it first reared its head in the 90s. Interpret. More graphs: Andrew Gelman