“Canadian economist wins the Nobel prize for economics for pioneering research that showed an increase in minimum wage does not lead to less hiring and immigrants do not lower pay for native-born workers”
Darn dismal science, as if a human science might exist and thrive despite the dull prospects of making equal rights under the law represent natural resources as well. Until then there’s all those status contests and their public relations branding for economic opinion as celebrity information and financial market touting. There’s also institutional effects like Card being the AEA president. Books will be sold as well. The thematic choice of natural experiments compensates for some of the prior awards made for experimental economics that use ‘non-natural’ experimental settings.
“My contributions are pretty modest,” David Card said. “It’s about trying to get more scientific tie-in and evidence-based analysis in economics.
“Most old-fashioned economists are very theoretical, but these days, a large fraction of economics is really very nuts-and-bolts, looking at subjects like education or health, or at the effects of immigration or the effects of wage policies. These are really very, very simple things. So, my big contribution was to oversimplify the field.”
And in the process to make it more useful in application?
“Well, that was my belief, but you would probably get a mixed vote on that.”
This is the second year in a row for UC Berkeley faculty to win a Nobel Prize. Last year, Jennifer Doudna was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and Richard Genzel won the Nobel Prize in Physics.
UC Berkeley’s Class of 1950 Professor of Economics, Card has co-authored and edited several books and more than 100 journal articles and book chapters. He directs UC Berkeley’s Center for Labor Economics, the campus’s Econometrics Laboratory and previously served as director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Labor Studies Program.
In 1995, Card received the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded annually to an American economist under 40 who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge. It is widely viewed as a precursor to a Nobel Prize.
He currently serves as president of the American Economic Association.
The minimum wage: a challenge to orthodoxy
Starting in the early 1990s, Card teamed up with Princeton University economist Alan Krueger on path-breaking research on the minimum wage. Krueger eventually chaired President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers before his death in 2019. Writing on the minimum wage, they posed a challenge to the economic orthodoxy that had prevailed for decades.
www.berkeleyside.org/…
Card worked on research that used restaurants in New Jersey and in eastern Pennsylvania to measure the effects of increasing the minimum wage. He studied what happened when New Jersey raised its minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.05, using restaurants in bordering eastern Pennsylvania as a comparison group.
Contrary to previous studies, he and his late research partner Alan Krueger found that an increase in the minimum wage had no effect on the number of employees. Card later did further work on the issue. Overall, the work concluded that the negative effects of increasing the minimum wage are small and significantly smaller than believed 30 years ago, the Nobel committee said.
Card also found that incomes of those who are native born in a country can benefit from new immigrants, while immigrants who arrived earlier are the ones at risk of being negatively affected.
[...]
Angrist and Imbens won their half of the award for working out the methodological issues that allow economists to draw solid conclusions about cause and effect even where they cannot carry out studies according to strict scientific methods.
Speaking by phone from his home in Massachusetts, Imbens told reporters that he had been asleep when the call came.
"I was just absolutely stunned then to get a telephone call" he said. "And then I was just absolutely thrilled to hear the news, a particular kind of hearing that I got to share this with Josh Angrist and and David Card were both very good friends of mine."
www.cbsnews.com/...
If you’ve ever heard of George Mason University economist Robin Hanson, there’s a good chance it was because he wrote something creepy. Over the years, the libertarian-leaning professor has become notorious in certain circles for his odd and disconcerting dips into socio-sexual commentary; he once mused on his blog, for instance, about whether women who suffered a “gentle, silent rape” were really worse off than men who experienced infidelity. Last week, Hanson was back at it again. In a post that left many readers agog, he decided to use a heinous incident of misogynistic violence as an opportunity to contemplate the concept of “redistributing” sex to men who have trouble getting laid.
[...]
Bloomberg’s Noah Smith later called out Hanson’s post in an article about how the economics profession, which often shrugs off material like this, is culturally hostile to women. Hanson, in turn, complained that his point was being mischaracterized—that he wasn’t so much trying to minimize rape, as explain how vile a crime infidelity is. “Just as people who accuse others of being like Hitler do not usually intend to praise Hitler, people who compare other harms to rape usually intend to emphasize how big are those other harms, not how small is rape,” he wrote.
slate.com/…
A Message from George Mason University Leadership:
We have learned that George Mason University Professor, Robin Hanson, posted a tweet that is highly objectionable. As leaders of George Mason University, we express our profound reaction of repugnance about this posting. The posting by Professor Hanson is offensive. It does not represent the views of our university and is inconsistent with our values. His words are hurtful. The tweet is under review.
Anne Holton, Interim President Mark R. Ginsberg, Interim Provost and Executive Vice President Ann Ardis, Dean, College of Humanities and Social Sciences Daniel Houser, Chair, Department of Economics
https://www2.gmu.edu/news/586546
www2.gmu.edu/…
(He's also defended violent incels)
I’ve long puzzled over the fact that most of the concern I hear expressed on inequality is about the smallest of (at least) seven kinds: income inequality between the families of a nation at a time (IIBFNAT). Expressed concern has greatly increased over the last half decade. While most people don’t actually know that much about their income ranking, many seem to be trying hard to inform those who rank low of their low status. Their purpose seems to be to induce envy, to induce political action to increase redistribution. They hope to induce these people to identify more with this low income status, and to organize politically around this shared identity.
Many concerned about IIBFNAT are also eager to remind everyone of and to celebrate historical examples of violent revolution aimed at redistribution (e.g., Les Misérables). The purpose here seems to be to encourage support for redistribution by reminding everyone of the possibility of violent revolution. They remind the poor that they could consider revolting, and remind everyone else that a revolt might happen. This strengthens an implicit threat of violence should redistribution be insufficient.
www.overcomingbias.com/…
That same day, I tweeted a brief summary of my post. Some responded to that with outrage, claiming (quite falsely) that I say men have a right to rape women of their choosing, and that I advocate a Handmaid’s Tale system of rape and enslavement of women. Many others then agreed loudly and rudely with those responses, calling me a terrible person.
I’ve been tempted to blame people for not bothering to read my short simple post carefully enough. For example, my post was gender-neutral. But I have to admit that people seem to be prone to misread such things more generally. For example, college students consistently misread Plato’s Republic this way:
Student papers talk about how unfair and cruel it is for the male guardians to dictate who women can sleep with … and use the women like a harem. Which isn’t at all what the Republic says. … It says very clearly that guardians are both sexes. And it says clearly that men and women are lotteried the same. (And we discussed it in class!) (more)
Most who expressed outrage at my post, even most in the mass media, did not offer counter-arguments to my analogy. They were instead content to identify me with sex-poor people today willing to do or sympathize with violence in order to advocate for sex redistribution. Such ‘incel’ advocates were said to be personally deeply icky, and therefore so also were any policies they advocate, and also anyone like me who did not attack they and their policies immediately with extreme prejudice.
My tentative best guess explanation for why this was the main response is the following. Many have long argued for gender-related policy reforms based on the claim that there exist many explicitly and strongly women-hating men. Yet it is usually hard to clearly and publicly identify many such men. Gender-policy advocates were so happy to find another visible (if small) pool of men that they could tar with this label that they spoke of little else. Politics isn’t mainly about policy, after all.
www.overcomingbias.com/...
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is an economics prize administered by the Nobel Foundation (since 1969). While it is not one of the Nobel Prizes, which were established by Alfred Nobel's will in 1895, it is commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize in Economics.