August 03, 2015
Actually, I want to skip over the minimum wage discussion (I’ll come back to it) to address another issue in his column this morning. In his prelude to attacking the $15 an hour minimum wage Samuelson takes a swipe at the economic policies of the 1960s:
“Consider the 1960s. Economists convinced themselves — and the public — that, through government budgets and interest rates, they could minimize recessions and sustain “full employment.” Early success was astounding. By late 1968, unemployment was 3.4 percent. But this was simply an inflationary boom, not a sophisticated advance in economic management. Double-digit price increases soon surfaced. We spent 15 years (and four recessions) combating inflation.”
This is close to incoherent. First, what does it mean to say “we spent 15 years (and four recessions) combating inflation.” If he means that we had people in Washington concerned about inflation, he should probably had said 40 years. Much of the Republican party has been yelling about hyper-inflation even as the inflation rate remains stubbornly below the Fed’s 2.0 percent target.
Does he mean inflation was a problem? Well perhaps it was higher than was desirable for much of the 1970s and the first few years of the 1980s, but that hardly makes it a crisis. After all unemployment has been higher than desirable (as measured by the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate of NAIRU) for most of the last 35 years. Furthermore, the four recessions line also doesn’t make any sense. We had four recessions in the fifteen years before 1960 also.
Furthermore, blaming the inflation on the 1970s on the policies of the 1960s is more than a bit bizarre. The more obvious cultpit would be the quadrupling of world oil prices in 1973-74 when OPEC first flexed its muscles and then again in 1979-1980 when the Iranian revolution shut off oil flows from what was then the world’s largest oil exporter. The sharp reversal of oil prices in the early 1980s, as more oil came on line and demand fell, was a major factor slowing inflation.
In fact, the 1960s were a decade of rapidly rising living standards for large segments of the population. Productivity was growing rapidly and most workers were getting wage gains in line with productivity growth, or close to 2.0 percent annually. That’s more than most workers have seen in the last fifteen years.
This brings us the Samuelson’s “minimum-wage madness.” In the period from 1938 (when the federal minimum wage was first established) to 1968 the minimum wage tracked productivity growth. This means that it not only kept pace with inflation, but minimum wage workers shared in the gains of the economy’s growth. If this pattern had continued, the minimum wage would be $18.42 an hour today.
Undoubtedly there would be large-scale unemployment if we were to try to quickly move to that wage today. Much has changed in the economy over the last 37 years and besides, it would take time for businesses to adjust. However the more modest goal of $12.00 by 2020 is certainly a reasonable target.
As Samuelson notes, there would be somewhat fewer jobs with this wage, but it is important to understand what this means. The jobs affected by the minimum wage tend to be high turnover jobs. People often hold them for only a few months at a time. In this context, fewer jobs will mostly mean that it takes people more time to find a new job when they leave another job or when they first start looking for work. That could mean that low wage workers get to work somewhat fewer hours over the course of a year than they would have liked, but when they do work they take home 65 percent more than if they were working at the $7.25 an hour minimum wage. Most would probably consider this a pretty good deal.
Samuelson is right that the minimum wage levels can be set too high where the loss of jobs more than offsets the benefits of the wage gains. Some cities may be moving into this territory now, but certainly the U.S. economy can support a minimum wage in 2020 that is more than one-third lower relative to productivity than the 1968 minimum wage.
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