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https://www.bendbulletin.com/business/6503418-151/study-minimum-wage-increases-in-6-cities-working:
The minimum wage increases that started four years ago in Seattle are spreading across the country, but economists continue to study — and disagree about — the impact.
The latest look at increased wage floors in six U.S. cities, including Seattle, finds that food-service workers saw increases in pay and no widespread job losses. That reinforces the conclusions the same group of University of California, Berkeley, researchers reached in 2017 after studying just in Seattle.
This time, the Berkeley researchers examined Seattle; San Francisco; Oakland, California; San Jose, California; Chicago; and Washington, D.C., where minimum wages at the end of 2016 ranged from $10 to $13.
"We find that they are working just as the policymakers and voters who enacted these policies intended," said Sylvia Allegretto, co-author of the report and co-chair of Berkeley's Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics. "So far they are raising the earnings of low-wage workers without causing significant employment losses."
abstract https://www.nber.org/papers/w25043
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aclarke on Thursday September 27 2018, @12:40PM
Agreed. It's one of those concepts that requires diving in, rather than dipping in a toe. "The water's great once you're in". Once a government gets established, it generally only changes incrementally, which makes sea changes impossible. I find it hard to see how we'll get to basic income, scrapping many other social programmes obviated by basic income, and a modified tax structure, through a series of incremental changes by politicians more interested in their party getting re-elected than making meaningful change. That, and by being buffeted by the whims of changing government priorities after each election, we often end up going up and down without actually making any progress in any direction.