Do higher wages kill jobs? (with Mayor Eric Garcetti and Alan Krueger)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 12 February 2019

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Trickle-downers always argue that raising the minimum wage inevitably kills jobs. But the empirical evidence from Seattle, Los Angeles, and elsewhere prove otherwise. Experts, including Mayor Garcetti of LA, discuss how our economic understanding has changed, and why changing the public perception around the minimum wage has been so difficult. Eric Garcetti: Mayor of Los Angeles since 2013. Former member of the LA City Council, serving as council president from 2006 to 2012. Twitter: @ericgarcetti Alan Krueger: Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton. Former Chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and a member of the Cabinet from 2011 to 2013. Co-author of ‘Myth of Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage’ and ‘Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies?’. Twitter: @Alan_Krueger Richard Kirsch: Director of Our Story at the Hub for American Narratives. Led development of Progressive Economic Narrative Project and has done extensive training with organizational leaders and elected officials on delivering powerful narratives. Twitter: @_RichardKirsch Further reading: Raising the Minimum Wage Is Good for Everyone Seattle’s $15 Minimum Wage Experiment Is a Success

Transcript

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0:00.0	If you can get people to believe the claim that raising wages always kills jobs,
0:08.9	taxes too high, wages too high, we're not going to be able to compete against the world.
0:15.0	Then you have explained the economy to them in a way that makes them fear raising wages.
0:23.0	If you raise the minimum wage,
0:24.1	you're gonna make people more expensive than a machine.
0:26.5	And that means all this automation that's replacing jobs
0:28.8	and people right now is only gonna be accelerated.
0:31.2	There are some people I think who just have difficulty not fitting the world into a particular
0:37.6	structure.
0:38.6	But we cannot do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world we just can't do it.
0:44.0	So do not raise the minimum.
0:46.0	I would not raise the minimum.
0:48.0	From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics with
0:59.2	Nick Hanauer, where we explore everything you wished you'd learn in Econ 101. I'm Nick Henauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
1:16.6	I'm Stephanie Urban.
1:17.8	I run a lot of our advocacy and campaign work
1:19.9	here at Civic Pinchers. In our last episode, we've been focusing on the three legs of the trickle-down stool,
1:29.1	and today we're going to cover that last leg.
1:31.0	This one we're expert in.
1:32.2	So get ready to answer the question, do
1:33.8	higher wages kill jobs? Yeah, thanks Stephanie. And for sure, because wages are
1:39.8	where the money is, this is the most pernicious claim of trickle-down economics.
	...

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