Oh, c’mon. You can't seriously claim that the literature is overwhelmingly in favour of raising the minimum wage, then cite one “real life situation as an indication of who is telling the truth.”
I'm not saying that you're wrong. I just find it hard to trust your one-sided summary of a large body of research. From Beware the Man of One Study by Scott Alexander:
We all know about the Krueger and Card study in New Jersey that found no evidence that high minimum wages hurt the economy. We probably also know the counterclaims that it was completely debunked as despicable dishonest statistical malpractice. Maybe some of us know Card and Krueger wrote a pretty convincing rebuttal of those claims. Or that a bunch of large and methodologically advanced studies have come out since then, some finding no effect like Dube, others finding strong effects like Rubinstein and Wither. These are just examples; there are at least dozens and probably hundreds of studies on both sides.
But we can solve this with meta-analyses and systematic reviews, right?
Depends which one you want. Do you go with this meta-analysis [link depreciated] of fourteen studies that shows that any presumed negative effect of high minimum wages is likely publication bias? With this meta-analysis of sixty-four studies that finds the same thing and discovers no effect of minimum wage after correcting for the problem? Or how about this meta-analysis of fifty-five countries that does find effects in most of them?
Maybe you prefer this systematic review of a hundred or so studies that finds strong and consistent effects?
In a field like economics, the notion that all the (quote on quote) independent experts agree with you is a total fantasy. It’s a complicated subject, and if anyone is lying to us here, it sure isn’t the economists!
