Tag Archives: data

About That Minimum Wage Debate….

Who was it who coined the immortal observation that “It ain’t what we don’t know that hurts us–it’s what we know that just ain’t so”?

I thought about that when I read a recent report  about job creation experience in states that had recently raised their minimum wage.

Economists at Goldman Sachs conducted a simple evaluation of the impact of these state minimum-wage increases. The researchers compared employment changes between December and January in the 13 states where the minimum wage increased with the changes in the remainder of the states, and found that the states where the minimum wage went up had faster employment growth than the states where the minimum wage remained at its 2013 level.

When we updated the GS analysis using additional employment data from the BLS, we saw the same pattern: employment growth was higher in states where the minimum wage went up. While this kind of simple exercise can’t establish causality, it does provide evidence against theoretical negative employment effects of minimum-wage increases.

It has always seemed reasonable to assume that higher wages would depress job creation.  What that simple logic missed, however, were the many factors other than wage rates that influence the decision whether to add employees. The cited study joins an overwhelming body of evidence that the simple equation is wrong.

It’s another one of those things we know that just ain’t so.

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Criminal Justice by the Numbers: The Moneyball Approach

“The approach is simple. First, government needs to figure out what works. Second, government should fund what works. Then, it should stop funding what doesn’t work.”

That, in a nutshell, is Peter Orszag’s summary of a recent, detailed set of recommendations  issued by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU’s law school. He calls it “the Moneyball approach”–going by statistical evidence rather than gut impressions.

The Brennan Center’s proposal, Reforming Funding to Reduce Mass Incarceration, is a plan to link federal grant money to modern criminal justice goals – to use that grant money more strategically– to promote innovative crime-reduction policies nationwide and to reduce crime, incarceration and the costs of both.

The proposal, titled “Success-Oriented Funding,” would change the federal government’s $352 million Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program, by focusing on the government’s current criteria for determining whether a grant has been successful.  (Fortunately, given the gridlock in Congress, It could be implemented by the DOJ– it wouldn’t require legislation.)

The fundamental premise of the program is that “what gets measured gets done.” If you are measuring the number of arrests, you’ll increase arrests. If you are measuring reductions in crime or recidivism, you’ll get reductions in crime and recidivism.

A blue-ribbon panel including prosecutors and defense lawyers, Republicans and Democrats, academics and officeholders has signed on to the proposal. As Orszag noted in the Forward:

Based on rough calculations, less than $1 out of every $100 of government spending is backed by even the most basic evidence that the money is being spent wisely. With so little performance data, it is impossible to say how many of the programs are effective. The consequences of failing to measure the impact of so many of our government programs — and of sometimes ignoring the data even when we do measure them — go well beyond wasting scarce tax dollars. Every time a young person participates in a program that doesn’t work but could have participated in one that does, that represents a human cost. And failing to do any good is by no means the worst sin possible: Some state and federal dollars flow to programs that actually harm the people who participate in them.

Figuring out what we taxpayers are paying for, and whether what we are paying for works.

Evidence. What a novel idea!

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Translating Anecdote into Data

There’s an old academic adage that reminds researchers “the plural of anecdote is not data.” It’s a worthwhile caution against drawing too broad a conclusion from one or two examples.

This caution came to mind last night at my grandson’s tenth birthday party . (This was the one for family–I am very grateful that my son and daughter-in-law separate the wild kid’s celebration from the more staid event for grandparents and aunts and uncles.) My brother-in-law said something about “those Republicans” in a way that made it clear he did not consider himself to be one of them. This from the person who is easily the most conservative member of our family.

Nor is ours a family that was considered “liberal” until relatively recently. My husband and I met when we served in a Republican Administration; my sister and brother-in-law were active Republicans (my sister was one of those good citizens who polled her neighborhood for the precinct committee person). Our daughter used to work for a group called Republicans for Choice (yes, Virginia, there really were pro-choice Republicans once upon a time); she now works for a group called Democrats for Education Reform.

Little by little, as the GOP became more and more extreme, more inhospitable to science, diversity and modernity, we left.

This is one family, one anecdote.

I wonder how widespread our experience is, and whether there’s any data to confirm a wider exodus.

Anyone know?

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