Noah Smith, Columnist

Finally, an Answer to the Minimum Wage Question

We're about to learn if higher pay costs jobs.

May 27, 2015 at 12:00 PM UTC

Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

Awaiting a verdict on the $15 minimum wage.
Photographer: Cem Ozdel/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

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Sometimes people ask me where I stand on economic policy. Am I a free-marketer or an interventionist? I tell them that I’m an identificationist.

In statistics, “identification” just means separating two groups in order to tell if a treatment works. You give Group A the pill and you give Group B a placebo, and you see if Group A does better than Group B. In laboratory experiments this is usually possible to do. In the real world, it’s a lot harder -- you have to wait for a policy to bring about a difference between two areas that are roughly comparable.