Following California implementing a law raising its minimum wage to $20 for more than 500,000 fast-food workers in the state in 2024, Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of research firm Beacon Economics, offered a warning about the state raising its minimum wage.
“California’s well-intended push to reduce income inequality via wage floors is beginning to have a significant negative impact on some of our most vulnerable workers—our youth, particularly those from lower-income households,” he wrote earlier this year.
His concerns echoed those of fast-food franchise owners, one of whom told Fortune in 2024 that higher wages would be unsustainable for smaller chains with slim margins.
But nearly two years after the law’s passage, economists are seeing very different results than what was initially feared. A working paper from University of California at Berkeley released this month found the policy increased average weekly wages for eligible workers by 11% and did not reduce employment. Prices increased modestly, about 1.5%, or the equivalent of about six cents for a $4 item.
The problem with Economics is that most Economists are first and foremost Propagandists, the most “important” the positions they hold, the most likely that’s the case: nobody gets made head of a Central Bank, a permanent commentator in the Press or gets a gold plated job at a Think Tank, for defending scientific theories which go against the interests of the power elites of a country.
So whilst there’s quite a lot of Science in Economics (especially Behavioural Economics), the most visible, highly paid, loudly praised in the Press, award-winning (most notably with the “Swedish Central Bank Prize for Economics in honor of Alfred Nobel”, commonly portrayed as a “Nobel Prize” for Economics) “Economists” are so distant from any Scientific Principles that they’re pretty much anti-Science.
Unsurprisingly, with the prestigious, most well paid and most visibly positions in it being dominated by greedy charlatans working as paid minions of the powerful, the discipline has a very bad name.