July 29^th

Thomas Sowell has generously solved the problem of unemployed black youth. You’ll never guess how easy it was. From his column today it appears that the minimum wage is raised entirely too high. Sowell shows that as the minimum wage rose over many years so did the unemployment of black youth. It must surely follow that if the minimum wage is eliminated black youths will find more jobs. Well, maybe not.

There is a little something from the logic place that might not have been emphasized at the University of Chicago’s graduate school of economics. That something is called “post hoc ergo propter hoc” If that is de-Latinized it reminds us that because A follows B we should not assume that B causes A. Sowell didn’t get to that part of whatever logic course he took…if he took a logic course. He is, after all, 85 years old which means that his graduate school days were close to the middle of the last century. Who knows what they taught economists back then. (I can make these ageist remarks because I’m older than he is and similar ones apply to me as well.)

Sowell really does claim that black unemployment is caused by increases in the minimum wage. Here’s a quote, “Liberals, of course, wanted the minimum wage raised to keep up with inflation. The result was that ten years later, the unemployment for black 17-year old males was 27.5 percent…as the minimum wage kept getting raised so did the unemployment rate for black 17-year old males in  1971 it was 33.4 percent –and it has never been under 30 percent since then.”

In 1971 the minimum wage was $i.60 an hour and now 44 years later in 2015 it is $7.25 an hour, four and half times as high. Black teenage unemployment is presumably increased by increasing the minimum wage, according to Sowell, so what has it done in those 44 years? According to Sowell it has remained stuck at 30+ percent over that time. If you want to make a case that A causes B, then when you increase A, B should increase too, or at least not remain dormant, because if A jumps by a factor of 4.5 and B doesn’t budge, it just ruins your argument.

It is obvious that many other factors than the minimum wage influence the unemployment rate of unskilled labor and how can anyone classify 17 year olds of any ethnicity as other than unskilled labor? Sowell even tries out the old chestnut about minimum wage jobs being for “young and inexperienced workers.” That’s nonsense! A visit to any fast food emporium or big box store will find many older people working there, trying to survive because their pensions have been cut or eliminated.

Sowell began his rant by accusing liberals of imposing policies without testing them. “Whether you really care about what happens to the supposed beneficiaries of the policy is indicated by whether you bother to check out the empirical evidence afterward.” Yes, that’s how he started a column which concluded that raising the minimum wage caused teenaged black unemployment.