View source for James Buchanan Calling the Kettle Black

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[[Category:David Glasner]]
[[Category:Economics 101]]
[[Category:Minimum Wage]]
[[Category:James Buchanan]]
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{{DES | des = "Buchanan’s assertion was substantively problematic in two respects. The first, which is straightforward and well-known, and which Buchanan was obviously wrong not to acknowledge, is that there are obvious circumstances in which a minimum-wage law could simultaneously raise wages and reduce unemployment without contradicting the inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price." | show=}}
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In the wake of the tragic death of Alan Krueger, attention has been drawn to an implicitly defamatory statement by James Buchanan about those who, like Krueger, dared question the orthodox position taken by most economists that minimum-wage laws increase unemployment among low-wage, low-skilled workers whose productivity, at the margin, is less than the minimum wage that employers are required to pay employees.

Here is Buchanan’s statement:

The inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price is the core proposition in economic science, which embodies the presupposition that human choice behavior is sufficiently relational to allow predictions to be made. Just as no physicist would claim that “water runs uphill,” no self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics, and that, in consequence, economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests. Fortunately, only a handful of economists are willing to throw over the teachings of two centuries; we have not yet become a bevy of camp-following whores.

Wholly apart from its odious metaphorical characterization of those he was criticizing, Buchanan’s assertion was substantively problematic in two respects. The first, which is straightforward and well-known, and which Buchanan was obviously wrong not to acknowledge, is that there are obvious circumstances in which a minimum-wage law could simultaneously raise wages and reduce unemployment without contradicting the inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price. Such circumstances obtain whenever employers exercise monopsony power in the market for unskilled labor. If employers realize that hiring additional low-skilled workers drives up the wage paid to all the low-skilled workers that they employ, not just the additional ones hired, the wage paid by employers will be less than the value of the marginal product of labor. If employers exercise monopsony power, then divergence between the wage and the marginal product is not a violation, but an implication, of the inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price. If Buchanan had written on his price theory preliminary exam for a Ph. D at Chicago that support for a minimum wage could be rationalized only be denying the inverse relationship between quantity demanded and price, he would have been flunked.

The second problem with Buchanan’s position is less straightforward and less well-known, but more important, than the first. The inverse relationship by which Buchanan set such great store is valid only if qualified by a ceteris paribus condition. Demand is a function of many variables of which price is only one. So the inverse relationship between price and quantity demanded is premised on the assumption that all the other variables affecting demand are held (at least approximately) constant.

Now it’s true that even the law of gravity is subject to a ceteris paribus condition; the law of gravity will not control the movement of objects in a magnetic field. And it would be absurd to call a physicist an advocate for ideological interests just because he recognized that possibility.

Of course, the presence or absence of a magnetic field is a circumstance that can be easily ascertained, thereby enabling a physicist to alter his prediction of the movement of an object according as the the relevant field for predicting the motion of the object under consideration is gravitational or magnetic. But the magnitude and relevance of other factors affecting demand are not so easily taken into account by economists. That’s why applied economists try to focus on markets in which the effects of “other factors” are small or on markets in which “other factors” can easily be identified and measured or treated qualitatively as fixed effects.

But in some markets the factors affecting demand are themselves interrelated so that the ceteris paribus assumption can’t be maintained. Such markets can’t be analyzed in isolation, they can only be analyzed as a system in which all the variables are jointly determined. Economists call the analysis of an isolated market partial-equilibrium analysis. And it is partial-equilibrium analysis that constitutes the core of price theory and microeconomics. The ceteris paribus assumption either has to be maintained by assuming that changes in the variables other than price affecting demand and supply are inconsequential or by identifying other variable whose changes could affect demand and supply and either measuring them quantitatively or at least accounting for them qualitatively.

But labor markets, except at a granular level, when the focus is on an isolated region or a specialized occupation, cannot be modeled usefully with the standard partial-equilibrium techniques of price theory, because income effects and interactions between related markets cannot appropriately be excluded from the partial-equilibrium analysis of supply and demand in a broadly defined market for labor. The determination of the equilibrium price in a market that encompasses a substantial share of economic activity cannot be isolated from the determination of the equilibrium prices in other markets.

Moreover, the idea that the equilibration of any labor market can be understood within a partial-equiilbrium framework in which the wage responds to excess demands for, or excess supplies of, labor just as the price of a standardized commodity adjusts to excess demands for, or excess supplies of, that commodity, reflects a gross misunderstanding of the incentives of employers and workers in reaching wage bargains for the differentiated services provided by individual workers. Those incentives are in no way comparable to the incentives of businesses to adjust the prices of their products in response to excess supplies of or excess demands for those products.

Buchanan was implicitly applying an inappropriate paradigm of price adjustment in a single market to the analysis of how wages adjust in the real world. The truth is we don’t have a good understanding of how wages adjust, and so we don’t have a good understanding of the effects of minimum wages. But in arrogantly and insultingly dismissing Krueger’s empirical research on the effects of minimum wage laws, Buchanan was unwittingly exposing not Krueger’s ideological advocacy but his own.
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