Talk:Minimum wage

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 3 September 2019 and 9 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Adam conlon. Peer reviewers: Chiqueno, PaigeCarmichael1, MrrrAndersonnn, Regoc14, Tcharwood73, Osa225, Alex Horley.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 04:14, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

I dislike the structure of this article

I don't like how academic content on the effects of the minimum wage are dispersed across multiple sections. I dislike that one section lists pro- and anti- arguments, as if Wikipedia was supposed to be a resource for a debating club rather than express the state of a literature on a given topic. Ideally, there should just be one big "Impact" section which may contain (i) surveys that give an impression of how views are shifting about the impact of the MW, (ii) the chronology of research on the topic (economists used to be bullish on the MW but shifted their views after Card and Kruger), and (iii) summarize the enormous literature that exists on the impact. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 22:35, 12 February 2021 (UTC)

I agree. The pro/con is NOT the way this article should be written. Your points 1 & 3 could be combined into a chronology of academic views/polls on the topic, (since these should track with the research results- not be disconnected with the state of research) if we can find enough of that type of stuff. ---Avatar317^(talk) 01:37, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

I request that we do this through a series of many smaller edits rather than one or two large re-writes, so as to give people the opportunity to object to some changes while retaining others. ---Avatar317^(talk) 03:58, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

We should also go further in saying that two things can be true at once- for instance, a rise in minimum wage will result in some people seeing a rise in wages while others will have more trouble finding employment. I have had trouble finding non-ideological research on the topic. Most scholars are either theoretical or they seem to have an ideological viewpoint that they then fit the data to (which is easy enough to do, since most wage and employment changes are from factors other than the minimum wage). If there are studies with real data then I'm all for including them to help ground the discussion. I agree the article is a bit of a mess right now, I plan on investing some time in it. Efbrazil (talk) 17:54, 13 February 2021 (UTC)

Avatar317 I see you moved some US-only content to the US section, but of course there's lots more US-only content scattered through the article, and I don't know that it all should be moved. The US clearly has outsized importance on the minimum wage issue as it is the largest economy and the minimum wage is of critical importance there (as opposed to the EU and China, which are also major but for which the minimum wage is not as significant an issue). It raises the question of where all US content should go, and my personal view is that instead of being sectioned out it should probably be scattered through the article. Maybe we should even be looking to eliminate the "US movement" section entirely, to eliminate confusion. What are your thoughts on the issue? Efbrazil (talk) 18:24, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

"We should also go further in saying that two things can be true at once". That's one of the dilemmas that these pro- and anti-sections create: A new study gets published with a nuanced/mixed result, where should it go? If there were an "impact" section instead of a "pro- and anti-" section, there would be no dilemma. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 21:19, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

1) I fully support an "Impact" section. I tried to make a start on doing that conversion by getting rid of the table but I don't want to delete any well sourced statements and so that will take time to re-do. Many of those studies may have more nuance to them than their associated statements talk about, and could be reworded, but I don't know without reading them.

2) I was intending to MOVE the content from the "US movement" section to the Minimum wage in the United States article's "Political" section, since I don't think any of that content belongs in this article...there is already a Fight for 15 article about the political movement, and I will replace that section with a brief summary of the Minimum wage in the United States article that I wrote up yesterday in WP:SUMMARYSTYLE, with a link to the Fight for 15 article.

3) I think that US studies/research belong scattered throughout here, for two reasons: one: the US is the most wealthy country and therefore funds the most scientific research, and as with medical studies, tends to produce the most published research, and two: the US is arguably the most free capitalistic market in the world, and therefore min wage does matter more in the US than in more socialized countries, so it would be relevant to the min wage notion overall, being that its current reason for existence is as a government tool intended to help the poor. ---Avatar317^(talk) 22:17, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

Good faith edits

I made a number of edits, the mass reverting and edit warring without leaving any comments within edit notes or on the talk page is inappropriate. Please discuss rather than edit war before we need to visit ani. 2600:1702:3C80:B60:2071:8EBC:E1CB:A1EA (talk) 20:10, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Please give reasons for your changes, and remember that Wikipedia says what Reliable Sources say: WP:RS, not what any one of us thinks is the "correct" or accurate thing to say, please see WP:OR regarding that policy.---Avatar317^(talk) 22:25, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Minimum Wages Table

@Avatar317 I don't have a strong opinion which rates should be in the article, however I just checked the number for Spain in the cited OECD stats page and it is given there equal 10.6 USD PPPs / hour in 2020; for other countries the numbers also do not seem to match. Maybe I got something wrong, maybe the entire table should be double-checked and corrected. Birdofpreyru (talk) 19:01, 27 April 2022 (UTC)

That's strange; you're right, some of the numbers are off. I thought I double-checked some of the entries when this table was added and they were correct...I wonder if the OECD possibly revised their PPP inflation deflator? Wow! Maybe they did; this InternetArchive link shows different numbers on 2021-12-01 then now (I can't seem to get the hourly on the archive, but the yearly is different between then and now) [1] - maybe we should list the day the source was read? That's a little funky that they are (potentially) revising their inflation numbers (at least that's my best guess as to why these numbers are different)...strange... ---Avatar317^(talk) 20:42, 27 April 2022 (UTC)