(NEW YORKER) John Cassidy — In some ways, what is happening in Los Angeles will amount to a larger version of the New Jersey/Pennsylvania experiment that Card and Krueger wrote about all those years ago. If, in five years’ time, the evidence shows that low-wage employers fled the new minimum-wage laws, or that they stayed put but downsized their payrolls substantially, the orthodox economists will feel vindicated. But, if it turns out that cities like L.A. and San Francisco can raise the minimum wage by fifty per cent or sixty per cent without suffering big losses in employment, the old argument that higher minimum wages are job killers will be much harder to sustain. And that would change American politics in a very significant way, greatly expanding the range of possibilities it could encompass.

Source: A Fascinating Minimum-Wage Experiment Is About to Unfold – The New Yorker