David Card, who with Alan Krueger, authored a very important study showing minimum wage increases don't cause the employment dislocation you'd expect, writes:
I think economists who objected to our work were upset by the thought that we were giving free rein to people who wanted to set wages everywhere at any possible level. And that wasn't at all the spirit of what we actually said. In fact, nowhere in the book or in other writing did I ever propose raising the minimum wage. I try to stay out of political arguments.[...]
I've subsequently stayed away from the minimum wage literature for a number of reasons. First, it cost me a lot of friends. People that I had known for many years, for instance, some of the ones I met at my first job at the University of Chicago, became very angry or disappointed. They thought that in publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics as a whole.
Well isn't that rough? He authored an important piece of economics research with distinct conclusions whose validity he defends, various conservative economists disliked the results, and so he abandoned the argument. Meanwhile, Greg Mankiw is doing everything but a whistle stop tour of the country in favor of a gas tax.
Milton Friedman understood that intellectuals had a public responsibility. They were not merely beholden to their data, but to popularizing it, and convincing the country of it. Meanwhile, at the precise moment the left -- and the country -- needs an eloquent, smart labor economist like David Card, he's made a conscious decision to keep his head down. A few weeks ago, I wrote a post wondering about the overrepresentation of rightwing economists in the public debate. I titled it, "Where art thou, David Card?" Now we know.
Update: I should probably mention that the interview is a really interesting discussion, with lots of important data on everything from education to inequality to the male-female wage gap. Folks should read it. Sure be nice if Card were willing to say the same things in more public forums, though.
