On October 18 2021, a screenshot of a tweet about the 2021 Nobel prize in economics was shared at least twice to Facebook, on the pages Coffee Party USA and Labor 411.
The depicted tweet was first published on October 11 2021:
Like many tweets, it did not have supporting links or citations, possibly due to character limits:
The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics is awarded, in part, to an economist who proved:
1. Raising the minimum wage does not negatively affect employment rates,
2. Immigrant workers do not depress the wages of native-born workers.So we can stop touting those labour myths now.
Google Trends data indicated a spike of interest in searches for “Nobel economics” in the seven-day period ending October 19 2021, with a related search term, “Nobel peace prize for economics.”
The Nobel Prize is actually shorthand for five separate prizes that are generally (but not always) awarded annually:
Alfred Nobel had a vision of a better world. He believed that people are capable of helping to improve society through knowledge, science and humanism. This is why he created a prize that would reward the discoveries that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. Since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been awarded in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace, while a memorial prize in economic sciences was added in 1968.
The economic foundations for the Nobel Prize were laid in 1895, when Alfred Nobel signed his last will and left much of his wealth to the establishment of a prize and the subsequent Nobel Foundation, which is tasked with a mission to manage his fortune and has ultimate responsibility for fulfilling the intentions of Nobel’s will. In accordance with the instructions Nobel left through his will, various independent prize-awarding institutions have selected Nobel Laureates in each prize category for more than a century.
The above tweet described a Nobel award in 2021. An Associated Press article published on the same day, “3 US-based economists win Nobel for research on wages, jobs,” which began:
A U.S.-based economist won the Nobel prize in economics [on October 11 2021] for pioneering research that transformed widely held ideas about the labor force, showing how an increase in the minimum wage doesn’t hinder hiring and immigrants don’t lower pay for native-born workers. Two others shared the award for developing ways to study these types of societal issues.
Canadian-born David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded half of the prize for his research on how the minimum wage, immigration and education affect the labor market.
Canadian outlet CBC also reported on Card’s Nobel Prize on October 11 2021. Card was interviewed by KGO-TV, reproduced in a piece published on October 15 2021:
In 1992, Professor Card conducted a survey comparing employment levels in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, after new Jersey raised its minimum wage while Pennsylvania did not. He found there was no evidence that raising the minimum wage led to a loss of jobs in New Jersey, contrary to conventional thinking.
“The popular thinking was driven by a very specific set of hypotheses which weren’t true. For instance today, there are all kinds of employers looking for workers. They’ve got help wanted signs, they’ve got bonuses for new workers, they’ve got recruiting bonuses if you bring in a friend. You might ask, why don’t they just raise wages too? The answer is, they’re actually saving money on the workers they have, and offsetting that by not having all the workers they want. if you force them to raise wages, they’ll increase employment, and that’s probably what we saw in New Jersey.”
In 1990, Professor Card conducted a study often cited in the debate over whether immigrants have an impact on the jobs of native-born Americans. He found that the flood of Cuban refugees from the 1980 Mariel boatlift had little impact on Miami’s job market.
Card also discussed the two concepts in a lengthy interview with Marketplace.org. Of the finding about raising minimum wage, Card cited the 1990s examples of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, explaining:
We had a perfectly legitimate explanation [for concluding a higher minimum wage does not depress the employment rate]. And what’s happened I think is over the last 30 years, people have realized that that explanation is probably right. So the situation was this; before the minimum wage went up, it was actually (a) relatively good time in both New Jersey and Pennsylvania. And so there were a lot of stores advertising for workers with “Help Wanted” signs and recruitment bonuses and all kinds of incentives to try and get people to come in the door, almost exactly like it is right now in the labor market. So a lot of employers looking for workers. And you might ask, “well if an employer is looking for workers and can’t get them, why don’t they just raise the wage?”
There’s a really simple answer for that, which is, if they raise the wage, yes, it’s true that might attract some new workers, but they’ll have to pay a higher wage on the ones they’ve already got. And so they’re going to actually do a kind of a trade off and say, well, I’m willing to put up with some vacancies in return for keeping wages low on the people I’ve already got in the house. And in that scenario, if you force them to raise the wage, they will be able to attract those extra workers and the people they’ve got will get kind of a bonus that they wouldn’t have gotten if you hadn’t forced them to raise the wage. But in addition, you’ll get all those extra workers that wouldn’t have come in the door, except for the fact that now you’ve raised the wage. And so that kind of model makes total sense to, I think, most people. And what’s different about it is it asserts that employers set wages; wages aren’t just set by [an] abstract market mechanism like they would be, say, in the stock market.
An October 11 2021 tweet proclaimed that the “2021 Nobel Prize in Economics [was] awarded, in part, to an economist who proved: 1. Raising the minimum wage does not negatively affect employment rates, 2. Immigrant workers do not depress the wages of native-born workers.” That claim was corroborated by local, national, and international news from the same date, indicating that Card was honored for those specific findings.
- "The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics is awarded, in part, to an economist who proved: 1. Raising the minimum wage does not negatively affect employment rates, 2. Immigrant workers do not depress the wages of native-born workers. So we can stop touting those labour myths now." | Facebook
- "The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics is awarded, in part, to an economist who proved: 1. Raising the minimum wage does not negatively affect employment rates, 2. Immigrant workers do not depress the wages of native-born workers. So we can stop touting those labour myths now." | Facebook
- "The 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics is awarded, in part, to an economist who proved: 1. Raising the minimum wage does not negatively affect employment rates, 2. Immigrant workers do not depress the wages of native-born workers. So we can stop touting those labour myths now." | Twitter
- Nobel economics | Google Trends
- Nobel Prize | Wikipedia
- 3 US-based economists win Nobel for research on wages, jobs
- UC Berkeley Econ Prof. David Card discusses Nobel prize, pay secrecy, federal minimum wage
- Canadian-born David Card among 3 winners of Nobel in economics
- Nobel Prize Economist David Card on testing Econ 101 theories in the real world