First off, behold the new look of the UC Irvine student newspaper New University's website. Much improved. Second, take a gander at Linda Domingo's story on social science professor David Neumark's recent address to the all-new Social Science Dinner Club gathered in the University Club. Neumark essentially argued against increases in the minimum wage and for the return of state-sponsored slavery. Okay, so we're making up the slavery part (we think), but Neumark does contend that a higher minimum wage makes it harder for the working poor to find work, making them the pooring poor, we suppose.
“If you think about firms that have some choice about how to produce things [by using low-skilled or high-skilled labor], when you make whatever you're talking about more expensive, they are going to use less of it. If you raise the price of low-skilled labor, they are going to substitute away from that low-skilled input toward other inputs,” said Neumark, according to Domingo's reporting.
Neumark pointed to stats that show as the price of gasoline and cigarettes have gone up, people have used them less. It follows that the same holds true for businesses who must dole out more for labor, he said.
Lucky for him, the same does not hold true for the UC system, which no doubt doles out a comfortable salary to Mr. Smarty Pants.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.