Insert relevant title here.

I was reading through the survey questions over at Booth's IGM forum (it's basically just where economists from prestigious universities give their opinions regarding certain issues, policies, whatever), when I came across Austan Goolsbee's responses. Most look like they came from a bad Twitter account, but his opinion regarding the minimum wage caught my interest. The first question was:

 "Raising the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour would make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment."

Which received an overall "meh" from the judges. Certainly, part was due to the question (noticeably?), but for the most part they agree that the effects are small (although, as Caroline Hoxby put it: "Unemployment among low-skilled workers is already high by historic standards, indicating that wages are already too high for market-clearing", so perhaps now is different?). 

Then comes the second question. Here:

"The distortionary costs of raising the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour and indexing it to inflation are sufficiently small compared with the benefits to low-skilled workers who can find employment that this would be a desirable policy."

Now that question is a little less black and white than the first, but here's Goolsbee's response:

"Depends what your social welfare function looks like"

Which reminds me that this is a good excuse to mention something relatively important. Does the minimum wage have an effect on employment? This is a standard yes, no, hypothesis, null hypothesis, etc., sort of question that can be proven correct or incorrect, and there's no lack of empirical work testing it. But what about the second? Goolsbee's response is perfect. Depends on what society desires.What do we consider a benefit? Cost? Where do they meet?

If I'm being convoluted here's an example. Let's say that we knew for certain that unemployment would result from increasing the minimum wage. What then? Well, people would gasp and then cry and complain about lowering it. But why? Because people place negative value on unemployment. That's the thing. Science faces the question of whether things are true or not, but when it comes to a question of good or bad, desirable and undesirable, then we leave that question to political philosophers and moral theorists who will surely answer our problems concretely as they have done so for hundreds of years....Haha, just kidding. They're idiots.

But seriously this is important. Let's say that on top of that we knew that increasing the minimum wage would decrease inequality. Alright, now we have conflicting values. People don't like unemployment, but they don't like inequality either. So now it's how they feel the costs and benefits match up. What about the effect it has on low skilled workers and high skilled workers? Prices? The dynamic abilities of certain markets?

And so on. If there were easy answers that showed something would be unambiguously better then we'd take it. If somehow some supernatural being told us what was morally right and wrong we'd create social welfare functions around that and then maximize. But as far as I know no moral philosopher has transcended to Godlihood just yet. So for now we just give the answers to whether something is true or not, and then the average person can interpret it depending on what they value.