Piketty On The Minimum Wage

A lot going on with the minimum wage lately, but I will contextualize it first with Thomas Piketty’s analysis in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 308-313. It’s important to remember that one of the keys to the book’s success is that it is built on a gigantic trove of long-term data. His French wealth data, for example, goes all the way back to the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution!

Piketty writes in this section about increasing labor income inequality in the United States and the importance of labor market institutions in affecting wages in the medium term even as education (though see Jeff Faux’s dissent in The Servant Economy) and technology are the keys to the long-run wage possibilities. He counterposes the steady increase in the real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) value of the French minimum wage since 1950 to the decline of the real U.S. minimum wage since it peaked in 1969 at $10.10 in 2013 dollars. At $7.25 today, it is a full 28% below its peak, and 1/3 less than the current French minimum wage at purchasing power parity in 2013 (see stats.oecd.org, search “data by theme” and select “labour,” then “earnings,” then “real minimum wages,” and set the series to “US$PPP” and the pay period to “hourly.”)

This decline of the real value of the minimum wage is why Piketty argues that an increase in the U.S. would make sense, much more so than in France. At this low level, there is much less danger of a negative impact on the number of jobs. His key insight is that if wages are too low, that itself causes economic inefficiencies and can even create inefficiencies for the firm. In particular, if wages are too low, it can cause workers to acquire fewer firm-specific skills than would be optimal for the employer. This would seem to hold economy-wide as well: if the general wage level is too low, workers have less incentive to acquire skills that would make them and the economy as a whole more productive. Additionally, Piketty argues that employers’ superior bargaining position and the absence of “pure and perfect” competition in labor markets justifies the limits on companies’ power embodied in the minimum wage.