“It is professionally irresponsible to draw such a conclusion from the data at this time.” Kshama Sawant
The Seattle Times Reports: Professor Jacob Vigdor and other members of a UW team published a preliminary study of the effects of the $15 minimum wage in Seattle. Whatever good that has done for workers, the UW report caught an angry repose form Kshama Sawant. Ms. Sawant, an avowed Troskyite rather than a Democrat or Republican, had used the $15 wage to great effect to get herself elected to the City Council and, more recently, to campaign for Jill Stein in the Presidential race.
The UW report was very careful. The new law is still in its early stages and may have more effect on business planning than on actual wages or business costs. The report also pointed out that because Seattle is in the midst of a boom, any effect on the economy, including effects on low end jobs, needs to be measured against what might be true if our economy were not doing so spectacularly well.
Sawant is upset because she is working with her Socialist Alternative Party as well as a political action group funded by near billionaire, Nick Hanauer, to support a nationwide movement. The Hanauer group claims that people across the country – from the media talking heads to voters — are closely watching what happens in Seattle. They talk about this city as the new California, the model for what happens across the US. I have heard this idea called “The Seattle First” model.
The Hanauer group 
needs to be careful about whom it chooses as allies. While they, and she, tout the fact that Sawant has a PhD in economics, her thesis was never published presumably because, according to another UW professor who read the thesis, this thesis was a trivial exercise about the effects of education in rural India. Although I am not an economist, I went through the math in her thesis and was underwhelmed.
An unpublished thesis from a less than stellar college in Virginia is not a great authority! This math in the thesis seemed to me more like a college Ec major exercise than a work worth of a real economist. Certainly Swant’s not on a par with the published efforts by Jacob Vigdor and his team.
I will so one step further. Sawant’s retort in today’s Seattle Time seems a lot like something Trump would say. “I’m not only concerned that we’re in danger of drawing erroneous conclusions about Seattle’s minimum-wage increase — I’m concerned about the consequences that could have on the nationwide fight for $15 (per hour).” Sawant’s resemblance to a Trumpian may not just be metaphoric. Sawant is currently campaigning for Green Party candidate Jill Stein. Stein for her part has been criticized by the Russian Green party for being silent on Putin’s human rights abuses. Last year Stein even went to Moscow to celebrate Putin’s state propaganda outlet, “RT,” and sat at the same dinner table as Donald Trump’s military adviser, retired-Gen. Mike Flynn and Putin himself. Hanauer needs to be more careful about who he friends.
Again, in a very Trumpian manner, Council member Sawant went on to challenge Dr. Vigdor’s objectivity. Sawant attacked the statistical models used by UW team. That model used sophisticated mathematics to isolate the impact of the minimum-wage law from other conditions, compared what happened in real Seattle from June 2014 through December 2015 to model Seattle. She said “Wages, jobs, hours worked and net business openings all increased in Seattle. Yet you chose to emphasize to the press that employment rates and hours worked went down compared to the fictional synthetic Seattle. Your methodological shortcomings and ideological editorializing undermine the credibility of the report.”
In a letter replying to Sawant on Tuesday, Vigdor and 10 other UW researchers, including several professors, said their work is a collective project.
“The research products generated by the minimum-wage study team are the work of all team members and not one member. The entire team has participated in discussion around research design, analysis, interpretation and presentation of results. We have taken great care to discuss where we find the evidence most compelling and where we are most uncertain. We believe our report reflects this care and caution.”
“Our work product is a public document, subject to partisan interpretation,” and said parts of the report have been used to promote both positive and negative views of Seattle’s law. “We have no ideological commitment.” “We may appear as though we have some ideological slant because we’re not reliably agreeing with anybody.”