Valuable Information for Policymakers

Thanks to PAW for providing easy access to a piece of economic research that I have been doing my best as a historian to document ever since the news first caught my eye almost 30 years ago (“Experiments in Economics,” June issue). The results of the minimum-wage/unemployment experiment of David Card *83 and Alan Krueger of the Industrial Relations Section of Princeton’s economics department have annoyed or disconcerted so many “conservative” economists that the news seems never to have reached most policymakers — or even the better business journalists. So, again, many thanks to the researchers, to Louis Jacobson ’92 for reminding us of them so clearly, and to PAW for bringing them all back to us noneconomists as income inequality reaches new heights.