Acting with good intent but poor critical comprehension is as reprehensible as not acting at all.

From Minimum wage hikes and real net wages by Tyler Cowen. We do such a grave disservice by refusing to look at things from the perspective of productivity. We would save ourselves many unpleasant surprises and negative outcomes if we did so. Cowen provides an example from recent research in regard to the impact of minimum wage impacts.

…past experience has confirmed the nonmonetary impact of a minimum-wage hike on workers, not only in reduced fringe benefits but in increased work demands and decreased job training. For example:

When the minimum wage was increased in 1967, economist Masanori Hashimoto found that workers gained 32 cents in money income but lost 41 cents per hour in training — a net loss of 9 cents an hour in full-income compensation.

Similarly, Linda Leighton and Jacob Mincer in one study, and Belton Fleisher in another, concluded that increases in the minimum wage reduce on-the-job training and, as a result, dampen long-run growth in the real incomes of covered workers.

Additionally, North Carolina State University economist Walter Wessels determined that a wage increase caused New York retailers to increase work demands. In most stores, fewer workers were given fewer hours to do the same work as before.

More recently, Mindy Marks found that the $0.90 per hour increase in the federal minimum-wage rate in 1990 reduced the probability of workers receiving employer-provided health insurance from 66.2 percent to 63.1 percent, and increased the likelihood that covered workers would be reduced to part-time work by 26 percent.

Wessels also found that for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, workers lose 2 percent of nonmonetary compensation per hour. Extrapolating from Wessels’ estimates, an increase in the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to only $9.00 an hour would make covered workers worse off by 35 cents an hour.

Politicians and some voters always want a free lunch and minimum wage legislation is a perennial favorite when politicians want to be seen to be doing something positive. But there are no free lunches. A minimum wage hike is always a tax increase (on someone) or a transfer, with the normal repercussions that arise from such events. If employee productivity is fixed and wages are increased, then ceteris paribus, either the company has to accept lower profits (an implicit tax) or they have to pass along the cost increase to consumers (i.e. inflation which is a form of taxation) or they have to reduce costs elsewhere (transfers from others to employees) or they have to reduce labor (usually through capital substitution.) If you focus on productivity, then all these things are obvious. If you focus in social justice or inequality or workplace fairness or any of a number of other worthy but abstract concepts, you will often end up with an outcome that is worse than when you started.

Acting with good intent but poor critical comprehension is as reprehensible as not acting at all.