Recently a Canadian named David Card was announced as one of three winners of this years Nobel Prize for Economics. The work recognized had to do with minimum wage and the assumption that raising minimum wage increased unemployment.
Card’s study showed that this assumption is not true. Before Card’s work 79% of the members of the American Economic Association said that higher minimum wage meant higher rates of unemployment. After Card’s study 46% say the same. Of course, this should be another component of the argument for decreasing inequality, but there are miles to go on that front. Consider all of the ways that money flows from the poor to the rich and you might see the general current of the river.
I had never heard of David Card before this week, but I am grateful for the work that he has done. It seems notable that often we hear that we must pay the highest wage earners more (to the point of enormous income gaps) for the sake of the economy, and for the sake of society. At the same time we must not pay the lowest earning workers more than absolutely necessary. To do so would be, the argument goes, to risk the economy and small business health.
When I heard about the Nobel Prize going to Card I thought of the economic statements of Jesus. By the measure of money markets Jesus was arguably a terrible economist. When asked about paying taxes, he simply said, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s (and to God what is God’s).” He warned against making decisions by financial calculation alone stating that, “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil”, and in one of his best stories ever about God’s kingdom he cast God as a landowner paying half-day workers the same amount that he had agreed to pay workers who had shown up early in the day. When the workers who had worked a full day got mad at the landowner for such extravagance, the landowner simply said that he had paid what was agreed to those who had worked the full day. Paying the same for the half-day workers was an act of generosity. The landowner then asked a question, “What is it to you if I pay them the same? You are getting what you agreed to. Or are you envious because I am generous?”
Now, as then, we are still scandalized by the generosity of God. We think that people should get what they deserve and no more. We have determined that those who are paid little deserve the paltry pay that they are receiving and we placate ourselves with arguments like the one that David Card proved wrong. It has often been curious to me that according to how many people see things today, rich people are motivated by tax cuts while poor people are motivated by pay cuts. Seems suspiciously self-serving logic. It is also worth noting that many of the hardest working people in our world are the ones making the least amount of money. The “I worked hard to get what I have!” argument might be true, but it is also true that others may have worked harder and wound up with much much less.
I am glad that the economics of Jesus have always and consistently called us to consider people as more important than money and generosity as more helpful than self-serving reasoning as to why people deserve less than we deserve.