Sorry about sending this in triplicate. 😦
Now this final re-send must include the link (HTML) to the source LA Times article.

Take III…

Greetings everyone. It has been a looooong time since my last post. This news article just came across my radar. It seemed too current and relevant to pass up.

By now, we’ve all probably heard talking points about how raising the minimum wage for fast food restaurant workers in California will cost jobs. This article describes that claim as “baloney, sliced thick.” That brought back fond memories of frying baloney and seeing it form into a cup. I don’t eat the stuff anymore but I digress…

The baloney description is correct. As an academic who frequently works with time series data, I understand the importance of seasonality, a factor that significantly impacts the restaurant industry. The wage increase critics based their arguments on non-seasonally adjusted numbers, failing to account for the industry’s regular employment cycles. Using seasonally adjusted numbers, fast food employment actually went up. See the article below for details.

Despite the inaccuracies, it’s unlikely that outlets like the Wall Street Journal, New York Post, and Hoover Institution, which have been criticized for using non-seasonally adjusted numbers, will issue retractions. This is reminiscent of the media’s refusal to retract the “$1 Trillion Black buying power” myth when challenged by Dr. Jared Ball [1].

The Buddhist perspective offers a multi-step process for the “Final Arrival at Truth” [2]. The first step is to investigate the source: is it free from greed, hate, and delusion? In that spirit, I leave you with a quote from the Buddha:

“Do not accept my words simply out of respect for me. Accept them when you see that they are true.”

Stay serene,

-Dr. Moore

The LA Times article, The fast-food industry claims the California minimum wage law is costing jobs. Its numbers are fake: HTML.

My footnotes:

[1] You can find Dr. Ball’s The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power on Amazon (HTML) or your local library. Another book related to these matters is How Not to Be Wrong by Dr. Ellenberg (Amazon: HTML or your local library).

[2] In the Buddha’s Words pages 100-103 (Amazon: HTML or your local library).