REALISM AND ABSTRACTION IN ECONOMICS (william)
- Highlight on Page 12 | Added on Monday, March 12, 2012, 12:56 AM
There is no guarantee, for example, that a minimum wage law will cause unemployment in the sense of making unemployment higher than it was before the law; for the level of unemployment is influenced by many different factors, some countervailing. What economic law does guarantee is that the level of unemployment will be higher under a minimum wage law than it would have beenwithout the law. (This is precisely the distinction, familiar to Austrians from the writings of Frédéric Bastiat and Henry Hazlitt, between “what is seen and what is not seen.”)
