Michael Reich on how political polarization has impacted debate on the minimum wage

In this episode, Reich and Ashenfelter discuss: 

• Reich’s early life in Poland as the child of Holocaust-surviving parents and his upbringing in New York. 
• Reich’s academic trajectory from Swarthmore to Harvard where he went from studying physics to economics. “...I picked Harvard because it seemed more policy oriented. There had been so much publicity about how many New Frontier people under Kennedy were from Harvard. So, my entering class at Harvard was twice as big as it had been in prior years, almost 60 people.”  
• Reich’s collaborative work with David Gordon studying anti-poverty initiatives in Boston while a student at Harvard. 
• His formative role in helping to establish the Union of Radical Political Economists as a graduate student. “...we kind of thought about how could we move economics or have an economics that was more about power and conflict and more empirically like what the world around us seemed to have, which is a lot of imperfections.” 
• Reich’s work on the minimum wage and its positive effects on the economy. “I love working on the minimum wage because the work applies the same scientific method that I learned in elementary school science lab and elsewhere about treatment and control…. My kind of soundbite for this with journalists is the minimum wage doesn't kill jobs. It kills job vacancies.” 
• Reich’s belief that the current climate of political polarization has impacted rational discussion about the minimum wage. 
• Reich’s thoughts on the 2024 election and its consequences. “What I fear is that the 2024 election might well be still another turning point, a realignment not in a direction that I'm sympathetic with, but definitely one that's quite challenging for many of us, and which might take quite a while to unwind, unravel...”  

Michael Reich earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is Professor of Economics and Chair of the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics (CWED) at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) of the University of California at Berkeley. He was also the Director of UC Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment from 2004 to 2015. "The Work Goes On"—a podcast produced by Princeton's Industrial Relations Section (IR Section)—is an oral history of industrial relations and labor economics hosted by Princeton's Orley Ashenfelter.