There's really no surprise about the rise in teenage unemployment

Woe, woe is us, our uncaring and cold hearted society, for teenage unemployment is higher than general unemployment. Those who should be starting on life's process of accumulation of both skills and wealth are left to rot on the scrapheap of inactivity.

Quite true and absolutely no surprise either. As yet another new paper points out.

Their results show a combined direct and indirect effect of minimum wages on teen employment to be -2.1% for a 10% increase in the real effective minimum wage.

Quite why this ever causes any surprise is beyond me. We can start really simple: fixing a price above the market clearing price will lead to an excess of supply and a deficiency of demand. That's why we call it the market clearing price. We can get a bit more complex and point out that in any such situation, it's going to be those with the least experience or signaling ability of their possible value who will lose out the most. Teenagers, those with no working history, are those who will suffer. Yes, I know that the teen minimum wage is lower than the adult but the point still holds.

We could even get really complex and complicated and insist on looking at the real world: you know, that thing most difficult for those spinning theories either in the ivory towers of academe or the cesspools of politics. Both the UK and the US have either introduced or significantly raised the minimum wages in recent years. Both the US and the UK have seen teen unemployment rise much faster than adult unemployment in those same years.

QED you'd have thought. But much worse than this arrogant inability to see that it is absolutely the minimum wage that is the problem is that those of us who say these things are still barracked. To paraphrase Robert Conquest, we told you so you fools.

A high minimum wage will do more damage to the employment prospects of teenagers than it will to the job prospects of anyone else. We've now a high minimum wage and we've seen the employment prospects of teenagers damaged more than those of others. Why are so few people willing to both admit this and then go on to argue that the best thing to do for that soon to be wasted generation is to lower or eliminate the minimum wage?

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