<p><pre><code>    &gt; What happens when a bunch of states and
    &gt; municipalities alter their minimum wage policies
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What kind of sizes to you need to be statistically significant?<p>How can you be confident that there are not network effects in play that you don&#x27;t know about. Immigration patterns, organised crime networks, political corruption, the subtleties of quality in supply chain companies, measurement variation, the culture of particular trade unions. What if someone else is running other economic experiments in parallel to you?<p>What if there&#x27;s network effects created by the contrast between the areas you&#x27;re changing? In municipality A you raise wages and not in muni B. Labour will feel pull to flow from one to the other while you&#x27;re running the experiment.<p>You&#x27;ll never come close to modeling all this.<p>Worse yet - these are fundamentally political issues that relate to practice of power and allocation of resources. Everyone has an agenda in how they play out, and this further muddies the water of the experiment and the analysis.<p><pre><code>    &gt; I&#x27;m not sure if the response to difficulties in
    &gt; measurement is to build a system out of faith and
    &gt; assumptions.
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I have these concern also. As I look at it - everyone is operating on faith and assumptions. The Austrian position is strange in that it&#x27;s honest about it.