Jim Manzi has posted a critique of the Economic Policy Institute's study suggesting that Wisconsin's public-sector workers are underpaid relative to their private-sector counterparts.
It basically boils down to the argument that this sort of thing is hard to measure. The study controls for most every observable worker characteristic that we can imagine controlling for.
But there are, Manzi says, an "all-but-infinite" number of differences beyond that.
Perhaps going into the public sector says something about a person's level of ambition, or ability to take risks and tolerate stress, or tendency to innovate -- something that, in turn, makes the private-sector worker worth more or less to the economy.
And fair enough. Maybe there is some systemic difference between Hispanic women with bachelor's degrees and 20 years of work experience who put in 52-hour weeks in the public sector and Hispanic women with bachelor's degrees and 20 years of work experience who put in 52-hour weeks in the private sector.
If anyone has some evidence for that, I'm open to hearing it. But the EPI study is aimed at a very specific and very influential claim: that Wisconsin's state and local employees are clearly overpaid. It blows that claim up.
Even in Manzi's critique, there's nothing left of it. So at this point, the burden of proof is on those who say Wisconsin's public employees make too much money.
By Ezra Klein
WashingtonPost
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