It's not an HN commenter's obligation to post everything a reader might want to see, certainly not highly technical point about the distinction between "this paper claims that evidence for an employment effect is over-reported" and "this paper claims that employment effect is approximately 0". They linked to the whole paper for the curious, and answered a particular question about it.

Also, the use of "despite" does not logically fit the contents of (my) grandparent poster and parent poster, as grandparent poster didn't claim mention employment as a possible positive effect of minimum wage, and even within context of my parent post, "beyond" is a better word choice that n "despite"

I think summaries (by their nature) must leave something out. Considering the abstract mentions what you said (and that it's reasonable for me to have read the abstract), I think it was reasonable for the responder to focus their attention on the plot alone (which was the focus of my question).

It is an incomplete summary of the paper, however it seems to be a pretty solid summary of what the plot is telling us.

The obvious starting position is that raising minimum wages has a negative effect on the number of low wage employees hired; because the money from higher wages has to come from somewhere and might not be available - leading to reduced business activity. This is also the classic economics position. With that in mind, there is going to be a bias towards publishing the 'surprising' results that there is no impact/a positive impact from minimum wages. The bias that this paper is identifying is surely a real thing, but it might potentially be a bais against, eg, poorly run studies that pick up spurious effects.

So the conclusions the paper draws w.r.t. elasticity aren't that interesting; we'd need to know why the bias exists before it is particularly useful. I'm a bit suspicious of using 'meta-analysis' at all because that just means that the faction that repeats themselves the most with low-quality research gets to pick what the elasticity is.

In theory we shouldn't need 200 studies to make a claim, we should need 1 or maybe a small suite (like, 5) of very high quality studies that intellectually honest economists struggle to rebut.

>why leave it out?

Because he summarized the plot, not the paper.

I, too, have a commenting rate-limiter applied to my account. I can only post about 5 comments in a day before HN tells me to "Slow Down, You're Posting Too Fast".

>‘The simplest and most commonly used method to detect publication selection is an informal examination of a funnel plot’ (Sutton et al. 2000a: 1574). A funnel graph is a scatter diagram of precision versus estimated effect (such as estimated elasticities, regression coefficients or partial correlation coefficients). Precision is best measured by the inverse of the standard error (1/Se).

> As the name suggests, the expected shape is an inverted funnel — in the absence of publication selection. When there is no publication selection, estimates should vary randomly and symmetrically around the ‘true’ population effect. Because small-sample studies with typically less precision form the base of the graph, the plot will be more spread out there than at its top. However, it is the graph’s symmetry (or its absence) that is crucial for assessing publication selection (see Figure 1).

Selecting correct presentation methods should be up to the platform, not the users.