# Contested concept: effective (as in 'effective poverty-reduction tool')

_**What you are reading**: one contested-concept page in Deliberus's deliberation graph. Deliberus maps human reasoning — including claims that are contested, mistaken, or extreme — so that disagreement can be examined precisely. A claim's presence here is not an endorsement: the graph records that someone argued it, how it connects to other reasoning, and how far scrutiny has gotten. The metadata on this page describes the state of that scrutiny, not the truth of the claim._

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- **Contestedness**: criterion
- **Diagnosis**: The disagreement over whether minimum wage is 'effective' hinges on whether effectiveness is measured by the increased income of those who remain employed (individual benefit) or the potential job loss and redistribution within low-income groups (aggregate social/economic impact).
- **Canonical**: `/concept/effective (as in 'effective poverty-reduction tool')` (data: `/concept/effective (as in 'effective poverty-reduction tool').json`)

## Senses in use
- **Failing to achieve net poverty reduction due to job losses, reduced benefits, and horizontal income redistribution within the poor.** — used in 3 claim(s)
- **Successfully increasing the income of low-wage workers and lifting families out of poverty.** — used in 1 claim(s)

## Claims using this term
- [Most individuals who are not economists believe that minimum wage laws are effective at reducing poverty.](/claim/claim_292acc030a36.md) _(sense: Successfully increasing the income of low-wage workers and lifting families out of poverty.)_
- [The visibility of increased income for workers who keep their jobs, contrasted with the invisibility of those who lose jobs, leads many adv…](/claim/claim_56c4b90ba765.md) _(sense: Failing to achieve net poverty reduction due to job losses, reduced benefits, and horizontal income redistribution within the poor.)_
- [Minimum wage increases tend to redistribute income horizontally among different low-income families rather than vertically transferring wea…](/claim/claim_ce88e9ad39e6.md) _(sense: Failing to achieve net poverty reduction due to job losses, reduced benefits, and horizontal income redistribution within the poor.)_
- [The cognitive asymmetry between the visible benefits to employed workers and the invisible losses to the unemployed causes many advocates t…](/claim/claim_e27db9dacd6d.md) _(sense: Failing to achieve net poverty reduction due to job losses, reduced benefits, and horizontal income redistribution within the poor.)_