The Minimum Wage Is a Free Lunch With Hidden Charges: Justin Fox

One of the biggest shifts in economic thinking in recent decades has involved minimum wages. In the 1970s and 1980s, the consensus among academic economists was that they destroyed jobs. Then empirical work in the 1990s began to show that this wasn’t necessarily true, with studies of the low-wage fast food industry finding no negative impact on employment from minimum-wage increases. These inspired many critiques and counter-studies that did find negative employment effects. But overall, “a rising fraction of researchers” has concluded “that the employment effects of moderately sized minimum wage increases are quite close to zero,” minimum-wage skeptic Jeffrey Clemens of the University of California ...