Economists famously argue about everything. Even so, it used to be that economists across the board—whether left, right, or center—generally agreed that the minimum wage was ill-suited to help the poor. As we still teach introductory students in Econ 101, a price floor on low-skilled labor will (at least in the textbook diagrams) lead to unemployment among the very people minimum wage legislation allegedly helps. In addition to the textbook diagrams, economists also used to rely on a seemingly impregnable body of empirical studies backing up the claim that raising the minimum wage would throw unskilled laborers out of work.1
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