minimum wage worker who holds different part-time jobs for a few months at a time, with bouts of unemployment

in between. The worker in this situation receives the 10% raise in the minimum wage when working, but also ends

up working 2% fewer hours during the year because the higher minimum wage reduces how much employers want

people to work. Overall, this worker’s income would rise because the 10% pay raise would more than offset the 2%

fewer hours worked.

Of course, these arguments do not prove that raising the minimum wage is necessarily a good idea either. There may

well be other, better public policy options for helping low-wage workers. (The Poverty and Economic Inequality

chapter discusses some possibilities.) The lesson from this maze of minimum wage arguments is that complex

social problems rarely have simple answers. Even those who agree on how a proposed economic policy affects
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