This is the story of how the fast food industry and
its conservative allies sought to discredit two distinguished economists, and
how the attack backfired. The economists in question committed the sin of
conducting research that challenged the conventional view of the minimum wage.
Their attackers may have committed rather cruder sins.

Almost every introductory economics textbook warns that raising the minimum
wage will cost jobs. Assuming a standard model of the labor market, the
reasoning is a straightforward variant of the law of supply and demand: If you
raise workers' wages, you increase the price of labor—and firms will
naturally hire fewer workers.

Business opponents of the minimum wage often argue that it is little more than an "entry-level" wage--water-wings for those workers taking their first dip in the labor pool--and therefore needn't be high enough to sustain a worker over many years. A recent study by two government economists, William Carrington at the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Bruce Fallick of the Federal Reserve Board, however, has found that a significant number of new workers stay at or near the minimum wage long after their initial foray into the labor market.