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California’s new minimum-wage law hadn’t even gone into effect before it was declared a disaster. Business groups and Republican politicians have argued for decades that minimum-wage increases harm the very workers they are supposed to help, and this one—passed in September 2023 and setting a salary floor of $20 an hour for fast-food workers—appeared to be no different. Headlines such as “California Restaurants Cut Jobs as Fast-Food Wages Set to Rise” and “California’s Minimum Wage Woes Are a Cautionary Tale for the Nation” proliferated.The story seemed to fit into a familiar theme: naive California progressives overreaching and generating a predictable fiasco. “Let me give you the downside,” Donald Trump responded when recently asked whether he would agree to raise the federal minimum wage during his second term. “In California, they raised it up to a very high number, and your restaurants are going out of business all over the place. The population is shrinking. It’s had a very negative impact.”Except it hasn’t. Since California’s new minimum wage came into effect in April, the state’s fast-food sector has actually gained jobs and done so at a faster pace than much of the rest of the country. If anything, it proves that the minimum wage can be raised even higher than experts previously believed without hurting employment. That should be good news. Instead, the policy has been portrayed as a catastrophic failure. That is a testament to how quickly economic misinformation spreads—and how hard it is to combat once it does.Among economists, the minimum wage was long seen as disproved by simple math. In theory, if each individual worker becomes more expensive because of higher wages, then employers won’t be able to employ as many of them.Then economists began analyzing what actually happened when the minimum wage was raised. Since the early 1990s, economists have conducted dozens of studies of more than 500 minimum-wage increases across the country. “The bulk of the studies conducted in the last 30 years suggest the effect of minimum wages on jobs is quite modest,” Arindrajit Dube, an economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who has conducted multiple meta-analyses of the minimum-wage literature, told me. “Sometimes they actually result in higher employment.”[Annie Lowrey: The counterintuitive workings of the minimum wage]The leading explanation is that when the minimum wage goes up, low-wage jobs suddenly become more attractive to workers, who respond by staying in those jobs longer. Less turnover means that companies have to spend less time recruiting and training new hires, and that the workers themselves are more productive and less prone to rookie mistakes—all of which lowers an employer’s labor costs. Businesses also typically absorb some of the costs via lower profit margins or pass them on to consumers in the form of higher prices (a point I will return to later).Still, economists continue to debate just how high the minimum wage can go before it becomes a drag on employment. Less than a decade ago, many believed that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour would lead to “substantially lower” employment, only to be proved incorrect. Then, in September 2023, California passed A.B. 1228, a law that would raise the hourly wages of fast-food workers across the state from $16 to $20—a far larger increase than any that had previously been studied. (The new law applies only to employees at chains with more than 60 locations nationwide.)The state’s fast-food industry immediately erupted in protest. Before the law took effect in April, the owners of hundreds of Pizza Hut locations declared that they would be forced to lay off all of their 1,200 delivery drivers. The owner of 140 Burger King franchises claimed that he would have to slash worker hours and expedite the rollout of self-service kiosks. Rubio’s, a regional Mexican-food chain, announced that it would close 48 stores, citing “the rising cost of doing business in California.” (Coverage of this announcement typically left out the fact that the company’s largest cost appeared to be debt payments, which had ballooned since its acquisition by a private-equity firm in 2010.)Opposition picked up even more once the law went into effect. In June, the California Business and Industrial Alliance took out a full-page ad in USA Today declaring that the state’s fast-food businesses had shed nearly 10,000 jobs in anticipation of the new law. Similar claims began appearing in right-wing media, local newspapers, and the national business press, blaming the new minimum-wage law for mass layoffs and restaurant closures.That narrative, however, was based on a statistical illusion. The 10,000-jobs number originated in an article by the Hoover Institution, a free-market-oriented think tank, which analyzed raw employment data from September 2023 through the end of the year. But as the anonymous blogger Invictus and the Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik have pointed out, the fast-food industry always sheds jobs during the fall and winter months, simply because people go out to eat less. (It then gains those jobs back during spring and summer, when demand recovers.) According to “seasonally adjusted” employment numbers, which are widely considered more reliable because they account for these regular ups and downs, California’s fast-food industry gained more than 5,000 jobs during the period in question.The Hoover Institution eventually retracted its original post, admitting the mistake. But that didn’t put an end to the matter. In September 2024, an industry press release cited new numbers, this time seasonally adjusted, appearing to show that the state’s fast-food sector had lost thousands of jobs since the beginning of the year because of the new minimum wage, while the neighboring states of Oregon and Nevada had gained jobs. This resulted in a second wave of negative press.Once again, the statistics were misleading. This time they came from the Employment Policies Institute, a nonprofit controlled by Richard Berman, a lobbyist for the restaurant industry. The analysis conveniently chose January 2024 as its date to begin measuring employment, which happened to be one of the few starting points that showed subsequent job losses; choosing a start date of either September 2023 (when the law was signed) or April 2024 (when it took effect) would have shown that the number of jobs had risen. Simply comparing each month’s job growth with the same month the previous year, which avoids the problem of picking a start date, reveals that California’s fast-food sector gained jobs in all but one month since September 2023.[Rogé Karma: Is economic pessimism the media’s fault?]The first rule of social science is that correlation does not equal causation. Many factors could affect fast-food employment in California—positively or negatively—that have nothing to do with the minimum wage. That’s why, in a recent paper, a pair of economists from UC Berkeley compared employment for California fast-food workers with that of similar workers in states that still abide by the $7.25 federal minimum wage. The authors found that employment for the two groups was on roughly the same trajectory prior to the April wage increase, but that, since then, California’s fast-food employment had actually grown slightly faster than the other states’. (The authors also shared a not-yet-released analysis showing that these results hold when adjusting for seasonal effects and using alternative sources of data.) “These findings were a bit surprising even to me,” Michael Reich, one of the paper’s co-authors, who has published more than a dozen studies on the effect of minimum-wage laws, told me. Another report, from a different set of academic researchers, found that the new minimum wage had not resulted in a reduction in hours or a rollback of benefits, either.That doesn’t mean raising the minimum wage had no negative consequences. Reich and his co-author, Denis Sosinsky, found that the higher minimum wage caused menu prices in California fast-food chains to rise by about 3.7 percent. That number is far lower than the “$20 Big Macs” that critics of the law warned of, but it’s still significant at a time when many consumers are deeply upset over the post-pandemic spike in food prices. Even so, Reich points out that this number pales in comparison with the 18 percent raise that the average fast-food worker received because of the new law. (The authors calculated that about 62 percent of the wage increase was absorbed through higher prices, while the rest was likely absorbed by a mix of reduced turnover and, crucially, lower profits for franchisees—hence the massive industry resistance.)Notwithstanding the law’s broadly positive real-world consequences, the nonstop negative press about it has turned it into a political liability. In November, California voters narrowly rejected a ballot measure that would have raised the state’s minimum wage for all industries to $18 an hour, following a massive industry-led campaign centered on the claim that the state’s fast-food minimum-wage experiment had been a disaster.The biggest losers from this misleading narrative won’t be Californians themselves. It will be workers in the 20 states that still have a minimum wage at or below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, 19 of which voted for Trump in 2024. California’s government, like many Democratic-controlled cities and states around the country, has had plenty of mistakes to its name in recent years, but raising the minimum wage isn’t one of them. If Republicans in Washington are serious about delivering for the working-class voters who brought them to power—and who overwhelmingly support raising the minimum wage—they might consider following California’s lead just this once.

Until now, the phrase crypto winter meant that cryptocurrency traders were facing hard times: a period of tumbling and depressed prices that had to be weathered until the good times returned. Today, though, the cryptocurrency industry is enjoying an end-of-year season more akin to “brat summer”: This month, crypto prices hit previously unheard-of highs, with bitcoin trading above $100,000. In this new Era of Good Feelings—to borrow a phrase from early-19th-century American history—skeptics have become believers, and a digital-economic instrument that was designed to circumvent, if not replace, the traditional financial system is becoming more and more integrated into it.The catalyst for this boom, of course, was last month’s election of Donald Trump. Bitcoin’s price fell this week, but it’s still up almost 40 percent since November 5, and other major cryptocurrencies, such as ethereum and ripple, have seen similar spikes. It’s not hard to see why. Trump nominated Cantor Fitzgerald CEO and crypto enthusiast Howard Lutnick to be his secretary of commerce. He named Paul Atkins, also a crypto advocate, as the next head of the Securities Exchange Commission, replacing Gary Gensler, who became crypto’s bête noire for bringing lawsuits against the biggest crypto exchanges and numerous other players in the industry. And Trump recently repeated his campaign promise to set up a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, which would require the Treasury Department to purchase billions of dollars’ worth of the cryptocurrency and hold it as a “permanent national asset.”On top of the regulatory environment growing markedly more crypto-friendly, other bullish signs have emerged as well. Last week, the investment giant BlackRock, which back in January was one of 10 companies to issue exchange-traded funds tied to bitcoin, released a report suggesting that investors “with suitable governance and risk tolerance” (meaning tolerance for little governance and lots of risk) should consider having as much as 2 percent of their assets in bitcoin. And MicroStrategy, a software company whose business nowadays consists almost entirely of issuing stock and convertible debt in order to buy bitcoin, was just added to the Nasdaq-100 after its stock rose more than 600 percent in the first 10 months of the year. All of the good news has bitcoin owners—also known as HODLers, a moniker derived from a common online typo of hold that was then also said to stand for “hold on for dear life”—feeling buoyant: On X, predictions of bitcoin hitting $1 million by the end of 2025 are easy to find.I first wrote about bitcoin in 2011, when one Bitcoin cost about $14, and even then, I thought it was a bubble. Had I just taken a flyer and bought $1,000 of it, I’d be a multimillionaire today. So for longtime bitcoin skeptics like me, a measure of chagrin at having been so wrong about crypto’s evolution is difficult to avoid. At the same time, what’s been fascinating about the popular embrace of bitcoin is that the reasons to be skeptical of it never disappeared: It’s still an enormously volatile asset; its price is still mostly dependent on sentiment rather than underlying fundamental value; it’s still ill-suited to be a widely used digital currency. What’s changed is that the investment world has decided none of those things really matter. As is true of gold, bitcoin is valuable because people have collectively decided it’s valuable. In effect, HODLers have succeeded in conjuring a respectable asset out of thin air.[James Surowiecki: The Trump-whim economy is here]Respectability doesn’t mean stability. The history of crypto over the past decade is one of big spikes driven by positive sentiment, rapidly followed by crashes. Bitcoin’s value has fallen by 49 percent or more on at least half a dozen occasions, and there’s no reason to believe that it’s now reached a permanently high plateau. (Indeed, just this past week, after hitting an all-time high of about $108,000, bitcoin’s price fell almost 15 percent in days, and MicroStrategy saw its stock fall more than 40 percent over the past month.) Yet even if determining a fair price for Bitcoin remains a near-impossible task (which is why I’ll never buy it), treating its value as simply the product of a hysterical bubble mentality—which was once a common critique—feels outdated. In keeping with its buccaneering, unregulated origins, the crypto industry is still rife with sketchy so-called memecoins and shitcoins, not to mention promoters promising 1,000 percent returns in a matter of days. But bitcoin itself has become practically blue-chip.The reasons bitcoin has become so highly valued are not the reasons that advocates originally argued would make it valuable. Bitcoin was designed to be a currency that people could use for trustless transactions—transactions that could be carried out without need for a financial intermediary such as a bank. But transactions in which bitcoin is used to buy or sell goods and services make up only a tiny fraction of the currency’s total trading volume, most of which is made up of people buying or selling bitcoin itself. Bitcoin’s real use, it turns out, is not as a medium of exchange, but as a secure, portable, accessible store of value, something that can be quite valuable, particularly in countries where inflation or confiscatory government policy is a problem.Similarly, bitcoin was designed to facilitate decentralized person-to-person transactions, but most bitcoin trading, at least in the West, now takes place on centralized exchanges. Again, in its liberatory promise, bitcoin was supposed to not just be independent of traditional financial institutions and government, but also enable alternatives to them. Yet the big engine of the price boom of the past two years has been bitcoin’s integration into the conventional investment industry (through such vehicles as exchange-traded funds, or ETFs), increased purchases by institutional investors and corporations, and now the prospect of legitimization by the government itself. That may include government buying of bitcoin—though exactly why Uncle Sam would want to own such a volatile asset is a question no one has yet answered persuasively.This integration has a couple of striking consequences. The first is that, for all of its benefits, it also adds a whole new set of risks to an already risky asset—if, say, Trump does not follow through on his promise to set up a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, bitcoin’s price will likely take a tumble. The other, more substantive, consequence is that the revolutionary promise of bitcoin has largely vanished—no one really thinks it will replace, or even meaningfully weaken, fiat currencies such as the dollar, nor is it going to threaten the financial primacy of Wall Street. Cryptocurrencies will always have a special appeal for people who are skeptical of the system and convinced that economic disaster is on the horizon. But what the past six weeks have shown is that most bitcoin HODLers don’t want to bring down the system. They want bitcoin to become a part of it.

In the last issue of this newsletter, I wrote about what went wrong with public housing in the United States — how it didn’t necessarily fail, but was routinely sabotaged because of bad policy choices that contributed to neglect and mismanagement. So this week, I want to look at what successful public housing can look like. Oftentimes, when looking for models to emulate, many Americans look abroad for answers — Austria, Denmark, and Singapore, for example, are frequently cited as places to learn from. But one of the problems with turning to other countries is that their politics and governments are fundamentally different, and simply copying them isn’t always an option. That’s why I’m particularly interested in looking at examples of public housing models that have worked quite well here in the United States. After all, if one American city or county can pull off an ambitious program, then what’s stopping others from doing the same? What we can learn from the DC suburbs Earlier this year, my colleague Rachel Cohen highlighted a place where local leaders are expanding public housing: Montgomery County, Maryland. Montgomery County has long prioritized affordable housing. Developers, for example, are required to make at least 15 percent of units in new housing projects available for people who make less than two-thirds of the area’s median income. But the county got creative with how it could provide public housing: It set aside a fund to finance and develop housing projects. And while the county partners with private developers, its investment makes it a majority owner of a given project. As the New York Times put it, the county, as an owner, becomes “a kind of benevolent investor that trades profits for lower rents.” For background, the county’s Housing Opportunities Commission (HOC) is not just a public housing authority, but a housing finance agency and public developer as well. “We have these three different components that ultimately work together to help us really advance a very aggressive development strategy that we have deployed over 50 years,” said Chelsea Andrews, executive director of HOC. Historically, public housing projects in the United States have only been available to people making very low incomes. That’s by design: In 1936, the federal government set income limits for eligibility. While that might seem like it makes sense — shouldn’t public housing units be available to those who most need them? — the reality is that this rule limited housing authorities’ ability to raise revenue by charging closer to market-rate rents for middle- or higher-income earners. As a result, public housing projects have been overly reliant on government subsidies and constantly underfunded. But Montgomery County is addressing that problem by opening public housing up to mixed-income renters. “Mixed income accomplishes so many goals,” Andrews said. “It allows for housing authorities to ensure that they are creating inclusive communities. It takes away the concentration of poverty.” Andrews added that mixed-income housing doesn’t discourage people from advancing their careers since they don’t have to worry about losing their eligibility to stay housed in an HOC property. And by making the developments mixed-income, the local government can use profits from some renters to subsidize others and keep the buildings in good condition. In many ways, this model is a rebrand. “They are very clear about not calling it ‘public housing’: To help differentiate these projects from the typical stigmatized, income-restricted, and underfunded model, leaders have coalesced around calling the mixed-income idea ‘social housing’ produced by ‘public developers,’” Cohen wrote. But in effect, the model is still publicly owned units being rented to residents at subsidized rates. Montgomery County has seen plenty of success. The Laureate, one of these types of developments in the suburbs of Washington, DC, had leased out 97 percent of its 268 units within a year of opening in 2023. It’s not just Montgomery County Across the country, housing advocates and local governments have taken note of Montgomery County’s example and are keen on trying it out for themselves. In Massachusetts, state Rep. Mike Connolly introduced legislation last year to create a $100 million fund to finance social housing projects. While that specific legislation hasn’t passed yet, the governor recently signed a housing bond bill that includes funding for a social housing pilot program. “We got a lot of enthusiasm and support around us now doing the work of mapping out what these initial projects will look like. It could result in perhaps one or two local, mixed-income social housing-type projects in the coming years,” Connolly said. “If we can develop something and build it, people can see it, and then we can point to it and look to expand it. And, of course, Montgomery County, Maryland, has been the contemporary national leader here.” As local governments struggle to deal with soaring housing costs, this model is providing a good solution by both building more units (which is very much needed) and providing below market-rate rents. And with more and more lawmakers approving these projects, America could be on the brink of a new era of public housing — and this time, it might actually be a success. This story was featured in the Within Our Means newsletter. Sign up here.

Filmmaker James Gunn says the battered-looking version of Superman seen in the trailer for his highly anticipated "Superman" film represents America.

The junior quarterback showed big improvement this by cutting his interceptions down to three from 14 as a sophomore. He passed for 49 touchdowns and ran for 11.

Sierra Canyon junior defensive back Madden Riordan had 11 interceptions in 2024.

At least 13 people were killed in two separate stampedes in Nigeria as large crowds gathered to collect food and clothing items distributed at annual Christmas events, police said.

This week's Weekend Update segment poked fun at the mystery which has left lawmakers and the public demanding answers.

We cover a new film about the singer-songwriter.

We head West and meet three culinary mavericks redefining fine dining, from an artist-turned-chef in Seattle, Washington, to a chef in Portland, Oregon, who infuses the flavors of Haiti into every dish. Watch these stories and more on The Dish.

The Trinity League MVP was the Monarchs' Great Wall on defense, playing on the edge, at tackle and nose guard for the Open Division state champions.

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A Swedish hip-hop star has been shot dead in a car park with disturbing footage of the apparent killing emerging online.

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The suspect in Magdeburg's Christmas market car-ramming attack appeared in front of a judge on Saturday and was remanded in custody.

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Newsweek spoke to relationship specialist Aly Bullock about a new poll revealing links between close friendship and wellness.

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German authorities say the five people who died in the attack were a 9-year-old boy and four women aged between 45 and 75.

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A movie about the 1972 massacre of Israeli Olympians has a refreshingly simple — but not simplistic — take: Kidnapping and murdering civilians is bad, and there is no context in which to justify it.

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