Minimum wage laws priced young workers out of the market before the pandemic and may do so in the future.

Unemployment fell at a slow and steady rate in the 10 cyclical recoveries from 1949 through 2019. These historical patterns also apply to the recovery from the pandemic recession after accounting for the unprecedented burst of temporary layoffs early in the pandemic followed by their rapid reversal from April to November 2020. Unemployment for other reasons—which has been most important in other recent recoveries—did not start declining until November 2020.

As a number of economists and others have noted, Richard L. Stroup died on November 18. He was a good and gentle man and a very good economist. He used straightforward microeconomic tools to investigate, and generate insights on, interesting issues. I’ll highlight some items from the 10th edition of his textbook, Economics: Private and Public Choice, co-authored with James D. Gwartney, Russell S. Sobel, and David A. Macpherson. I’ll point to sections for which there is a high probability that he wrote them.

The director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Rick Hess, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss the critical race theory debate, and how the media has covered the subject.