What actually happens is that profit margins get hammered (notice how you forgot about those? you were supposed to) and those businesses that rely upon minimum waged labor complain bitterly.

Very low margin businesses do raise prices but in the study I saw that looked at profit margins ans prices only two examples of price raising from a survey of about 50 were, like, nail salons and catering.

In the well designed studies where they measure job losses they found essentially negligible job losses. These studies caused a lot of drama in the economics community - a lot of them acted like they'd been told that their god didn't exist. It was replicated though.

Some other studies say "look! restaurants go out of business when the minimum wage is hiked! job losses!" but neglect to mention that when restaurant A goes out of business and is replaced with restaurant B (which is what often happens), servers and cooks just switch jobs.

The whinging manifests as money piled into lobbying and public outreach to prevent this type of thing from happening again and the result of that public outreach is how you formulated your opinion about what happens and why you forgot that, for example, profits can also decrease when price goes up.

I think the most common "mistake" is that most economists are used to thinking about money in absolute terms, but in real life it's a lot more useful to treat prices as a percentage of your income. That means the utility of money is not linear, so redistribution is good by itself unless it hurts growth so much that average incomes start going down in real terms.

The other one is way deeper and harder to fix but I don't think a lot of people actually believe it, they just use it implicitly in their research. It's that the goal of economics is to maximize efficiency (measured by ROI = profits), not to deliver the best outcomes for the greatest amount of people.

From this point of view a platform like Doordash is efficient because they underpay workers and overcharge customers, and so are surveillance data brokers. That's clearly not a perspective that gets us into a better society. But measuring quality of life is much harder than taking two numbers every company is legally required to count.

Not everyone has the time, energy or patience to do that though. Journalists certainly don't and the general public is more inclined to be drawn in by a nice clickbaity story that makes them feel smarter than their friends (which is the market segment freakonomics services).

Point being if you were to make an assumption, "pop economist says that popular thing thing that is bad for profits is bad for you too is probably bullshit" is actually a fairly safe one.

stage 1 is it hammers profit margins <-- for 95% of businesses we are here.

Stage 2 is then it increases prices <-- only affects very low margin businesses which are a small minority.

Stage 3 is it triggers job losses <-- to my knowledge it's never been raised high enough to make this happen. maybe $50 / hour would be the threshold.

Really, can you at least provide some napkin calculations to see the cons and pros? Some countries have tried it, notably France. It backfired as expected and they had to revert.