[notahacker]

Agree. It's positively dangerous to assume a simple, selectively chosen set of questions are a basis for public policy recommendations.

Take the argument about minimum wages increasing unemployment amongst the unskilled and the young, for example. It's not too difficult to infer an implicit policy recommendation from the answer to that question...

If, however, you had asked the question "minimum wages increase unemployment overall" you would find a much lower level of agreement (not least empirical observations of the introduction of minimum wages in many jurisdictions have contradicted that claim). There's no inconsistency here since there are plenty of plausible economic mechanisms for believing that imposing a minimum wage leads to a countervailing increase in older, more skilled labourers, but even amongst the subset of economists that believe the actual effect of a minimum wage is to concentrate unemployment amongst the young and unskilled you'll find a large degree of dissent over whether this has good or bad implications for society and the economy as a whole.

It's possible to agree wholeheartedly with Mankiw's simple observation of minimum wages => youth unemployment whilst disagreeing passionately with any policy recommendation against imposing a wage floor, even using narrow economic efficiency criteria.